I was speaking at an event last week about “Developing Talent” – and my slot was about “Making it real”. So in setting this up, I did some research about – “Why have senior people succeeded?” – there is no shortage of material on this subject as you can imagine………..Anyway, to save you a lot of reading, it turns out that 4 things have commonly happened to successful senior people:

1. Someone senior – at a pivotal point in their career – sponsored them and took a risk on them
2. They took on a stretching role outside their comfort zone, and were successful
3. They were at some point part of a high performing team (and now they won’t settle for anything less)
4. They have developed excellent networks and use them well

It’s an interesting exercise if you apply this to your own career and see what has been helpful – or even what would be helpful going forward.

We do think this makes a lot of sense and so validates our approach in designing and executing high potential programmes, and also delivering team programmes with our ‘High Performing Team’ model.

Finally, in discussion with the group, they certainly agreed with this but found that the lack of willingness to ‘take risks on people’ was probably the one most difficult to carry out. We even had a debate about ‘are women or men more or less inclined to take risks?’. So I’ll let you make up your own mind but I did come across this recent article @HarvardBiz ‘Do Women Take as Many Risks as Men?‘.

So enjoy helping people blossom and let us know your own views @tinder_box_ltd

by Jason Miller