High Potential Assessments
Identify and develop future leaders with predictive high potential assessments that maximize ROI of your leadership development programs.
The difference between high performers and high potential talent.
One of the most common questions we get is how to identify high potential talent. If your organization has trouble distinguishing high performers from your high potentials, you are not alone! We've conducted validation studies where we asked the supervisors of people we assessed to rate their performance and their advancement potential. In every study, the correlation between these ratings is astonishingly high - to the point that they are likely measuring the same thing. There are two reasons for this. First, many factors can help a person excel in their role. Second, characteristics that help a person excel in future roles are not easily observable.
High performers excel in their current role.
This could be because they:
- have strengths that help them perform the job duties well. For example, a salesperson who is assertive, goal focused, and knows the product is likely to succeed.
- have gaps aren't relevant to their role. For instance, an entry level engineer doesn't need to be an extravert.
- work harder than everyone else and/or have a supervisor who is supportive and builds them up.
- are surrounded by teammates whose strengths compensate for their weaknesses.
- have been doing the job for many years, giving them a lot of time to gain the knowledge needed to do it well.
High potentials can excel in higher-level future roles.
This is usually because they:
- have a variety of personality traits that are relevant to different types of roles. For instance, they are achievement oriented, empathic, and stress tolerant.
- are able to learn new things quickly, transfer skills to novel responsibilities, and solve complex problems.
- proactively seek to turn gaps into strengths by asking for feedback and engaging in developmental activities.
- have a desire to lead people, take on new challenges, and advance in their careers.
- can adapt their style to be effective with different people and in a variety of situations.
High Potential Assessments: A Diagnostic Tool for Leadership Development Programs
Whether you're launching an early talent program, leveling up your accelerated leaders program, or building a deep bench, PCI's high-potential assessments add rigor and objectivity to the process. It's helpful to conduct the assessments before the program launch, to help select cohort participants. However, many of our clients choose to do it a the beginning of the cohort experience. Our standard 4-step process is shown to the right. However, our leadership consultants can customize the process for seamless integration into your into your high-potential programs.
What Our High-Potential Assessments Measure
Our assessment process allows you to accurately identify high potential employees because we measure 4 predictors that are backed by scientific research.
Learn how you can maximize leadership development ROI by accurately identifying your high-potentials and strategically allocating resources to accelerate their growth.
- Cognitive Abilities
- The Five Factor Model of Personality
- Preferred Leadership Style
- Self-awareness and Coachability
Why you should have cognitive ability tests in your high potential assessments.
Research shows that general cognitive ability is the single best predictor of performance in moderate- to high-complexity jobs. That's because it is literally one's ability to handle complexity. And, general cognitive ability does not change over time. So, if you want to know how much runway a person has to advance, you need to include measures of cognitive ability in your high potential assessments. Still, there are overachievers, so this should never be used as the sole factor when creating career paths.
Why you should assess the Five Factor Model of Personality.
We use a customized test and proprietary norms to measure the most widely accepted model of personality - the Factor Factor Model (aka - The Big 5).
Expand the domains below to discover how these traits can influence leadership emergence, potential, and style.
Why Preferred Leadership Style Matters
The research is clear - considerate leaders who provide a moderate degree of structure tend to be most effective. So, we use a tool designed to measure how often the person is inclined to engage in people-oriented and task-focused leadership behaviors. People are often surprised by their results, especially if they haven't led people before or received much feedback from direct reports. These are developable skills, so knowing where they stand compared to thousands of others leaders in our norm group can spark growth.
How We Assess Self-awareness and Coachability
Some of the personality scales give us some clues about an individual's self-awareness, but the interview often provides even more insights. That's because we give people a chance to describe themselves in their own words and can compare that to their personality test results. And, we give them high-level feedback on the online assessments, allowing us to observe how they respond to it. For early career high potentials, self-awareness can build over time. However, for experienced leaders seeking to advance to the executive level, lacking self-awareness can be a career staller.
Developing High Potentials
Read about the Top 10 High Potential Skills that you need to develop to drive results in 2025.
High Potential Assessment Deliverables
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High Potential Assessments - FAQs
What are high potential assessments?
How are high performers different from high potential employees?
What does PCI’s high potential assessment measure?
Why is cognitive ability important in high potential assessments?
How does PCI assess leadership potential?
What are the deliverables from a high potential assessment?
How do high potential assessments support leadership development programs?
Developing High Potentials
Read about the Top 10 High Potential Skills that you need to develop to drive results in 2025.