Talent and leadership development have always gone hand in hand. The understanding of talent has addictively focused on high potential based on some Darwinian notion that future leaders are created from a pool of about 20 per cent of employees who evolve into the “chosen ones.” And so employers disproportionately invest large amounts of capital on a group of “high flyers” in the hope the chosen ones will develop into future leaders. Identifying the chosen ones assumes leaders have the ability to accurately speculate on potential based on observation of demonstrated capabilities in employees’ current roles and the belief that past behaviour is a predictor of future behaviour. However, the conventional approach to talent and high potential is very limited. It is not uncommon for leaders to be considered high potential under one manager in one business unit and then, after being transferred to another business unit, lose their royalty status as a high potential when they struggle to adjust to the finer nuances in the different business unit context. Vice-versa, duds inherited from other business units can suddenly emerge as high-potential talent in their new business unit. Nor is it uncommon to hear that leaders considered to be high-potential talent were actually not considered talent at all in their previous organizations. So what has changed? Has the employee suddenly inherited a dose of talent characteristics or has she simply found that unique combination of environment, manager and role that leverages her true potential?

1. HRReporter
C A N A D I A N
THE NATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT www.hrreporter.com
A Carswellbusiness Publication
SEPTEMBER 11, 2006
T
alent and leadership development have
always gone hand in hand. The under-
standing of talent has addictively fo-
cused on high potential based on some
Darwinian notion that future leaders are creat-
ed from a pool of about 20 per cent of employees
who evolve into the “chosen ones.” And so em-
ployers disproportionately invest large
amounts of capital on a group of “high flyers”
in the hope the chosen ones will develop into fu-
ture leaders. Identifying the chosen ones as-
sumes leaders have the ability to accurately
speculate on potential based on observation of
demonstrated capabilities in employees’ cur-
rent roles and the belief that past behaviour is
a predictor of future behaviour. However, the
conventional approach to talent and high po-
tential is very limited.
It is not uncommon for leaders to be con-
sidered high potential under one manager in
one business unit and then, after being trans-
ferred to another business unit, lose their roy-
alty status as a high potential when they strug-
gle to adjust to the finer nuances in the
different business unit context. Vice-versa,
duds inherited from other business units can
suddenly emerge as high-potential talent in
their new business unit. Nor is it uncommon to
hear that leaders considered to be high-poten-
tial talent were actually not considered talent
at all in their previous organizations. So what
has changed? Has the employee suddenly in-
herited a dose of talent characteristics or has
she simply found that unique combination of
environment, manager and role that leverages
her true potential?
The war for talent has confused employers’
understanding of talent and leadership and
created a misperception that there is a limited
pool of talent and that it looks and feels the
same from one organization to another. Orga-
nizations often ride on a high when they poach
talent from another organization and boast
about their newfound intellectual capital at the
expense of competitors. However, the war for
talent is really just a war to find the right fit or
the right context for leaders. Leadership and
high potential are inspired under the right
combination of role, environment and man-
agerial response.
Limiting understanding of high potentials to
a select group of employees misjudges the real
potential of all employees. When everyone is
considered talent, there is an underlying ex-
pectation that everyone must grow outside of
their comfort zone and stretch their perfor-
mance boundaries. True learning organizations
aim to optimize all growth and not only that of
a small group of chosen ones. A chosen one ap-
proach reinforces an expectation that growth is
limited only to a few.
Talent management should also take a com-
plex view of growth to reflect the market com-
plexity in a globally competitive context. A
more complex approach to talent management
is to recognize the external market conditions
that demand different strategic and organiza-
tional structure responses from organizations,
which adds to the complexity of situations in
which some talent can excel, while others might
not. Mehrdad Baghai, author of The Alchemy of
Growth: Kickstarting and Maintaining Growth
in Your Company, outlined three different
types of talent categories, namely operators,
business builders and visionaries, to reflect the
organizational structural arrangements to
strategic business responses.
Talent operators, for example, have deep
functional and industry expertise and a strong
drive to hit targets and meet plans consistent-
ly. Talent business builders, on the other hand,
have an entrepreneurial desire to create some-
thing new and have comfort with ambiguity
and change. Talent visionaries are champions
and unconventional thinkers.
Each category requires different talent ap-
proaches. Talent approaches for the operator
category should create personal career conse-
quences for near-team performance whereas a
talent approach for the visionary category
should provide psychological rewards such as
recognition of ideas and freedom to experi-
ment, and provide career advantages such as
an opportunity to satisfy intellectual curiosity.
All too often, visionaries who successfully
launch business initiatives are expected to sus-
tain the operations of this initiative or are ex-
pected to be the operators that squeeze costs
out of the organization. No surprise that they
lose interest and do not remain with the com-
pany because it is not what inspires them.
All this has implications for leadership de-
velopment. Conventional approaches to leader-
ship development have focused on developing
well-rounded high potential individuals and, to
be a vice-president, an employee must develop
an aptitude for diverse business functions and
be proficient in all areas. However, decades of
research into personality and interest profiling
shows leaders have primary preferences and
styles, which lends some validity to the view of
leadership as leveraging unique strengths and
connecting to a “calling.” Therefore focusing on
key strengths is the more efficient path to pur-
suing a calling.
So, there is a place for everyone in talent
management and high potential is a term that
should apply to all employees. When leaders
take a complex view of organizations and rec-
ognize that talent in one context may not be
talent in another, then organizations can find
the right combination of role, environment
and management style that leverages every-
one’s true potential.
A wide variety of personality and interest
assessment centres are available to get an in-
depth insight into employees’ true potential.
Organizations make extraordinary efforts to
understand the uniqueness of their customers
but rarely make the same effort to understand
the uniqueness of each employee. By knowing
each employee’s true potential, employers
could organize talent along categories of ex-
pertise that cut across levels in the organiza-
tion. All too often talent is organized along hi-
erarchical levels and high performers are
involved in cutting-edge projects that may not
be their expertise. Rather, if companies could
access a pool of expertise drawn from employ-
ees with strong acumen in, for example, mar-
ket segmentation, regardless of hierarchical
level, then it would be a better use of resources.
Not everyone wants to be a director or a vice-
president, but they do want challenging situa-
tions that leverages their unique expertise.
Furthermore, the war for talent has also closed
companies off to the learning potential of shar-
ing talent between non-competing companies
in non-competing industries to further en-
hance their true potential.
So, conventional approaches to talent man-
agement and leadership development dispro-
portionately focus on the chosen few, but the
chosen few reflects a limited paradigm for
leveraging the full potential in a learning or-
ganization.
Malcolm Gabriel is the program director for
the Toronto Organizational Development
Network and an HR practitioner at a
telecommunications firm. He can be reached at
(416) 735-0504.
The ‘chosen few’
© Copyright Canadian HR Reporter, September 11, 2006, by permission of Carswell, Toronto, Ontario, 1-800-387-5164. Web site: www.hrreporter.com
MALCOLM GABRIEL
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Why the conventional approach to leadership
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