High-Potential Talent: Beware the Rhino in Unicorn’s Clothing

Over a coffee with a talent executive of a major global organization recently, they were unloading on some of their biggest challenges.

“When it comes down to it, I’m shocked daily at the lack of talent to deal with the scale of the challenges we have in our organization. I feel a million miles away from the promise that roles like mine were supposed to offer the business when I started as a chief talent officer 10 years ago.”

It’s a familiar and heart-wrenching challenge for executives who care deeply about delivering for the business. The Great Resignation and the surge of retirement have intensified the pressure, forcing turnover in C-level positions. It's become clear that business owners must address accelerating talent much differently in the post-pandemic age. Those who master this are outperforming their competitors significantly, and leaders brave enough to rethink talent are likely to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

So where are we failing, and what’s the secret to change?

Unicorns vs. Rhinos: A Modern Fable

Imagine two archetypes for great leaders in your business. One is a beautiful, enigmatic unicorn with a magnificent talent to transform organizations, customer experience, and engagement from those around them. The other is a strong, dependable rhino who lacks the "je ne sais quoi" of the unicorn to operate easily in a complex, mystical future.

For leaders promoting and hiring talent, there are many stories of times when we thought we found a unicorn, only to find out they were a rhino. They seemed capable but were later found unable to deliver up to expectations.

A high-performing unicorn that shines bright in an organization steeped in tradition and rigorous process can flounder when moved to an innovative and chaotic startup-like culture.

Looking at employees from a unicorn-rhino perspective allows employers to stop nurturing the wrong talent pools. Even though it may feel ethically right to train everyone to be an executive, for instance, it doesn’t make practical or financial sense. Being able to separate the unicorns from the rhinos early in the process avoids the frustration of having only rhino candidates when important roles come open.

Moving Unicorns Up the Ranks

Knowing the basics of unicorns and rhinos doesn’t mean you won’t encounter missteps as you revitalize your talent management framework and workflows. Fortunately, each one can be rectified effectively. Consider these strategies:

1. Differentiate unicorns and rhinos.

Most companies disagree on what constitutes an ideal leader. With this lack of alignment, it’s always going to be a challenge to get assessment right. My team and I estimate that around three-quarters of companies use past performance, current performance, mobility, and some form of motivation to identify high-potential players. We believe these are outdated measurements for high potential, and most are just table stakes for being identified as a rhino. The methods used today also overly rely on the assumption that conditions in the business and with the individual will remain static in the future. They won't.

Why are organizations falling into this trap, and how do they get out? At around the same time as the field of talent emerged in HR, so too did generic assessments of potential. Most organizations signed up for this approach with an empirical assurance that we could assess and spot the unicorns with these methods. Years later, however, we can say it has not proven to work.

It wrongly assumes that all talent and contexts are created equal, whereas we know context is key to how people show up and contribute. A high-performing unicorn that shines bright in an organization steeped in tradition and rigorous process can flounder when moved to an innovative and chaotic startup-like culture. How can the factor of context possibly be ignored? Assessing potential and finding unicorns requires assessing factors meaningful to your organization, the context, and the real roles people will need to fill.

In response, my team and I developed a five-factor model to increase a company’s ability to future-proof its talent and unpack the true potential of its residing unicorns. A major factor is the acumen to lead in your context. Business acumen is essential to solve the biggest challenges – and see risks and opportunities in a manner that yields good business outcomes. Equally important to unicorns is "people acumen," defined as the ability to select the right people for the organization and team, motivate them to achieve, and get them working.

2. Put a unicorn-grade solution into place.

When organizations switch from assessment to development mode too often, the development falls back into the paradigm of the standard leadership framework and expectations of the organization, which people are assessed against in performance reviews. This will fail to prepare them to run the future of the business and stretch their high potential. Expectations and outcomes for talent and leadership interventions must be tightly aligned to deliver results.

Good high-potential development solutions should also humbly acknowledge where there is catching up to do developmentally. If people have had a fast-track career of promotion, there will be basic acumen they may have lost along the way. We’ve seen the consequences of many clients assuming their top executives understand agility or have sound digital literacy when there were clear gaps that the leaders felt embarrassed about that held the strategy back.

The development often gives people a heavier workload rather than more complexity. Ironically, more work (projects, stretch assignments, etc.) is a perfect growth opportunity for our sturdy rhinos. Our unicorns need more complexity to help them build their ability to see around corners in the organization's future.

Energy and engagement are also critical. When it's left to the line manager or HR teams, it will inevitably fall short. Development experiences should be staged carefully over time – and part of a continuous experience of support and helpful nudges in critical moments. With the explosion of innovation in learning since the pandemic, this is now even more achievable for organizations on the tightest budgets and the less tech-savvy employee groups.

With these foundations serving as the base of your high-potential development approach, you can augment it with regular exposure to experienced leaders and coaching. This promotes a value shift and the opportunity to engage in observable, not abstract, learning experiences.

3. Think strategically about the future.

In reality, most high potentials won’t end up doing the roles they are slated to occupy in the future, as they likely won’t exist in their current form. Instead of designing solutions against current roles, focus on the future acumen to deliver the current strategy and the next.

Development must be contextualized in the future, too. Many current high-potential development experiences involve a liaison with a business school in some version of a mini-MBA. If this experience is not explicitly designed around the context of your strategy and the acumen required to run the future of your specific business, it will not create any lasting impact.

Business acumen must be developed in the context of the business in the future according to your strategy, such as financial acuity, strategic perspective, customer obsession, or using data to drive insight. To develop people's acumen, the leader must have experiences encouraging them to tap into their inner motivation and purpose (which can be linked to stage development and maturity). It should also involve introspection in order to show their constant ability to drive learning and agility.

The development experience should enable people to practice and simulate operating the future business from any akin role that is more complex than their current role to avoid the trap of just developing for today’s roles as a simple guide. This exposure is what will uniquely equip unicorns to tackle similar dynamics and challenges, even in a constantly changing context.

Many organizations today are failing their unicorns and diluting their high-potential strategy by including too many rhinos. Each deserves a place in the field, but the tactics for attracting, retaining, and engaging them are vastly different. We all need rhinos, sure. But no company can afford to let its precious unicorn population go extinct.

By Stephanie Peskett, senior vice president and partner at BTS; with Kile Dyer, senior leader at BTS; Lynn Collins, head of the Center of Expertise and chief scientist; and Ravi Bhusate, head of leadership in Europe