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Issue 43
How to Institutionalize Stagnation
Chris Hagood
June 26, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes
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Table of Contents
Opening Salvo
Not every top performer is a high-potential employee and not every high-potential is performing at their peak right now.
Organizations tend to conflate the two. The result? Promotions based on past output, not future capacity. Talent reviews that reward consistency over adaptability and development plans that reinforce what someone has done, not what they could do.
When you mistake performance for potential, you build a future leadership pipeline that mirrors today’s success stories, often at the expense of agility, innovation, and inclusion.
This is how we institutionalize stagnation.
Practical Personas (with a tinge of hyperbole)
The Star Performer Bias: They assume top results = top leadership material. But the skills that drive individual excellence often don’t scale across teams, functions, or complexity.
The “Quiet Potential” Overlook: They deliver steadily, think strategically, and outpace expectations when stretched. But because they’re not the loudest or most visible, they get left behind.
The Balanced Evaluator: They assess potential and performance separately, using calibrated tools and structured input to avoid halo effects and confirmation bias.
Ask Yourself:
Are we promoting people based on output, or capability?
Do our talent reviews allow for quiet high-potential talent to emerge or just the most familiar names?
Are we developing people for roles that exist today, or for what we’ll need in 18 months?
If potential doesn’t have its own signal, performance will keep drowning it out.
Did You See This?
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Faith-Based Policies Are Not a Shield for Bias
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Talent Management 101 (TM101)
Measuring Potential vs. Performance
The most common mistake in succession planning and talent development? Treating potential and performance as interchangeable.
Performance measures current results:
Meeting or exceeding KPIs
Delivering consistently
Being a go-to expert in a domain
Potential measures future readiness:
Capacity to lead broader, more complex initiatives
Learning agility and adaptability
Influence, strategic thinking, and resilience under pressure
What Managers, and yes, even HR Often Gets Wrong:
Conflation: Promoting strong individual contributors who lack interest or skills for leadership.
Visibility bias: Rewarding those who self-promote or work closely with senior leaders.
Lack of tools: Relying on subjective impressions instead of structured assessments.
How to Get It Right:
Define potential clearly: Use frameworks like learning agility, drive, and leadership behaviors, not personality alone.
Use multiple inputs: Include peer feedback, simulations, and development performance.
Normalize two-track growth: Don’t force high performers into roles they don’t want—reward technical excellence and leadership separately.
Identifying true potential isn’t about gut feel. It’s about building systems that can see beyond the present.
The Plug
This newsletter is brought to you by AstutEdge, a consultancy dedicated to developing and deploying a people-first talent management culture. We solve both obvious and hidden challenges by optimizing performance, engagement, and development across the entire HR, People, and Talent spectrum.
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