Do you want the next person you hire to be an expert, or a high-potential?
If your answer to this question was ‘both’, please go to the back of the class and sit next to the client who once asked us to find ‘a really creative leader with great attention to tiny detail’… because they are very different beasts.
Anyone who is an expert is a dedicated specialist, with a well-defined and deep set of skills and experience. He or she will normally be able to get on with the role straight away, probably to the relief of your organisation’s internal customers for that role. Recruiting a specialist should be a fairly straightforward task; your headhunter should be able to find candidates already performing the role expertly in other organisations.
The downside of hiring a specialist is that there’s a good chance that they will move on in three or four years, looking for a better salary or a bigger challenge. By and large that’s the only real way they can progress their career; almost by definition, somebody who has built up a specialism is fit only to perform that specialist function. So, hiring an expert is basically a short-to-medium move for your organisation.
A high-potential candidate, in contrast, is good at lots of things, and has the capabilities and confidence of an all-rounder. They may well have moved from function to function as they rose through the executive ranks. Their attractiveness lies in the fact that they offer your organisation future options in terms of succession and leadership, making them a long-term move.
Hiring a high-potential can be somewhat pesky. Your headhunter needs to find candidates who are seriously good; they need to meet some of the role’s specialist criteria, but will not have immersed themselves in the function for many years, unlike the expert.
And seriously good people with lots of potential are pretty hard to find.
First, you — as the client — have to work out your own definition of what ‘high potential’ looks like. Then the headhunter needs to apply your definition, leavened with a good understanding of your organisation’s culture, to a search that inevitably involves a lot of lateral thinking. Finally, it sometimes takes courage to appoint a high potential over an expert, because there may be some internal resistance to an appointee whose promise is all about options tomorrow instead of expertise today.
Organisations facing this dilemma may want to have their cake and eat it by balancing their functions’ leadership teams.
So, for example, if you have a very strong specialist at either the number one or two spot within a function, and the other spot comes free, you could appoint a high-potential, knowing that the function would still have a safe pair of expert hands running it. And the high-potential will get an excellent understanding of how that function can be run really effectively, insights that will help them become a better leader in due course.
More and more organisations are now seeing the benefits of hiring high-potentials. As the world becomes more complex, driven by fast-changing technology and globalisation, so businesses are finding they need executives who are highly capable, adaptable and equipped with good judgement — all essential elements of the high-potential’s toolkit.
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- How to make change systemic: the Vodafone story
- Transferring capability: developing culture not process
Daniel Vacassin is the Founder Director of Indigogold, internationally recognised as experts in organisational change and effectiveness, leadership development, and executive search. Clients appreciate our honesty, integrity and straight talking — and, above all, the way our work makes their businesses stronger.
