What distinguishes the high potential, high-performing, promotable rock stars from everybody else?

One thing I discovered in my interviews with executives about this topic is that the rock stars actively seek to find out how the promotion and talent management processes work in their company. Specifically, they look to uncover how the company identifies who they want to invest in and who they feel has the potential to go to the next level. Then they reverse engineer their career development and perception management efforts accordingly. And those conversations begin to foster alignment and trust.

Consider the impact of that action. Now they're competing for the best development the company has to offer and future leadership roles with their colleagues who maybe don't know how the process works, who are quietly waiting to be recognized based on what they're doing intuitively, and whose actions may not be best aligned with what needs to be done for them to be perceived in the best...

Your executives are probably getting briefed on the measurable traits of high-performing leaders before they going into the talent meetings where they're choosing which individuals in which to invest their development dollars. This is where they discuss, calibrate and agree on the assessed performance and potential of key players in the business. Wouldn't it be interesting to understand their criteria and use it as a way to guide your own leadership development planning?

The premise is that building your development plan to focus on the leadership attributes that have been shown by research to predict who will perform well at higher levels is probably a good bet. It also makes sense to find out what your company uses as its specific criteria to assess talent to guide you as you prioritize your development activities.

Companies use different frameworks to organize their thinking around spotting high potential future leaders. A popular one is the Seven Signposts, by KornFerry, based...

Your executives are probably getting briefed on the measurable traits of high-performing leaders before they're going into talent meetings where they're choosing which individuals to invest their development dollars in.

Wouldn't it be interesting to have these as a way to guide your leadership development plan for yourself?

I'm going to walk you through them. I help women who want to build careers that they love by driving their own development to do that.

So the premise is building your own development plan and focusing on the leadership attributes that have been shown by research to predict high-performing leaders is probably a good way to go.

I have a development planning template that's focused on these, which you can get at fullpotentialrealized.com/leader

These are the Seven Signposts. KornFerry has a framework which is based on 30 years of research. And seven is a lot so I'm not going to say that all leadership teams use all of them, but...

I know you're all interested in the promotion process as I've heard from you. I want to walk you through it. I'm Christina DelliSanti-Miller of Full Potential Realized.com and I help women to build careers they love by driving their own development.

So let me tell you a little bit about my background. I worked for 20 years in corporate in Fortune 100 companies, responsible for Talent Management or Diversity & Inclusion or Leadership Development and Succession Planning.

I spent a lot of time with executives behind closed doors talking about their people challenges and helping them to build leadership teams that were high-performing and balanced. And sometimes we got to the balanced part, but sometimes we're “still working on that”…

 And so I was thinking about what we could we be doing - I mean I thought about this all the time - what could we be doing to support more women and people of color to push through to senior leadership levels.

 I...