What Your HIPOs Actually Need From You Isn't a Program
One of the first things I do when an organization brings me in to design a HIPO program is ask to see everything around it. Not the program itself, the surrounding infrastructure. How are people selected? What does the performance conversation actually look like day to day? What's the succession picture? The answers to those questions tell me more about whether a program will land than anything in the curriculum.
What I've found is that the organizations who are ready to invest in a HIPO program have usually thought hard about the program design. The cohort structure, the topics, the facilitators. What gets less attention is whether the ecosystem those HIPOs are operating in is actually set up to support what the program is promising them. And that gap is where most HIPO investments quietly underdeliver.
HIPO development is a system. When it works well it's because every connected part of the talent ecosystem is doing its job. Selection feeds into development, development connects to succession, and the whole thing is grounded in a performance culture honest enough to give people real signal about where they stand. Pull any one of those pieces out and the program becomes an expensive island.
It starts with who you're putting on the list
Most HIPO selection processes are less rigorous than organizations believe them to be. In practice, managers nominate people they trust and people who are visible, and the list ends up reflecting existing relationships more than actual potential. Potential is not the same as current performance, and it's not the same as tenure or likeability. Before any program gets designed, there needs to be clarity on what you're actually selecting for and a process that applies those criteria consistently. Without that, you don't have a HIPO list. You have a favourites list, and the program's credibility suffers for it.
Your performance management process has to be real
A HIPO program running inside a weak performance management culture is operating in a vacuum. If feedback in your organization is vague or inflated or saved for annual reviews, your high-potential employees are navigating their development without any real signal about where they stand or what's actually getting in their way. High-potential people want honest, specific feedback. They can handle it, and most of them are hungry for it. The program can't compensate for a culture that doesn't give it to them.
They need stretch, not just content
The most powerful development for high-potential talent doesn't happen in a workshop. It happens in stretch assignments, in cross-functional exposure, in being brought into decisions and conversations they wouldn't normally be part of. Learning that happens in a room tends to stay in that room. If your program runs for six or eight months and your HIPOs are doing essentially the same job they were doing at the start, you've educated them. You haven't developed them, and there's a real difference between those two things.
Succession planning and HIPO development have to talk to each other
If your HIPO program isn't explicitly connected to your succession planning, you're building capability with no clear destination, and your best people will notice. HIPOs are paying close attention to signals about their trajectory. You don't need to promise anyone a specific role, but you do need to be able to have an honest conversation about what they're being developed toward and what needs to be true for them to get there. If succession planning lives in an HR spreadsheet that never surfaces in the development conversation, that's a gap worth closing.
The fine line between growing people and overpromising
This is the part most organizations don't talk about enough. Sometimes you identify someone as high potential, invest genuinely in their development, and then the role isn't there. The org doesn't scale the way you planned, the timing doesn't line up, or the seat they were growing toward is already occupied. When that happens a lot of organizations go quiet, because they don't know what to say. That silence tends to do more damage than the situation itself. People can handle an honest conversation about timing and organizational reality. What they struggle to recover from is the slow realization that the implicit promise was never real. If you're not prepared to have that conversation when things don't unfold as expected, it's worth asking whether you're ready to make the investment at all.
What happens after graduation
Most HIPO programs have a defined end point. The cohort wraps up, there's some kind of recognition, and everyone goes back to their roles. And then in a lot of organizations, not much changes. The question worth sitting with is what the organization actually does differently with someone who has completed the program. Are they on a formal succession slate? Do they have a sponsor at the senior leadership level? Are they being considered for opportunities they weren't visible for before? If the answer to most of those is no, the program has functioned as a retention tactic with an expiry date more than a genuine investment in talent.
Build the HIPO program. But build the system first.
👉 Designing a HIPO program is the fun part. If you want help thinking through the whole system, book an intro call to start the conversation.