A High-Potential Employee Development Program Ensures Long-Term Business Success in Billings, MT

Identify and Effectively Train Your Company's Next Superstars with a High-Potentials Leadership Development Program in the Billings area

Whether you need to fill leadership positions now or you’re looking for future managers and innovators, identifying and developing top talent within your organization is critical. Some of the individuals most likely to succeed in leadership roles are known as high-potential employees, or HiPos. These gifted individuals tend to have natural communication, leadership, critical thinking and risk evaluation skills that help them see the big picture and navigate learning opportunities and change quickly. By identifying and investing in these individuals, you can ensure your organization has innovative team players and leaders at every level. Your HiPos benefit from employee development programs by learning to leverage their skill sets and natural talents for personal and company growth.

What Are High-Potential Employees and Why Should You Develop Them?

The first step in creating a successful high-potential employee program is understanding what high-potential employees are and why it is so important to develop them.

In their Harvard Business Review article, “Are You a High Potential”, Douglas A. Ready, Jay A. Conger and Linda A. Hill describe HiPos as possessing the following characteristics:

• A drive to excel: these employees are not simply high achievers. They are willing to do whatever it takes and make sacrifices to be the best.
• A catalytic learning ability: high potential employees don't just soak up knowledge like a sponge; they know how to convert knowledge into productive actions that get results.
• An enterprising spirit: high-potential employees are trailblazers. Never satisfied with the status quo, they are always seeking new challenges and figuring out better ways to do things.
• Dynamic sensors: the most promising leaders are always on alert for the next big thing. This can make them difficult to manage. If they can't sense a long-term career payoff where they are, they often get wandering eyes.

This combination of traits makes HiPos ideal candidates to guide your company into the future. But it also means they need the right guidance and training to keep their vision and goals reconciled with those of your business. Left to their own devices, they can easily get derailed and go rogue. The master trainers at Turnkey Coaching & Development Solutions understand the psychology of HiPos. We can help you build an effective high potential leadership program that strategically grooms them to steer your company to long-term success.

High-Potential or Just Talented?

To remain competitive and drive growth, businesses are almost universally better off developing talent from within rather than hiring external candidates for newly vacant managerial or executive positions. Recently, however, a survey by the Corporate Leadership Council found that only 25 percent of respondents felt confident that they would fill all open leadership positions within the next half decade. Worryingly, a concurrent report by the Conference Board revealed that only about 34 percent of companies effectively identified future leaders within their ranks. Some of the confusion may revolve around an inability to distinguish talent from high potential. While both types of employee are vital for business success, only HiPo employees reliably travel up through various management levels to executive status. Gifted individuals often prefer solving problems on their own; high-potential employees work in groups and encourage the people they manage to excel. Talented people may be innovative but lack serious ambition; high-potential employees come with a built-in desire to excel and have naturally exceptional business instincts. According to a recent Hewitt Associates study, when HR managers and existing top-level executives consistently identify and develop high-potential employees, companies tend to see a jump in shareholder returns. Even greater returns begin to happen when businesses track their employees’ successes and use them to build progressively more powerful high potential employees development programs.

Our high potential employee assessment and HiPo development programs are nothing like the run-of-the-mill leadership programs you've likely sent your employees to before. We do not host one-day or one-week events where your company leaders mingle with executives from other firms and listen to so-called "trainers" rehash the same hackneyed leadership clichés that, by now, are probably seared into your brain.

Instead, we evaluate your company and its specific needs; then, we build a program from the ground up to meet them. We customize every program using high potential employee development best practices, including:

• Needs analysis using our high-potential employee assessment tools
• Culture analysis
• Employee level and experience
• Creating a "coach approach"
• Long-term sustainability
• Human resources integration and even ‘train the trainer’ options

Your hi potential employees get the opportunity to work with master trainers who specialize in developing high-potential employees. They have helped many businesses get the most out of their workforce and create seamless transitions between generations of leaders. Our master trainers HiPo program experts put their knowledge, experience and vast resources to work for your business.

What Does a HiPo Look Like?

Because you're in search of potential rather than achievement in identifying employees for a high-potential program, it's all too easy to overlook hidden gems and focus instead on the obvious people. Complicating matters, the capabilities and traits of a HiPo don’t always show up in performance reviews. But if you miss these individuals and don't funnel them into appropriate training, you're likely to lose them entirely to companies where they'll be better appreciated. So, what should you look for when selecting HiPos for a high potential development program? Consider these key factors:

• A high learning curve. Yes, high potential employees are excellent learners, but there's more to it than that. True HiPos don't just learn. They take what they've learned and turn it into action, and they're able to carry new ideas they've learned in one area and translate them to a different area.
• A passion for success. Success is more than a pat on the back or a year-end raise for a high-potential employee. HiPos rely on intrinsic motivation in their push for success, and they're willing to make sometimes astonishing sacrifices to satisfy it.
• An entrepreneurial attitude. HiPos love to explore new territory, even if it means personal or professional risk. They're excited by the challenges that make other employees turn away, and they love being first in line for new opportunities.

Potential Pitfalls to Avoid in Your High Potential Employee Program
A high-potential employee development program is vital to maximize the talents of your employees and plan for future leadership, but it's easy for such a program to lose its way without careful planning and expert knowledge. At TurnKey Coaching & Development Solutions, our professional coaches and master trainers keep a sharp eye out for these potential pitfalls:

• Misidentifying HiPo candidates. If you focus on employee performance when selecting candidates for a high-potential leadership development program, you're likely to make some unwise choices. Performance at one level within a company isn't necessarily a predictor of excellent performance at higher levels. In addition, some employees may go out of their way to draw attention to themselves in hopes of landing on the HiPo list, and it's easy to fall for candidates who are flashy rather than effective. This does not mean these individual should not be provided development opportunities but a best-practice is to monitor their engagement level and ensure your investment is with the most likely to succeed individuals.
• The flip side of many HiPos. Many passionate, driven, enterprising individuals also have a tendency to push others out of the way in their drive to meet their goals. These darker characteristics often show up in HiPos, who can sometimes be hard to manage, demanding, insubordinate or rude. In evaluating HiPos as you go about developing potential leaders, it's important to identify weaknesses as well as strengths and to assess whether these weaknesses, typically in interpersonal effectiveness, can be resolved through targeted soft-skill development. Some HiPos can derail their careers when Emotional Intelligence is not developed. An effective program has the ability to tend to the individual needs of your High Potential Employees and address head-on any EQ challenges with proven assessments, feedback loops, coaching, mentoring and acknowledgement.
  

The Right Coaching for Your HiPos
High potential programs for employees don't just happen, and they don't look like other leadership training programs in their specifics. Many high-potential individuals become bored with traditional leadership training, or they move so fast within a company that they skip right over it. As a result, they may not learn the lessons absorbed on the ground by leaders moving at a more sedate pace. At Turnkey Coaching & Development Solutions, we follow high potential employee development best practices in designing our coaching and training programs, always seeking the right fit for these unique individuals. With our customized leadership development training and coaching programs, you can maximize the talent already present in your company while avoiding the pitfalls that can accompany high-potential programs.

Traditional day or week-long high potential employee development programs might seem like an easy way to develop your high-potential employees — after all, that's what other companies are doing, right? — but think about how many such programs you've attended in your career. Then ask yourself, "Am I really a better leader because I attended a few formulaic leadership conferences?"

If you want real results, you need a customized HiPo employee development program custom-built just for your company and with high potential development programs best practices. That's what our master trainers and certified coaches at Turnkey Coaching & Development Solutions have to offer. Typically, we work with both large and small groups of high potential employees to create a comprehensive training and HiPo development program crafted around your goals that prime your business for success.

What kind of background do your master trainers have?

Many of our master trainers have 10+ years corporate experience, thousands of hours of executive coaching, and have served as corporate executives themselves or had Fortune 500 companies as clients. In addition, many of them hold advanced degrees such as MBAs and Ph.Ds.

What kinds of results can my company expect?

The goal of our high potential employee assessment and development training programs is to first establish the results you hope to achieve and then design our program to offer the best chance of seeing those results. Perhaps your organization seeks to reduce turnover, or improve innovation, or perhaps your executives are within retiring age and you want to ensure a ready-now bench of competent leaders.  We can design a high potential employee development program to address these needs and more. In fact, many of our clients have reported increased productivity, better organizational strength, cost reductions, higher bottom-line productivity and many other positive results.

How much does a high-potential employee development program cost?

Because we custom design each program based on the client's individual needs, it is impossible to quote an exact cost up front. What we can tell you is this: We offer a variety of participation levels that let you choose the intensity and duration of the high potential development program based on your budget and the time your organization has available to invest.

Training high-potential employees can be a way to turn around the leadership development path at your company. The earlier you can identify high-potential employees, the more likely your organization is to benefit from their development and training. At TurnKey Coaching & Development Solutions, we're ready to help you develop a customized HiPo development program that helps you identify these up-and-coming stars and harnesses their potential without burnout or loss of morale. Now is the time to implement a high-potential employee development program so your organization can be ready for tomorrow.