Ask any leadership group to name their high-potential people and the same few names arrive quickly. Ask what evidence supports each and the answers concern presentation more often than performance.
The names are frequently right. What is unreliable is the process that produced them, and its unreliability runs in one direction.
What nomination actually selects for
Names arrive from people who have observed somebody, which favours four things having nothing to do with capability.
Proximity to whoever does the nominating. Work that is visible rather than work that is difficult. Comfort in the settings where senior people happen to be present. And a willingness to describe one’s own contribution, which varies enormously between individuals and correlates weakly with the size of the contribution.
Somebody who does demanding work well in a location nobody senior visits, and who does not narrate it, will not be nominated. Not through anybody’s failure — they have simply never appeared in the process.
Four places to look instead
Ask who people actually consult. In any organization there are individuals colleagues go to when something is genuinely difficult. That is a judgment made by peers under real conditions, and it is more predictive than any assessment. The names are frequently not on the list.
Ask supervisors who would be missed. Not who is best. Who would leave a hole. The question surfaces people whose contribution is structural rather than visible.
Look at where things do not go wrong. A section that has quietly not had problems for three years has somebody in it who is preventing them, and prevention generates no evidence. The absence of incident is the signal, and it is the hardest to notice.
Ask who trained the people who are good. Capability that has already transferred once is the strongest available evidence of the thing you are looking for.
Quiet is not a capability judgment
The most common error, and it operates below the level anybody would defend.
Somebody who speaks little in meetings is read as less engaged, less able, or less ready. Frequently they are processing more carefully, have concluded the meeting is not where decisions are made, or come from a background where asserting yourself in a group is not how competence is demonstrated.
The test that separates the two is simple and rarely applied: ask them directly, afterward, what they thought. Somebody with nothing will have nothing. Somebody who was holding the most accurate reading in the room will say so in ninety seconds.
A leader who has never asked has been assessing on volume.
Ambition and capability are separate
Development systems select for people who have signalled that they want advancement, which excludes two useful groups.
People who would take responsibility if asked but will not ask, frequently because they assume the answer would be no or because asking feels presumptuous. In small communities this is a large population.
And people who have not considered it because nobody indicated it was available to them.
Both are reached by the same act, which is asking directly and specifically. The asking is the intervention, and it is the same finding as the civic chapter: nearly everybody who ends up holding responsibility was asked by an individual person.
The small-organization version
Where a firm or district has forty people, there is no formal identification process at all, and the informal one has a specific failure.
The pool of people considered is the pool the leader happens to know well, which in a place where everybody knows everybody is shaped by connection, family, and history rather than by observation of work.
Which produces the pattern from the hiring entry: capability drawn repeatedly from one set of networks, with no exclusionary intent and an identical effect.
The correction costs an afternoon a year — ask three supervisors who in their area would surprise you, and then go and look.
Why this is worth the effort
An organization drawing from the visible portion of its people is developing perhaps half of what it has, and is doing so while reporting a shortage of capable people.
In a state where every institution describes difficulty finding people to take responsibility, the population that has been overlooked rather than exhausted is the cheapest available source, and it requires no recruitment.
It requires somebody to look somewhere other than where the names arrive from.
Edited by Patrick J. Wolf, PhD