Potential is everywhere in talent management strategy. Yet identifying high-potential people is no guarantee that they will succeed. To create value, that potential has to translate into observable, lasting performance, serving individuals, teams and the organisation.
This article explores how personality assessment can support the whole talent life cycle: selection, onboarding, identifying high potentials, leadership development and alignment with organisational culture. It also shows why an effective HR strategy has to go beyond identifying potential and create the conditions for genuinely turning it into performance.
Episode 126 of the podcast The Science of Personality looked at how to turn high potential into high performance across the talent life cycle. Co-hosts Ryne Sherman, PhD, and Blake Loepp were joined by Melvyn Payne, commercial director at Advanced People Strategies.
"Potential, on its own, does not amount to much," Melvyn Payne explains. "For me, what counts is performance and the ability to deliver results."
Potential is mainly associated with what a person is capable of.
When considering an application, the question is essentially whether the candidate can do the job. Once the person is hired, potential often refers to their capacity to take on bigger, more ambitious things over time.
And that is precisely where the difficulty lies.
"For most organisations, one of the hardest questions is that big one: 'Potential for what?'," Melvyn Payne points out.
When you do not know precisely where you want to go, almost any path can look suitable. A fitness goal expressed simply as "being healthy" is far harder to reach if you have never defined clearly what being healthy means.
The same holds for organisations. Without a precise definition of the potential they are looking for, they will find it much harder to identify their high potentials effectively.
And as with health, the definition of potential probably varies with the context.
Being able to measure progress is an essential part of any properly defined objective.
Seen that way, personality assessment is one of the most effective means of gauging an individual's potential to reach a high level of performance.
On Melvyn Payne's view, it is relevant at every stage of the employee life cycle.
Selection is probably the first moment at which the question of potential takes on its full importance.
Assessing candidates can draw on various tools: CVs, interviews, skills assessments or personality inventories.
On Hogan's view, personality assessment is one of the most valuable tools available to those responsible for hiring. Data from scientifically validated personality inventories supports fairer decision-making and also identifies the areas in which someone can go on developing.
The point, then, is not only to establish whether a candidate can succeed today, but also to understand the levers likely to support their future development.
One mistake some organisations make is to stop using a candidate's personality data once that person has been hired.
Building a skills development logic straight into the onboarding process can, by contrast, prove particularly beneficial.
"Organisations choose the Hogan inventories for the insight they bring," Melvyn Payne explains. "Using the insight from the selection process during a new starter's first 100 days matters for laying the right foundations."
Data gathered during hiring can thus become a genuine starting point for integration, for professional development and for coaching.
The assessment is no longer merely a decision tool: it becomes a lever for development.
Melvyn Payne finds that many organisations still identify their high potentials mainly from the opinions managers form of their team members.
That approach naturally carries a risk of subjectivity.
"Using the Hogan inventories brings more objectivity to the process," he explains. "It is about reducing personal bias and identifying talent against the key behaviours and competencies the organisation needs."
Once the company has defined the critical competencies its strategy requires, personality assessment can also help identify the development needs of high-potential populations.
Melvyn Payne describes development as the ability to make the most of a person's talents in order to prepare them for the role they may hold tomorrow.
This perspective is central to assessment and development: identifying potential is only genuinely useful once the organisation knows which experiences, which environments and which support will turn it into skills and performance.
Hogan uses the Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI) to identify the drivers and values that shape behaviour at work.
To gauge the alignment between individual and organisational values, a clear definition of the potential being sought is once again indispensable.
"There is often a significant gap between what organisations think they are looking for and what they are actually prepared to accept day to day," Melvyn Payne observes.
Take an organisation that wants to keep running as it does. It will probably do well to select leaders who appreciate structure, order and stability.
Conversely, when an organisation is setting out to transform itself, leaders who place more value on risk-taking or experimentation may suit that environment better.
A difficulty appears when an organisation says it is looking for innovation while in practice rewarding far more conservative behaviour.
It then risks provoking a genuine conflict of values.
"The way the Hogan tools are used lets us give HR very concrete feedback: 'You have a group of people with the potential to do what you want, but here are the factors likely to stop them'," Melvyn Payne explains.
This approach moves past an individual reading of potential.
The question is no longer simply: "Does this person have the qualities required?"
It also becomes: "Will the organisational environment genuinely let those qualities be expressed?"
That is a major issue for organisational culture, for team transformation and for developing sustainable leadership.
Melvyn Payne describes a client that took a whole-system approach to its talent management strategy, built on personality assessment.
Having identified the critical competencies from the Hogan competency model, the organisation assessed all its leaders, from managers up to board members.
The work gave the entire organisation a shared language for talking about potential and performance.
Leaders then put coaching and training programmes in place, based on the assessment results, to help people realise their potential.
That coherence is essential.
When selection, skills development, coaching, mobility and leadership development rest on different criteria, HR strategy risks losing its legibility.
A coherent approach, by contrast, connects talent management decisions to a single shared understanding of behaviour, competencies and leadership potential.
Melvyn Payne insists on one essential point: identifying potential is only the start of the work.
The real challenge is turning that potential into performance.
"Identifying strengths and gaps is relatively easy. The hard part is concentrating on the strategy that will genuinely produce the results you expect," he explains.
The distinction is fundamental for organisations.
A talent strategy should not stop at identifying the people regarded as promising. It has to determine how to develop their skills, offer them the right experiences, build their self-knowledge and create an environment in which their potential can be expressed.
Put differently, the strategic question is not only who has potential, but how the organisation is going to turn it into performance.
Personality assessment shows its full value when it forms part of an overall talent management strategy.
Used from selection through to the development of high potentials, it brings more objectivity to decisions, makes better sense of individual drivers, anticipates development needs and aligns talent with what the organisation expects.
But data is not enough.
Lasting performance appears when organisations use this information to build coherent development paths, evolve their managerial practices and create a culture in which people can genuinely put their talents at the service of collective performance.
For boards, HR directors and heads of talent management, the issue is therefore strategic: turning knowledge about potential into concrete development work, then turning that work into lasting performance.
It is this articulation between personality assessment, leadership development, HR strategy and talent support that lets teams progress and organisations succeed over the long term.
At Authentic Talent, we believe that objective assessment of talent and potential within organisations is a decisive factor in their future success. If you would like to discuss it with us, let's talk!
This article draws on an article published on the Hogan Assessments website: From Potential to Performance
