Identifying high potential through soft skills: what past performance does not tell you

Every organisation knows this scenario: the best salesperson is promoted to manager, and six months later the team is falling apart while the former top performer burns out in a role that does not fit them. The error does not come from the person, it comes from the method: performance in one role was used as proof of potential for another role. Yet these are two different things. How do you identify high potential without telling yourself stories?

Performance and potential: two distinct questions

Performance measures what a person accomplishes in their current role, with their current competencies, in their current context. Potential asks something else: the capacity to succeed in a future role, broader or different, whose requirements are not today's.

The slide from one to the other feels natural, and that is what makes it dangerous. An excellent individual contributor often excels thanks to competencies (technical expertise, fast execution, individual rigor) that are not the ones a management role will demand: growing others, arbitrating under uncertainty, carrying unpopular decisions. Promoting on past performance amounts to selecting on the wrong variables.

Why intuitive HiPo identification fails

Without a method, the identification of high potentials rests on managers' judgement. That judgement is exposed to well-documented biases, which we detail in our analysis of cognitive biases in hiring and which operate the same way in internal mobility:

• The halo effect: the high-performing employee is assumed to possess every other quality, including those their current role does not allow anyone to observe.
• Similarity bias: managers more readily recognise "potential" in those who resemble them, which reproduces dominant profiles and impoverishes the pipeline.
• Visibility mistaken for capability: the most exposed employees (presentations, visible projects) are over-identified, discreet contributors under-identified.

The classic result: homogeneous high-potential pools, built on social ease and visibility rather than on the capabilities actually required by future roles.

What soft skills change in the equation

The methodological reversal consists in starting from the future role rather than the current job: which behavioural competencies does the target role require, and where does the person stand on those precise competencies?

This reversal requires two tools. First, a framework: competencies that are defined, observable, measurable. The Rising Up framework describes 18 behavioural competencies organised into three families (Leadership & Collaboration, Innovation & Communication, Operational Efficiency), each with published definitions and observable behaviours. Second, a measure: the Soft Skills Scan assesses these competencies through contextualised professional scenarios, not through the manager's opinion or the employee's self-description.

The gap between the measured profile and the target role's requirements then becomes objective data: it does not say "this person is a high potential in the absolute", it says "on the competencies this role requires, here are the strengths and here are the gaps". That is actionable information, where the HiPo label is a global judgement.

Potential is developed, not decreed

One scientific point changes the whole logic of HiPo programmes: behavioural skills predict professional success, contribute to it causally, and can be developed (research by James Heckman, Nobel laureate in economics). Potential is therefore not a fixed attribute you detect once and for all; it is a set of capabilities that can be measured and worked on.

This perspective turns the high-potential programme into a development loop: measure competencies against the target role, build a pathway targeted at the gaps, measure again. The mapping of behavioural competencies gives HR leadership the overview: where the collective strengths are, where the real pipelines are, what gaps separate today's teams from tomorrow's roles.

It also surfaces the potentials intuition does not see: the discreet contributor whose measurement reveals capacities for reasoning under uncertainty and emotional regulation far beyond what their current role shows. These are often the very profiles organisations lose, for lack of having identified them.

From a label to a method

The market is moving in this direction: according to APEC, 41% of companies recruiting executives now formally assess soft skills, up 9 points in one year. What holds for entry into the organisation holds a fortiori for promotion decisions, which commit entire careers.

Recognised as Deeptech by the European Innovation Council (EIC) in 2023, Rising Up equips this approach end to end: a public framework, an in-situation measure, and pathways for developing behavioural competencies to turn identified gaps into real progress. High potential stops being a label handed out in committee; it becomes a measured, documented and developed trajectory.