Metric Three: “High Potential” Mobility
Managers and Human Resources both know who the high potential stars are. They probably have additional compensation consideration, may have been singled out for additional training, and more. How does your organization manage the career paths of these A players? A manager’s preference is almost always to keep their star talent within their organization. But that might not be a healthy move for the organization if stars are turning over for lack of a career path.
Auditing career path plans for stars is, of course, essential. However, what kind of metric would assist an executive team in quickly assessing the mobility of your stars in the organization?
Simply enter the High Potential Mobility metric. By combining different pieces of data from performance reviews, voluntary turnover, and internal hire data, your Human Resources team can assess how the organization manages the career path of your stars. Star mobility provides a data point to the movement of the A players in your organization.
Value. The High Potential Mobility Metric provides Human Resources and executive teams with a summary statistic on the movements of their star performers. Use this statistic to focus the reader on your high potential employees to determine patterns—are your high potential employees moving about the organization the way you expect them to? Are they being promoted to new, higher-level positions? If not, then what can be done to address this situation? If human capital is truly an organization’s most important asset, then management must take extra care to assure the retention of star performers. According to Staffing.org’s 2006 Recruiting Metrics and Performance Benchmark Report, the lack of development opportunities is the single largest factor that employees cite for changing employers. Thus, it is critical to make these development opportunities readily available to star performers. In order to maximize the potential of your organization, it is imperative that you exploit all of your strengths, particularly with regard to human capital.
Audience. This metric may be of some interest to executives as a single summary statistic, and also to the vice president of Human Resources and likely the head of Learning and Development. The information you learn from it, however, has leverage points at the hiring manager level. If you see patterns of high potentials fleeing one particular manager, then senior management may need to explore the situation further.
Goal setting questions for this metric:
Data Elements. The data that you will need. Note that there are three different “sub-metrics” within the High Potential Mobility metric.
Metric One: Percentage of High Potential Internal Hires. Simply examine the hires made within the time period, and take the percentage of the internal hires that were high-potentials. Use the formula below; multiply the figure by 100 to yield a percentage. This becomes your Percentage of High Potential Internal Hires. You will need the following data:
The number of High Potential Internal Hires.
The number of Total Internal Hires.
Metric Two: High Potential Mobility. Data needed for a corporate-wide statistic:
The total number of High Potentials.
The total number of High Potentials hired for an internal job.
Metric Three: High Potential Voluntary Turnover. Since you already have voluntary turnover data, assessing the percentage of voluntary terminations that were high-potentials is an important statistic, even though the high-potential has already left. From this, you can assess if there is a global problem in managing career paths on high-potentials. You may want to consider looking at the results of the exit interview to understand your high potential voluntary terminations more closely.
The following data is necessary to compute this measurement. Of course, you may want to cut these statistics by division, branch, and so on.
Total number of voluntary terminations.
Total number of high potential voluntary terminations.
Presentation. This type of analysis is best to calculate on an annual basis, and may not be important enough to include on an executive dashboard-type report. Initially, run this data for diagnostic purposes to see if there are red flags, then present them in working meetings on the topic. Table 10.2 provides an example of how to present this data. Please note that the commentary provided is an example; whether your numbers are cause for intervention depends on your management goals.
| High Potential Data | Statistic | Commentary |
|---|---|---|
| % High Potential Internal Hires | 6% | We are considering |
| High Potential Mobility | 2% | Our high potentials may not feel like there is mobility when looking at peers. |
| High Potential Voluntary Turnover | 26% | Turnover is too high for these employees. We are not hiring high-potentials fast enough to replace. |
| High Potentials Considered for Management | 30% | 70% of management jobs are either not-high potentials or externals—is this right for our organization? |
You may need to drill down into the data to learn more about high potential movement, including hiring manager patterns. Do high potentials tend to leave one manager? Do high potentials tend to move to a specific manager? Are they being promoted or moved laterally? How do their moves map to typical career paths for that job? Is there anything we can learn to adjust the career path?