In a dynamically changing workplace, are our existing processes designed to identify high potential employees still fit for purpose?

For many years, talent professionals in national government in New Zealand have faced the challenge of properly allocating limited professional development resources to the right colleagues for the right reasons.

Talent teams collaborated with departmental heads to identify “high-potential” employees and allocated most resources to these colleagues. The definition of “potential” has been a source of debate among P&C professionals – with the most common definition being “ability to lead more people in the future”. Models such as the 9-box grid operate on this basis, generating a “green pool” of high potential employees who are seen as having high performance and high potential. Typically the money is spent on leadership programs for “emerging leaders” or high potential leaders ready to make the next step up the promotion ladder.

MOST GOVERNMENT WORKFORCES ARE BECOMING MORE SPECIALISED

But the workplace is changing, particularly in government, and we are seeing far more subject matter experts (SMEs) making more significant contributions, whether to policy formulation or innovations in the systems and processes to deliver those policies.

These SMEs typically do not aspire to climb the people leadership ladder and probably are not perceived to have the obvious skills to be a great people leader. SMEs typically have concentrated on the acquisition of their technical skills and experiences. The consequence is that they miss out on professional development for “high potentials”.

But they do have high potential – not to “lead more people” but to “add extraordinary value” to the agencies they are working with.

Is it time for the definition of “high potential” to get a makeover?

DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION APPLIES TO “HIGH-POTENTIAL” AS WELL

Many leading government agencies in New Zealand, Australia and the UK think so.

In New Zealand, the Reserve Bank and Treasury have launched initiatives to identify high potential technical experts – whether in policy, finance, IT, risk, data, science, law and so on – and then provide SME-specific professional development for these newly identified high potential employees. With great results (see below).

In Australia, agencies such as the Australian Taxation Office, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), and the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) have launched similar initiatives and collaborate by bringing SMEs from each agency together in some of these professional development programs designed specifically for SMEs.

In the UK, agencies involved in helping British industry leverage space technology have invested heavily in building the capabilities of their many very technical experts.

RETURN ON INVESTMENT IS MULTI-FACETED AND ALMOST IMMEDIATE

Our extensive research, leveraging data from our SME-specific 360-degree assessment tool, suggests that most SMEs are technically brilliant but are severely under-developed when it comes to the acquisition and deployment of soft skills, what we call enterprise skills. By these we mean stakeholder engagement, collaboration, personal impact, advanced communication and influencing skills, change agility, and business acumen. Our research shows these deficits exist not because SMEs can’t master these skills, but simply because they haven’t devoted any time or energy to doing so.

The agencies mentioned above (and several more besides) have discovered that the benefits of building enterprise skill sets into your SME populations are significant. They include deploying:

• Enhanced consulting skills, SMEs successfully refine briefs and consequently spend far less time on re-work.

• Enhanced stakeholder engagement skills, SMEs turn transactional and stressful stakeholder relationships into highly collaborative win-win relationships.

• Significantly improved knowledge transfer skills, they put energy into building the capability of more junior colleagues, reducing the single point-of-failure risks that most technical departments experience.

• Elevated prioritisation skills, SMEs spend more time on strategic and high value interventions, rather than being forced to spend hours every day putting out fires.

• Advanced collaboration skills, SMEs contribute more effectively to whole of organisational transformation projects.

The SMEs thus invested in stay longer, do more fulfilling work, have greater impact and influence that is strategically aligned to the organisation’s goals, and help build the capability of those around them. The reduction in recruitment fees because of higher retention typically pays for the professional development many times over.

This professional development pay-off arrives almost immediately. One CTO told us that his expert emerged from the professional development “immediately changed” for the positive. A participant in the professional development commented that the program was the most useful program he had attended in 12 years of working for the public service in New Zealand.

UNLEASHING THE POTENTIAL OF YOUR DEPARTMENT’S SMEs

As the requirements in 2025 for government agencies are to do more with less, activating top technical talent who can innovate and deliver efficiencies makes sense. Giving these experts the tools to emerge from their technical bubbles and add double the value also makes sense.

Most agencies, when piloting this initiative, use technical training budgets owned by each technical department, since no money has yet been allocated to these types of programs. Central funding comes later. Heads of technical departments can usually quickly identify ideal participants and are usually willing to pay for the development – because these SMEs are mission critical to the work their departments undertake.

Agencies in New Zealand have an opportunity to test these initiatives by participating along with many other government agencies in the next roll out of the professional development program referenced in this article – the Mastering Expertship program. The program runs in November and nominations are due by mid-September. A short overview of the program is available here.

Our firm is available to brief P&C teams and the heads of technical departments they serve about the program, and how to identify the ideal initial candidates.

Contact us at info@expertunity.global to arrange your no-obligation briefings, or for more information.

Or download below a chapter from MASTER EXPERT to provide you with a sense of the material covered in this program. Stakeholder engagement is one of the highest rated parts of the program by past participants.