Selecting high potential individuals and the moral quandry N. 1

Through out your career as an engineering manager you’ll be faced with the challenge of supporting individuals with different development potential. With finite time this will force a difficult question: where to focus your efforts?. Like most difficult questions, this one has a moral quality to it.

A potentially naive answer is to put an equal amount of time into developing each person: it feels like the fair thing to do. It can also feel like a neat shortcut - the onus is on your report to capitalize on that support.

A second, very popular but still naive answer, is to dedicate a disproportionate amount of your time on those who are already showing some signs of success. The reasoning goes like this: you’ll help accelarate their growth, and the outcomes of this growth have a higher likely impact than that of equally distributing your time accross your people.

This feels a little more uncomfortable: some people get more of your time or energy - and it can feel like these people actually need less of it. That is the moral quandry: when or why should a report get more or less of your time? Especially difficult in the context of work where your obligations are to your reports and through them to your team and finally company.

As you have less time, often because your management burden increases, this question becomes more pressing. In practice though, the time constraint is just an amplifier of the original question - it’s important to think purposefully about how you apportion time and support independent of constraints.

A fair while ago I found myself discussing why I was spending such a significant amount of time on someone who had not met expectations in their last performance review. My manager’s question was: will the impact of this time be greater than if you were spending it elsewhere or with someone else?

I thought using the lense of impact here was a little fuzzy - like looking through a thick piece of stained glass. When managing people, impact is the result of developed potential over time. The question still helped me frame the trade-off: did I think the investment made sense relative to alternatives.

To answer it I use two principles: Potential and Efficacy

Potential

I think of Potential as the product of two terms, appetite and apptitude, most often heavily weighted toward appetite rather than aptitude.

  • Appetite, in this context, is a person’s willingness to embark in change and growth, rather than their ability to do so. I think this is likely the most important quality to guague, and pratically impossible to measure by directly asking questions about it. Very few people will say, “no, I don’t want to grow” - at the most tactical level, because they understand that in the game they find themselves in - progression, this answer is a show stopper.

  • Apptitude is about the underlying foundation that enables growth: a mix of skills and confidence.

Efficacy

Supporting a report is a two way relationship, it depends on you at least as much as it does on your report. In this context, efficacy is your ability to produce the growth and change you intended. In most cases this will vary across your reports.

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So, how then do I think about prioritising support time?

Absent of a specific organisational initiative (more on this later), I think of support time as a uniform distribution that changes shape over time, but is roughly elastic: snapping back to uniform and then changing shape again as needs arise.

That is, I start out with a uniform allocation of time, and then depending on the team I’m supporting, reshape based on Potential and Efficacy.

This doesn’t suitably answer the moral quandry though does it? Only partially, in that time is allocated where it is most effective and wanted. And I suppose that is the key, change is already a challenge, but without actually wanting it, it’s impossible. This is the most important question: does the person in front of me really want it? You get answers through hard discussions and through posing a ladder of increasignly challenging opportunities. A person that really wants it (provided you help in developing grit), will step through that ladder of challenges, painful as that may be.

My answer to myself and thus my manager: I think this person really really wants to succeed and I can help them and the fact they want it as much as they do makes me believe there is outsized impac to be had over time.

Other important considerations when you are thinking about this:

  • When a report wants less of your support, and that is the right choice

  • When a report has need of support, but doesn’t really want it and thus does not engage

  • When the time constraints are so significant only a fraction of your people can get support

  • When there are specific organisational initiatives