Talent Management

Mark Powell

Managing Consultant, CEB (Now Gartner)

Finding Future Leaders in Your Organisation

• What is leadership potential?
• What is the relationship with between potential and performance?
• How can potential be measured?

These were some of the questions that Mark Powell from CEB addressed in his session ‘Finding Future Leaders in Your Organisation’. Referencing his background across the Civil Service, Consulting and Financial Service sectors, Mark’s presentation primarily centred on CEB’s approach to high potential assessment, within the context of some of the broader issues around the topic. During the session, Mark presented some powerful, and at times somewhat alarming, statistics relating to the identification of potential and talent management. (From Psyche Edition 75, Spring 2016)

Dr Gene Jackson C.Psychol

Founder of Working Matters

Assessing Learning Agility to Predict Learning Potential

Gene Johnson from Working Matters presented a pacey, lively session that addressed the issue of how to assess Learning Agility to predict high potential.  The idea of assessing learning agility has been around for twenty years, but the idea is still developing and there is an argument to be made that its time has now come. Perhaps this is because organisations are concerned to find a magic bullet to identify high potential. However, Gene’s view is that a simplistic solution does not exist because we are dealing with the complexity of people and with numerous variables that can affect performance and/or assessment.  Gene stated that the established Nine Box Model of talent management remains a very useful model with the proviso that it should be used ‘vigorously’. As with most models it is effective when believed in and used well. The constant challenge in the use of this model is that managers have to provide evidence and in doing so have a tendency to apply innate subjective biases.  (From Psyche Edition 75 Spring 2016).