Speaker 1: Hey friends, Dave Berkus here. Welcome back to the Daily Berk, and today we are talking about the truth about those high potential programs in organizations, those high potential lists, how most companies develop their future leaders. And the goal of a lot of these programs is valid. Succession planning is a really important thing. You don't want to be caught off guard with no potential new leaders when a leader leaves. The problem is that most of those programs work in a way that has a lot of different flaws. I mean, first, talking about the people that come into those programs, most of the time they're nominated by a manager, and the manager is, of course, trying to figure out who looks like good future management potential. Well, who is that? Well, that's someone who looks like me because I'm a manager, right? So too often you get more of the same type of people as what your managers look like. You can lose a lot of surface diversity, racial, ethnic, etc. You can lose a ton of cognitive diversity because the people that are challenging the status quo, the people that are pushing for innovation, are not the people that look like the manager. So you can lose a lot of things right there. The other problem is, quite frankly, the Pygmalion effect, the very real factor that being placed on this list is almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. We know this from studies that are almost half a century old that often just telling a trainer, telling a teacher, telling a manager that so-and-so is gifted, that they are high potential, means that that person spends a little bit more time with them, gives them a little bit more of a challenge, puts in a little bit more work, and as a result that person really does become it. You could actually just randomize who you put into the high potential list and you would probably get a pretty similar result. Now there's some good news and bad news in both of these truths. The bad news is that we need to take a deep look on how we're selecting people for that list. The good news is, we probably ought to let people opt in to that high potential list and then whether doing the work, whether or not they succeed or fail, is up to that. Because we really, we are terrible judges of somebody's future potential, really we're just judging who looks like me. The good news, especially if you're not on that list, is that that list doesn't matter. The fact that you were chosen for that is irrelevant. You still have the ability to be a future leader of the organization. Even if you push in the status quo, you still have the ability to become a future leader. Although in fairness, if you're one of the disruptors, if you're one of the rebel talent as my friend and colleague Francesca Gino says, then you might want to be more successful somewhere else, but that's a decision that you have to make. So there's good news and bad news, right? The bad news is that these programs don't really usually work to their optimum. The good news is that you can take responsibility for your career. And if you are a manager, you should probably just nominate everybody because it's about who opts in and then who does the work afterwards that really succeeds. Thanks again so much for watching this episode of The Daily Burke. Leave a comment below. Let me know. Are you going to declare yourself today to be a high potential person? It doesn't matter what age you are, you can be a high potential person today. Then while you're leaving that comment, of course, make sure you are followed or subscribed to the show on whatever platform you're watching this on or want to watch this on because we post new episodes every single weekday designed to help you do your best work ever. And I want to make sure that you don't miss them. Thank you again so much for watching The Daily Burke.