By Stefan Peetroons, Management Consultant, at Accord Group Belgium

This blog post was first published on LinkedIn Pulse

Despite the devotion of efforts to talent management and succession planning, for many companies “potential” remains one of the least understood aspects of human capability. Potential to do what? Potential to fill a particular role? In three years? In five? In ten? Never?

In order to manage talent and plan for succession, it’s essential to understand what potential really is and how to evaluate it; to understand what is really meant by talent mapping and how to build an effective talent pipeline.

This post covers the following topics:

1. Understanding potential

2. Researching potential

3. Evaluating potential

4. Discussing potential

5. Mapping potential

6. Using potential

1. Understanding Potential

One limitation for many organizations in an attempt to achieve their goals, Van Vrekhem states in ‘The Disruptive Competence’, is the availability of a talent management system, a “people system” that effectively deals with potential.

But what is potential? How should we understand it? According to Dr. Gerald Kraines, author of ‘Accountability Leadership’, potential is a person’s raw capacity to handle complexity: it’s innate and it matures biologically over a person’s entire adult life.

Potential exists independently of knowledge and skill acquired from experience and training, and independently of commitment and emotional maturity.

In other words, potential refers to how big a role you can handle when you acquire the skilled knowledge, value the work and function maturely at a particular level. Thanks to Elliott Jaques’ extensive research, the evaluation of potential can be done simply and accurately.

The research we describe below argues that each person’s potential capability matures in a predictable way throughout life, from childhood to old age. And the methodology that follows from these findings contributes positively to happier and more effective organizations.

“Sound people systems have a mighty pay-off in productive effectiveness and in rich human satisfaction”

Elliott Jaques

2. Researching Potential

In the 1950s, Dr. Elliott Jaques, a Canadian psychoanalyst and organizational psychologist, was one of the first researchers to develop a scientific method for measuring the amount of complexity in a role. He also discovered that there are distinct levels of work complexities.

Although complexity increases when people move in the organization from less complex to more complex roles, there are natural turning points when the actual qualitative kind of work changes, requiring a different level of mental processing and reasoning.

Jaques’ scientific developments, and resulting principles, concepts and practices, are based upon over 50 years of practical consulting research, carried out in over 15 countries throughout the world, in every type of managerial organization, and at all levels.

Many of these studies were designed and carried out by the US Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences, widely recognized to be among the most rigorous and conservative scientific research and publication bodies in its field.

Dr. Elliott Jaques wrote over 20 books and received the Joint Staff Certificate of Appreciation presented by General Colin Powell for “outstanding contributions in the field of military leadership theory and instruction to all of the service departments of the United States.”

3. Evaluating Potential

Over the course of several decades, Dr. Jaques developed practical methods for managers to judge the potential of their people, in casu their capability to treat roles on different levels of complexity, and conducted scientific experiments around human reasoning and thus potential.

During the 1980s, in the midst of a twelve year project at the US Pentagon, Elliott devised a means for measuring the type of mental processing employees deployed when debating a point of view and found that different people consistently used different types of reasoning.

Over the same decades, he returned to companies every five to ten years to assist managers in reassessing the potential of the same employees. When he plotted the progression, he discovered that everyone demonstrated a maturation pattern, consistent with other biological processes.

While some people will find satisfaction with one type of work for long periods, others are on a more rapid track and will want different work challenges at regular and predictable intervals.

As a result, these curves can accurately predict, based on a single assessment of a person at any age, what that person’s potential will likely be at any other age. Talent management thus starts by evaluating the complexity level that a person potentially can manage.

“Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

4. Discussing Potential

The discovery that people mature along innately established, predictable pathways in potential capability, might be for some an unpopular idea, Dr. Gerald Kraines states, because it challenges general held beliefs like:

• the Horatio Halger myth that anyone who is strongly enough motivated can achieve anything he or she wants through hard work and persistency.

• the idea that people who progress in their careers become more capable because of their training and experience (which will increase effectiveness, but not potential).

Though this finding can come across deterministic, most people accept the fact that we are all born with the potential to grow a certain height that is genetically predetermined. When we consider that our brain is much more complex than our musculoskeletal system, then 80 years for full brain maturation versus 20 years for full skeletal growth is not that great a leap of faith.

In addition, it is our experience that people look for career progression opportunities in line with their cognitive maturation along their growth curve. People feel fulfilled if they get the right opportunities to progress, frustrated if they do not, and experience failure if they are progressed more rapidly than their own pace of maturation.

“The people are fine. It is the managerial leadership systems (the “people” systems) that are at fault”

Elliott Jaques

The next step is to apply this knowledge about the maturation of potential when thinking about people in business situations – in terms of role complexity and potential capability - and to build a people system to improve talent management and succession planning.

5. Mapping Potential

Referring to the talent map above, such a composite chart, Elliott Jaques states in Executive Leadership, maps out the talent pool of a company in dynamic terms and offers senior leadership in one overview the following information:

Who is retiring when? Who is ready for promotion to a next level? Now. In a year or two. In three to five years. Where are our talent pool riches? Where do we lack talent? Where there are too many pressing into the next level?

It’s not just a mapping of the present talent pool, but a mapping of the present that shows the potential of the current pool unfolding into the future. The chart shows the talent pool today, and by extrapolation on the curves, what the future holds. And this for any group of people.

To discover what this ‘unfolding into the future’ means in terms of leadership at different levels in organizations, read ‘Six Levels Of Leadership’ and ‘On The Origin Of Peter Principle’ to avoid promoting people to the level of their incompetence.

In short, thanks to these findings we are able to build a talent pipeline more effectively and systematically related to our strategic planning for the near, mid and long-term. Such mapping contributes to the welfare of all people and to the effectiveness of every organization.

“Leaders need to have the right level of capability to be good leaders, not the magic of charisma.”

Elliott Jaques

6. Using Potential

Dr. Jaques showed that cognitive development (or rather cognitive maturation) evolves according to a certain pattern, which is different for everyone. It is a natural process in which emotional and knowledge development support the naturally present potential of a person.

The consequence of this natural growth phenomenon is that an important part of employed people – at a predictable point in time – will outgrow their role. This results in unused potential when they make the mental step towards the next level while their role remained the same.

Mapping this out visualizes previously untapped opportunities for an organization to create value. It only requires a methodology to map each employee’s current potential capability, see his or her growth curve (or future potential capability) and plan for development.

Applying this will lead to the optimal use of an company’s current and future potential. And when this talent is not present, then there is only one long-term solution, as Jim Collins⁷ put it: “Get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats on the bus.” To get the right people on the bus, read ‘How To Improve Quality Of Hire’.

The level of potential capability by itself, although the primary factor, is of course not sufficient to ensure success in a role. To complement this, a person must have the skilled knowledge required for the role, value the work and function maturely. Knowing when people will naturally evolve to the next level will allow you to plan and prepare for this.

And this is what talent management and succession planning is all about.

About Stefan Peetroons

Stefan is a consultant at Accord Group Belgium. Our vision is to be a source of inspiration for people and organizations to stimulate the development of their identity. Our mission: building resilient organizations where people, work & strategy are balanced with the purpose to create value.