High potential employees: The fatal flaw

The quick and dirty on how your top five percent of employees somehow ends up including members of your bottom 10 percent.

High potential employees, or HiPos in some parlance, are what all organizations seem to seek. This is why we hire so much around competence, i.e. metrics like GPA or where you went to school. It's assumed that a competence-based model will get us "The A-Players" who will subsequently become high potential employees. There are about 131 flaws with this a…