How to Recognize Long-Term Potential in Employees

By Praveen Tipirneni, CEO of Morphic Therapeutic Inc. Originally published on Quora.

When you ask people about the attributes of high-potential employees, you’ll get a lot of different answers. Some say it’s an ability to work collaboratively. Others will tell you it’s about taking ownership of your work.

All of that may be true, but in my mind, one thing matters more.

The one trait that marks a high-potential employee is an ability to transform knowledge and build expertise.

High-potential employees (HiPOs) learn something new, and then do something with that knowledge — transforming it into a different form. For example, they might listen to a speaker give a lecture, but when they get back to the office, they type up a summary of the speaker’s points and send it to a few colleagues.

They’re very active and thoughtful in how they consume information and transform it.

Here’s what that process looks like:

It’s about turning information into something new.

The next time you go to a conference, look around at what people do while they listen to a speaker. Most of them will be taking notes or listening intently. That’s about what you’d expect at a professional event.

But high-potential employees take that one step further. They take what they learned at the conference and create something new. This could be taking their notes from the conference and building a presentation. It might be expanding on those notes and creating a notebook dedicated to the subject. They may even sketch something out by hand as a way of learning about a topic.

Or they might just talk to someone about what they learned.

All of those methods help HiPOs organize their thoughts, reflect on what they know, and gain greater insight. The project could be minor, or it could be massive, but it helps these employees understand the information in a deeper way.

The method doesn’t matter.

Not every high-potential employee will create a powerpoint after a conference.

The process is different for everyone. People generally find one or two methods that work well, and stick to them.

I know someone who synthesizes information verbally. He goes somewhere and learns about a subject. When he comes back, he picks a few people to talk to. He walks them through the whole thing, telling them about what he learned and what he got out of the experience.

He transforms his knowledge through conversation. He has to clearly explain what he discovered, answer questions about the experience, and incorporate his partner’s feedback. These conversations make room for deeper insights and connections that he couldn’t have come to on his own.

The point is that each person is different. You don’t pick out HiPOs just because they create spreadsheets or drawings. It’s much more loosely defined.

The goal of transforming knowledge is to impact learning.

Listening to a lecture or reading an article are both still useful ways to learn about something.

But when you take that knowledge and reshape it, you put your brain through a different learning process.

This process is a focusing tool. By forcing yourself to understand what you really think and summarize it in some form, you create new connections. You begin to see how this new knowledge relates to everything else. By actively manipulating your knowledge, you gain a greater understanding of the subject.

The high-potential employees who consistently transform their knowledge don’t do it for other people. Maybe they send their presentation to others, but they don’t do it specifically to share what they’ve experienced.

They do it to learn more about what they already know.

This process is a gateway to expertise.

Some people work for ten years and get ten years of experience.

Others get one year of experience ten times.

The people that get all ten years of experience are the ones that learn, consolidate knowledge, and build expertise from week-to-week, month-to-month, year-to-year. Over time, their proficiency accumulates and compounds.

They are able to look at research and pull out variables that matter. They manipulate the variables and try to make sense of what happens. They sensitize themselves to the nuances of the data and figure out how to relate it to other knowledge.

This creates a better mental representation of the subject in their mind. It adds a scaffolding to their memory that they can build off of as they continue to learn. They construct their expertise in a very intentional and accumulated way.

The good news is that this process is completely learnable. This isn’t an innate trait that people are born with. At some point, high-potential employees realize transforming information is the best way to gain expertise and mastery of a subject, so they get in the habit of doing it.

You can start developing this practice by finding a way to synthesize information that’s comfortable for you, and then work at it deliberately. I can promise you’ll notice the difference in the depth and quality of your understanding.

By Praveen Tipirneni, CEO of Morphic Therapeutic Inc. Originally published on Quora.

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