High-potential employee coaching: develop future leaders
"High potential" is a prediction. Most organizations use it as a reward.
That single confusion explains most of what goes wrong here. A reward is given for what someone has already done, and it needs no follow-up. A prediction is a claim about what someone will be able to do in a role they do not yet hold — and a claim like that carries obligations: name the role, state the evidence, say what would prove you wrong, and set a date to check.
Almost no high-potential list does those four things. Which is why so many of them produce a group of flattered, undeveloped, and eventually disappointed people.
This page is for the sponsor deciding whether to run high-potential employee coaching, and how to design it so that the label means something. The pipeline and the seats behind it — who succeeds whom — is succession planning and coaching; the wider organizational picture is leadership development for organizations.
ICF ACC · MBA · Riyadh · Arabic and English
Three questions your list has to answer
Take any name currently on your high-potential list and answer these. If you cannot, the nomination is an opinion.
Potential for what? Not "bigger things". A kind of role: leading a function rather than a team, running a business unit with its own economics, managing through managers, operating with a board. Each of these requires something different, and someone can be an excellent candidate for one and a poor one for another. A list that does not say for what cannot be developed against, because nobody knows what the gap is.
On what evidence — and what would disconfirm it? Nominations collect confirming evidence only. Ask the opposite question: what have we seen that argues against this, and what would we need to see in the next year to change our mind? A nomination that survives that question is worth investing in. One that collapses was a popularity assessment.
By when, and what happens if we are wrong? Being wrong is normal and it is not a scandal. But an organization that has never taken a name off the list is not assessing potential; it is maintaining a status class.
Performance is not potential
The most expensive error in this area is nominating the strongest performer in the current role.
Current performance is a necessary condition and a weak predictor. What it tells you is that someone is good at the job they have. What the next level requires is frequently the opposite of what made them excellent: letting go of the work, deciding with less information, being judged on other people's output, and choosing between two defensible priorities rather than executing the agreed one.
Three signals are more informative than performance, and all three are observable without an assessment center:
What they do with an ambiguous problem. Do they seek the missing definition, or wait for it?
Whether they change their mind in public. Someone who can say "I was wrong about that, here is what changed" in front of peers has something that is hard to teach.
Whether other people's careers improve around them. The most reliable early indicator of leadership capacity, and the least frequently recorded.
The evidence brief
One page per nominated person, written by the nominating manager, before any program is designed. This is the artifact that makes a high-potential list reviewable.
NAME / CURRENT ROLE _______________________________ 1 POTENTIAL FOR WHAT The kind of role, named: _____________________________________________________ Realistic horizon (e.g. 2–4 years): ________________ 2 EVIDENCE FOR Two or three specific things they did, not traits: 1. __________________________________________________ 2. __________________________________________________ 3. __________________________________________________ 3 EVIDENCE AGAINST What argues the other way (leave this blank and the brief is not finished): _____________________________________________________ 4 THE GAP What they have not yet had to do: _____________________________________________________ 5 THE STRETCH The real assignment in the next 12 months that will test the prediction: _____________________________________________________ 6 WHO OWNS THIS Sponsoring executive: ______________________________ What that person will actually do: _________________ 7 REVIEW Date, and what would take this name off the list: _____________________________________________________
Copy the block — nothing to download and no email required.
Box 3 is the one that does the work. A set of briefs with box 3 blank is a list of favorites. Ask for it and roughly a third of nominations change.
Box 5 is the one that decides whether the program matters. Coaching without a stretch assignment is preparation for a test nobody is going to sit.
Buyer diagnostic
Score your current practice, not your intentions. 2 = true, 1 = partly, 0 = no.
| Score | ||
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Every name on the list has a named kind of role attached | |
| 2 | Nominations record evidence against, not only evidence for | |
| 3 | Each person has a real stretch assignment in the next year | |
| 4 | A named executive owns each person and meets them | |
| 5 | People have been removed from the list, not only added | |
| 6 | We have decided, deliberately, whether to tell people | |
| 7 | The list is not simply the highest performers in current roles | |
| 8 | Someone would notice within a month if the program stopped |
13–16: the design is sound. Coaching will compound what is already happening.
8–12: fix rows 1, 3 and 4 before buying anything. They cost no budget and they are the difference between development and recognition.
Below 8: you have a recognition scheme. That is a legitimate thing to have, and it should not be called potential, because the people on it will make plans based on the word.
Row 8 is the honest one. If the program could quietly stop and nobody would notice, it was an event.
Telling them, or not
This is the decision sponsors most often avoid, and avoidance is itself a choice — usually the worst one, because the list leaks anyway and people learn their status from the fact that someone else was invited to something.
If you tell them, you gain the ability to have an adult conversation about the gap, and you take on an obligation. The label raises expectations, and an expectation raised and then left unattended for eighteen months converts a retained employee into a departing one who is now also disillusioned. Telling someone they are a high potential and then changing nothing is the single most reliable way to lose them.
If you do not tell them, you keep flexibility and you get less. Development conversations become vague, the stretch assignment arrives without explanation, and the person cannot participate in a plan they have not been told exists.
The workable middle: tell people they are in a development group, be specific about what it is and what it is not, and say plainly that it is not a promise of a role. Most people handle that well. What they handle badly is discovering a secret list.
What coaching does here, and what it does not
It does: turn a stretch assignment into learning rather than survival; make the gap discussable without it sounding like criticism; give the person a place to think that is not their manager's office; and surface, early, whether the person actually wants the role everyone assumes they want. That last one saves years.
It does not: create potential that the evidence does not support; substitute for a stretch assignment; make a promotion happen, or promise one; or fix a nomination that was really about performance.
A frequent and valuable outcome: someone concludes that they do not want the path that was planned for them. This looks like a failure and it is not. An organization that learns this in month four rather than year three has been saved a bad appointment, and usually keeps the person in a role they are better suited to. That is a legitimate outcome of this work, and it is one reason the objective should be written as a review question rather than a promotion target.
How engagements are structured here
The stated organizational process is Understand → Design → Deliver → Apply → Review. For high-potential work the Understand stage includes reading the evidence briefs, because a program designed before the nominations are examined will develop the wrong gap.
Career development for employees and internal mobility and promotion readiness are two of the six stated organizational service areas, alongside executive and senior leadership coaching, manager development, professional positioning and career transition support. The six audience levels run from emerging talent to executives — and emerging talent is a distinct level, not a junior version of the senior one.
Entry configurations range from a single senior leader to coaching attached to an existing program, which is the usual shape here where an organization already has a talent program and the gap is individual depth.
On confidentiality, the stated position applies: "The organization pays. The session still belongs to the participant." This matters more in high-potential work than anywhere else, because a participant who suspects their sessions are being reported into a talent review will not raise the doubts that are the most useful material in the room.
Delivery is in Arabic or English, and participants choose.
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In the Saudi context
The market is competitive for exactly these people, which compresses the timeline. A high-potential program designed on a three-year horizon in a market where strong people receive approaches every quarter is a program designed for a different market.
Nationalization targets have made some talent pools visible and urgent, and the risk is that urgency turns development into placement. Someone moved into a senior role ahead of the evidence is not being developed; they are being exposed, and it is the organization's judgment that failed, not theirs.
Where a person is being developed for a role their family or peers can see, the visibility raises the stakes of an unsuccessful stretch. Designing the assignment so that a partial result is still creditable is a practical courtesy, not a softening.
Mixed workforces mean the list should be checked for who is not on it. Nomination by manager discretion reproduces the network of the managers, and the most common omission is the person who does excellent work in their second language and speaks less in meetings.
Rapid organizational growth creates the opposite problem too: roles arriving faster than candidates, which is a succession design question rather than a coaching one.
Common questions
How many people should be in a high-potential group?
Few enough that each one has a named sponsor who actually meets them. That constraint sets the number more usefully than any ratio.
Should we tell them they are on the list?
See above. The defensible positions are "tell them, with a clear statement of what it is not" and "do not run a list". The secret list is the option that fails.
What if someone is not ready after the program?
Then the prediction was wrong or the timing was, and both are ordinary. What matters is that the review question was written at the start, so that this is a finding rather than an argument.
Can this be combined with our talent review?
Yes, with one boundary: the coaching does not feed the review. Engagement objectives are shared; session content is not.
Is this the same as succession planning?
No. This develops named people. Succession attaches named people to named seats and asks what happens if one becomes vacant next quarter — that is succession planning and coaching.
Our high potentials keep leaving.
Look at rows 3 and 6 of the diagnostic first. In most cases the label was given, nothing changed, and the person drew the reasonable conclusion. Internal mobility and promotion readiness covers the system side of the same problem.
Do you assess who should be on the list?
The evidence brief is designed so that you assess it, and the nominating managers own the judgment. Outsourcing the decision weakens it.
Start with box 3
Ask every nominating manager to complete an evidence brief, including the evidence against. Do it before you talk to any provider. The briefs will tell you whether you have a development question, a nomination problem, or a recognition scheme with an ambitious name.
A useful next step, matched to this topic
If you want support applying what you just read, start with the option closest to the problem in front of you.
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Saad Al-Wuqayan
Career & Executive Coach — ICF ACC, MBA
Saad Al-Wuqayan coaches professionals and executives in Riyadh. Nearly two decades across engineering, business development, financial leadership as a CFO and government transformation sit behind every session.
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