Every organization wants to do more with less. Most treat it as a budgeting exercise. The smarter move is better developing the people you already have.
Winning organizations have figured out how to unlock capacity that already exists within their teams. That ability starts with two disciplines many companies still get wrong:
Who to identify as high potential
How to effectively support those people
Identification: You’re Missing Most of Your Talent
Ask most managers who their high potentials are and they’ll describe the same profile: outspoken, already high-performing, well-networked, easy to spot in a room. These are the usual suspects.
High-impact organizations define high potential far more broadly. They don’t leave identification to chance. They are proactive and work to surface talent early and at every level.
Broadening who is considered high potential means shifting development budgets, creating ways to recognize potential in action, and training managers to spot and flag promise beyond the favored few.
Two practical ways to start:
Train managers to spot coachable behaviors — curiosity, adaptability, influence without authority — and give them a clear path to refer those team members for support
Regularly gather input from peers and direct reports, not just supervisors, on who is high potential
Support: Identification Without Development Is Just a List
Broadening who’s identified as high potential is meaningless if nothing follows. This is where many organizations stall. The classic response is to build a formal development program — a curriculum, a cohort, a series of workshops. These work. But coaching is often the missing piece — the connective tissue — that makes development stick.
Coaching is the most effective support for high potentials at any level because it meets people where they are, addresses specific goals and challenges, and builds the self-awareness and skills formal training often misses.
When organizations talk about offering more support and revamping development programs, people may assume coaching alone isn’t enough or that it’s too expensive — or reserved for executives or people in crisis. In reality, a well-resourced, consistent coaching program — deployed across levels — is often far more cost-effective than traditional training, and far more likely to actually change behavior.
The key is treating coaching not as an add-on, but as the path between identification and performance.
A high potential who has been seen but not supported will plateau, disengage, or leave. Coaching closes that gap.
The Return
The case for this approach isn’t just philosophical. Broader identification grows the talent you’re actively developing. Coaching helps people grow faster and stay longer. And high potentials who become high performers lift everyone around them.
This is what doing more with less actually looks like — not squeezing harder, but developing smarter. Your next generation of high performers is almost certainly already in your organization. The question is whether you’ll see them, and whether you can coach them into becoming who they’re capable of being.
In our final post of this series, we’ll tackle the newest variable in this equation: AI coaching — where it fits, where it doesn’t, and why getting that balance right matters more than many organizations realize.