HI-POs and Succession Management
Last week was a flurry of customer meetings — and measurement in succession management seemed to be on the minds of more than one HR executive. There’s are real desire to more effectively measure individuals with high potential (HI-POs, as the organizational development folks call them), but a plethora of challenges in doing it.
I’ve written about the issues related to capturing and maintaining data (here), but it’s more than that. While organizations seem to be able to ‘manually’ identify hi-pos, the ongoing activities that need to be done to keep track of them consistently falls through the cracks.
The Institute for Corporate Productivity did a survey tracking high-potential employees and the results didn’t disappoint:
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69% of the responding organizations had a tracking process in place;
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70% said that development planning was part of the process;
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but only 47% said that they are tracking the effectiveness of their assessment activities
Organizations have multiple challenges with measuring hi-pos — they don’t have clear success profiles for their jobs (and thus a way to measure great performance), measures of potential are often subjective and oriented in point-in-time assessments (rather than on a recurring basis), and almost no one can easily (meaning quickly and at low cost) correlate behavioral characteristics of hi-pos to business outcomes.
The result: some high level data about hi-pos, in a spreadsheet that gets updated occasionally is as good as it gets for most companies. It’s going to take a long-term commitment to integrated talent management combining good measurement with reliable data collection (and some decent technology to keep track of it all) to gain a differentiated advantage in managing top talent.
Tags: hi-pos, high potential employees, performance management, succession management
