Why Your High-Potentials Go to the Opposition, and How to Avoid it
Have you ever thought about how your organisation would fare if you lost the top 10% of your talent? It’s a daunting thought, right? And one that should keep you awake at night. What you need is a designated talent management strategy to identify, nurture and develop high-potential employees so that they become part of your succession plan, to be retained into the future.
How to identify high-potential employees and how vital are they in an organisation?
High-potential employees are often mistaken as high-performer employees. Contrary to high-performers, high-potentials have the ability to progress into key leadership roles within the organisation. They have the drive and motivation to excel on their current roles, resulting in high levels of engagement with the organisation because their personal goals align with the organisation’s vision.
These high-potential employees are vital for an organisation’s success because they are the employees who will take a given task without question and finish it with excellence, even beyond your expectations. They are the employees who are worth investing in. They are the ones who should believe and feel that their abilities are well-acknowledged in order for them to continue performing well and even better.
Reasons why high-potentials go to the opposition
Lack of development opportunities
The opportunity to expand and increase knowledge, skills and abilities helps an employee, especially a high-potential employee, increase his/her motivation and job satisfaction. Without the opportunity to grow, high potential employees might think that they’re just wasting their time and effort for nothing, resulting in lack of interest in their work and finding another organisation that could help them feel more appreciated.
Feeling underrated
Recognising achievements and hard work is very important for a high-potential employee. It gives him/her the assurance that his/her hard work is greatly valued and not in vain. There are some high-potential employees who are highly-driven by being recognised. Hence, without recognition, they may lack the motivation and drive to continue doing their best and may eventually lack interest in the organisation.
Insufficiency of support
High-potential employees are employees with great capabilities, skills and motivation. All of these will eventually diminish if not given the proper support. They need guidance and assistance in order for them to put their skills and effort towards the right outcomes. An organisation can enable and empower these employees to do their best through coaching.
How does Coaching work?
Talent management has become one of the main strategies to enhance and grow the human capital of an organisation and achieve competitive advantage. One way to manage an employee’s talent is through coaching. Traditionally considered as a human resource function, coaching is increasingly becoming a focus of managers and leaders’ business activities in order to develop employees and retain key staff. Coaching engages and commits talented individuals to the organisation for longer, since they know that the organisation recognises their skills and abilities which are likely to help them progress into other positions or opportunities within the organisation. Talent management has been investigated across a range of industries, professions, generational groups and socio-economic levels as an essential component of the succession planning pipeline. Global talent management has been increasingly explored in the cross-cultural literature especially in relation to the management of expatriates, the search for global leadership talent, organisational success and organisational reputation.
A recent survey by the International Coach Federation (2015) has reported that whilst many factors influence employees’ engagement, organisations that offer coaching report higher engagement levels compared to the previous year across all employee segments. In particular, over 60% of organisations report higher engagement levels for high-potentials with access to any form of coaching – internal, external or by the manager / leader as coach.
Investing at the earlier stage of these high-potential employees’ careers means earlier returns of your investment and more benefit for your organisation.
Providing coaching to your high potentials just makes good sense (as well as making good business sense). You need to look after your high-potentials, and the best way to do this is to provide personal and professional coaching to let them know that you care as much about them as you do about the business.
If you want to incorporate coaching into your organisation and become a professional coach yourself, you can contact the Australian Institute of Professional Coaches 1 300 309 306 or email us at [email protected] . We look forward to speaking with you soon.
