The Readiness Gap: Why High-Potential Leaders Can Fail at Senior Level
- 1 day ago
- 2 min read
Talking to HR and Talent leaders tells me there are a lot of High Potential people in their pipelines. I was curious to discover that although many organisations have these High Potential programmes in place, many of the people are not board-ready and those who are promoted without just in time support, often fail.
I was keen to explore this and spent time researching what’s going on?
Research has been consistent on this for years. Somewhere around 40% of senior leadership transitions fail within the first 12 to 18 months when the right support is not in place.
Mind the gap
The moment a promotion is put into place is the moment full support should be offered; it’s at this transitional stage that new leaders face their first significant gaps. It’s common to experience imposter syndrome, alongside overwhelm and pressure to ensure effective decision making, as well as learning how to set clear strategic direction, all of which are typically new or different when stepping up to board.
The cost of mistimed support
Sometimes we’ll see a new board leader come to us after a baptism of fire and it’s sad to see. On the one hand they were considered ready, what that meant was, they’d been identified as high potential, been on a training programme and had some shadowing of board members. But in reality they weren’t ready, the boardroom had them second guessing themselves, questioning their confidence and unsure about how to be impactful whilst navigating a new level of political dynamics. Couple that with the external experience of them by others - their directorate, board and external stakeholders and that’s a loss in anyone’s books. That’s more than unfortunate, that’s an irresponsible organisation.
The benefit of timely support
On the flip side, when these new to board members take part in one to one executive coaching as part of their transition, and importantly in their first 180 days, that makes a massive difference. It reflects in them as leaders, is experienced throughout their directorate and impactful to the wider organisation.
Bridging the gap
Does this mean high potential programmes should be put in the bin? No! These programmes offer huge value, they have identified and developed talent with key knowledge, skills and behaviours. It’s when the rubber meets the road that the real work begins.
As talent and leadership development professionals we simply need to be intentional in how we recognise board readiness and provide support to those high potentials as they step into senior and board level positions.
We’ve created a Board Readiness Diagnostic to help sense-check this.
