Take It to the Roundtable

The Potential for Potential

“…Having a breakfast meeting with the CEO can, in some cases, either make or break a person's career with just a short exchange. In addition, managers often have their own mental models of what a high potential looks like, and these are seldom the same across managers, which is why talent calibration meetings are such an important part of most successful talent management programs (although there is always room for improvement in these meetings as both Henson (2009) and Mone, Acritani, and Eisinger (2009) note). Future research in this area might be directed at identifying the specific competencies that are needed to be an effective assessor of talent.…”

“…Another theme concerning the identification of potential was the degree to which managers often confuse performance with potential. Both Mone et al (2009) and Robinson, Fetters, Riester, and Bracco (2009) raise this concern. We agree that it represents and remains one of the biggest issues in talent management and high‐potential identification.…”

Performance Management: Process Perfection or Process Utility?

“…Our second insight is to use formal tools and processes that mirror the natural, informal conversations. We were recently reminded of this “mirroring” lesson when orchestrating the company's succession planning process (see Mone, Acritani, & Eisinger, 2009); the more the formal process matched the informal process, the more effective were the outcomes. Process utility, not process perfection, was the ongoing challenge.…”