Pearson
Developing High Potentials
Summary
We were engaged by the Group Management Development Director to work with a small group of senior high potential leaders. The defining characteristics of this group was that they were seen as having more to offer, highly regarded and valued by the business. However, the business or the individuals – sometimes both – were unclear as to what was a realistic and achievable career path and how to travel that path successfully.
Our Approach
We took each ofthese leaders through an individually tailored process to help them:
- Really test their career aspirations
- Understand how their career stakeholders in the business regarded them and their gaps – either behavioural or experiential
- Increase self insights and challenge stated aspirations
We used an in-depth career conversation to probe their key experiences and preferences, aswell as to establish their main transitions that they had been through – onboth a personal and organisational level.
For some of these leaders we utilised a few key psychometrics to gain a greater understanding of likely behaviours at more senior levels or in different partsof the business. For others we used one of our senior benchmarked business simulations to really test their leadership capability.
Results
We spent time with each individual leader feeding back and gaining agreement with our key finders in terms of career headroom and scope. We then worked with them to agree how they would feed this back into the business and secure commitment to their development plan that we worked up with them.
The programme has been a clear success and development moves have been secured by some of the leaders. Others are working on development plans to enable them to make the moves they are seeking and some have decided that they want to continue to develop within their current roles to take the business forward without furthe rprogression.
Whilst we continue to work with senior individuals on their career development, we are now also working with a group of high potentials to help them identify their key strengths (to leverage) and development needs (to address) as part of a year long development programme. Our role spans the initial learning plans and will include guiding their learning objectives for each of the individual elements ofthe programme.