Increasing Your Potential

What is high potential and why do I want it?

It’s a common refrain to say that someone “has potential.” Unfortunately, the word is often used ambiguously or superficially, which can dissuade someone from thinking it’s something that can be worked towards, when in fact it can! Our definition of high potential is:

A collection of attributes that allow an individual to grow quickly and consistently succeed within an organization.

Or as a chart (who doesn’t love a good chart):

Someone with high potential will advance quicker than their peers. They have no foreseeable ceiling. Managers love managing employees who have high potential, because they are more autonomous, but also know how to manage up and keep stakeholders informed. These are the people who magically seem to always rise to the challenge and somehow are able to take on more responsibility with each passing month. So what’s their secret?

The secrets to success

As you may have guessed, people with high potential don’t have just one secret, they have many. Here’s a copy of a slide from a recent internal training I gave, which details out attributes that people with high potential exhibit:

As you can see, progressing through your career with higher velocity is not just about working quicker. It’s partly about using time well, but things like communication, self improvement, and being goal oriented are just as important.

Some people may naturally have more mature skills in a single area, like communication. It’s important to not let these strengths become a crutch. Developing proficiency across all four of these areas is what will propel you into high potential territory. This article will share some of the best practices for each attribute set from people already operating at high potential, so that you can be conscious of increasing your potential in areas that aren’t currently your strength.

Working towards goals

Advancing in your career quickly and consistently is about deliberately honing skills. In order to hone skills, you need the right opportunities — projects that allow you to learn new skills and refine existing ones. This is where goal setting practices become critical. People who do this well will have multiple high value opportunities lined up in advance.

Many high potential people:

• Look at problems as opportunities for themselves to drive impact
• Self identify opportunities that stretch their skills
• Set 3 quarterly goals for themselves based on opportunities and skill growth
• Checks in on goals weekly to plan work and track progress

I think one of the keys here is to make sure that these goals are personal goals — not just things you are advising on, but initiatives you are driving forward. It’s common to see managers or even advanced individual contributors set goals that are really team goals. It’s easy to get consumed with coaching and working through others, but if this is all you do, then you will stunt your personal growth as well as the impact you could potentially have on the organization. Setting these personal goals helps ensure you balance between contributing through others and contributing as an individual.

Effectively using time

Many people feel like days slip through their fingers without much to show for them. They’re dumbfounded by those who seem to accomplish so much in a short period of time. There’s no magic at play here. Time management is a skill, and even though it’s not all that’s required to advance, it is foundational. There are countless books written about time management, so I won’t give detailed advice here, but I can explain enough for you to be able to reflect and hopefully determine whether this is a skill you need to work on.

Many high potential people:

• Prioritize one-to-two of their quarterly goals to move the needle on every week and have a plan for what days and times they will use to work on those priorities
• Check in with themselves at the end of every day to see if they accomplished what they set out to do
• Are able to prioritize other time blocks for normal work, including reading and responding to messages
• Set an agenda for 1:1s with their manager and talk through ideas, plans, progress, and challenges
• Create agendas for other meetings they’re responsible for

If a day slips through their fingers, they know it, and they know why. However, these missed days are anomalies — most days end with them feeling good about what they accomplished and progress made towards their goals, while not missing a beat on anything else. Not only is this important for making progress, but it’s important for mental health. If you nail these skills, you can gamify every day and feel a sense of satisfaction more often than not. Having trouble here can feel like you are constantly failing.

Clearly communicating

High potential individuals are not lone rangers — completing projects on their own and then delivering a perfect finished product. Rather, they gain trust and progress quickly by bringing people along for the ride, whether it’s leading complex initiatives that require work from others or engaging stakeholders who have valuable advice and need information to do their own jobs effectively. Well run projects are characterized by timely collaborative problem solving, little rework or churn, and few surprises — especially near completion.

Many high potential people:

• Use communication techniques to build relationships, create a followership, lead projects, create space for discussion, inform stakeholders, and address concerns
• Practice active listening techniques vs listening to respond
• Craft messages carefully to be engaging and easily digestible using the pyramid principle (helpful how-to twitter thread), by starting with the answer, or by starting with why
• Use a variety of communication methods, including meetings, presentations, and workplace messengers (like Slack)

Someone who is high potential is not only great at crafting messages, they are also engaging. They listen and learn from their peers. They integrate new ideas with the goal of polishing whatever they are working on. They are a joy to collaborate with, which makes people want to work with them and makes them the obvious choice for complex projects.

Proactively seeking to improve

Learning how to improve oneself is a first class set of skills and is the engine that drives quicker skill attainment through frequent reflection and adaptation. The more you make space for self-assessment and are deliberate about adapting your skills and habits, the more automatic and effortless this activity becomes.

Many high potential people:

• Take time frequently to reflect on personal areas for improvement
• Pull for feedback frequently: e.g., after delivering work, when thinking through ideas, after facilitating a meeting, or after giving a presentation
• Openly receive feedback by acknowledging it and either repeating back or giving their thoughts on the feedback delivered
• Effectively pull from external sources to help themselves improve or to shape ideas

There is both an internal and external component to this set of skills. You will never be able to do a fully comprehensive self-assessment even if you are humble. You should also rely on others as they can give you an external perspective and have different experiences they can pull from to give advice (i.e., you don’t know what you don’t know). Similarly, you’ll never divine all of the answers yourself or find them within your immediate team. High potential individuals are good at pulling information from a variety of sources and even bringing new ideas and methods to their organization.

How best to use this?

This article is primarily meant to help you do a gap analysis. I gave a training using similar content at Policygenius, and I asked attendees to rate themselves from one to five on each group of attributes. We then used those ratings to self-reflect and look for core areas we can work on. The most important thing is knowing where to start — what skills can you focus on in the next month that can improve your potential.