Spotting tomorrow’s leaders today: Why assessing for potential matters
Written by Jane Arthur-McGuire from JAM People Consulting Limited
When it comes to building a resilient, future-ready organisation, experience alone is no longer enough.
To sustain growth, innovation, and competitive advantage, organisations need a clear view of potential, not just current performance.
Without it, succession plans become guesswork, development budgets risk being wasted, and critical roles may sit vacant just when they are needed most.
Assessing for potential ensures organisations can:
- Strengthen succession pipelines with ready-now and ready-future leaders
- Increase talent visibility across the business, surfacing hidden stars
- Invest development resources intelligently, targeting those with the greatest upside
- In short, assessing potential is not just a ‘nice-to-have’ — it’s a strategic imperative.
What is potential? A practical model
At JAM People Consulting, we find it helpful to define leadership potential through a simple but powerful model:
Potential = Ability + Aspiration + Agility
- Ability: The capacity to learn, master complexity, and solve problems at increasing scale and complexity.
- Aspiration: The drive and ambition to take on broader leadership responsibilities in the future.
- Agility: The adaptability to grow through change, feedback, and stretch experiences.
High-potential individuals typically demonstrate strength across all three areas.
They not only have the intellectual capacity and learning responsivenss, but also the personal drive and resilience to thrive in more complex, uncertain environments.
How to assess potential against this model
A robust potential assessment process blends multiple sources of evidence:
- Psychometric assessments: Tools that measure cognitive ability, critical reasoning, learning agility, and leadership styles.
- Structured behavioural interviews: Focused on uncovering patterns of aspiration, adaptability, resilience, and growth mindset.
- Past performance insights: Not just what an individual has achieved, but how they have responded to stretch, change, and challenge.
- Manager and stakeholder feedback: 180 or 360-degree perspectives on behaviours linked to future leadership capacity.
- Development readiness: Willingness and ability to step into unfamiliar, stretching assignments — a strong predictor of future success.
It’s about mapping where individuals are today, where they could grow, and what support they need to get there.
The benefits of assessing for potential
Organisations that assess and develop potential systematically benefit by:
- Creating credible, data-driven succession plans that Boards and executives can trust
- Maximising development ROI by investing in the right people at the right time
- Boosting retention of ambitious emerging leaders who see clear growth paths
- Building a diverse, future-ready leadership pipeline by surfacing talent that might otherwise be overlooked
- Driving organisational agility by having the right leaders ready to step up as needs evolve
In a world of constant change, potential, not just past performance, is the currency of future leadership success.
How JAM People Consulting can help
At JAM People Consulting, we help organisations identify and nurture leadership potential with evidence-based processes, tailored to your strategic context.
Led by chartered occupational psychologists, our potential assessments combine psychometric insight, structured interviews, and expert analysis to provide a clear, actionable view of your talent pipeline.
Whether you’re looking to future-proof succession plans, target development investment, or build a more agile leadership bench, we can help you move beyond assumptions and build real visibility of tomorrow’s leaders, today.