Assessment-Heavy, Experience-Light
The typical HiPo program looks like this: a battery of assessments, a 360-degree feedback report, a development plan, a mentor assignment, and a workshop series.
All of that measures potential. None of it tests potential. Your best people can tell the difference. That gap is why your HiPo pipeline leaks talent, and it costs you the people you were trying to keep.
There is a world of difference between a leader who scores well on a leadership potential assessment and a leader who makes good decisions when the plan falls apart, the team is anxious, and the data is incomplete.
The Assessment Trap
Assessments tell you what a leader thinks they would do. They tell you how others perceive them. They do not tell you how they actually perform when it matters.
A leader might score high on "adaptability" in a 360. Put them in a situation where their plan collapses and watch what happens. Some adapt. Some freeze. Some revert to command-and-control. The assessment cannot predict which response you will get. So the answer arrives on the job, with a real team and real money on it. That is the HiPo development mistake that drives talent away: you name someone high-potential, then hand them a workshop and hope.
At the Canadian Olympic Committee, the coaching team used a Learn2 experience to develop their coaches and support staff. The result was 14 gold medals at a single Olympics, a world record at the time. They did not achieve this by assessing coaching potential. They achieved it by putting coaches through an experience that revealed and developed their real leadership behavior.
What Pressure Reveals
In the Lead the Endurance simulation, high-potential leaders face the same types of pressure they will face in senior roles: incomplete information, time constraints, competing stakeholder demands, and the need to make decisions they cannot take back.
This reveals three things that assessments miss:
Decision-making under ambiguity. How does this leader act when there is no right answer? Do they gather more data until it is too late? Do they decide too fast? Do they involve the right people?
Influence without authority. In the simulation, nobody has positional power. Senior Advisors must persuade, collaborate, and negotiate. This is the exact skill senior leaders need most.
Recovery after failure. The simulation includes setbacks. How a leader responds to failure tells you more about their potential than any success story. This is exactly how to identify hidden leadership potential — the person who recovers well from a setback nobody saw coming is telling you something a resume never will.
Designing Better HiPo Programs
The best HiPo programs balance assessment with experience. Use assessments for awareness. Use simulation for development and observation.
The HiPo cohort program is designed for this purpose. It combines the immersive Shackleton experience with structured observation, peer feedback, and personal leadership commitments.
The data you collect from watching leaders in a simulation is qualitatively different from assessment data. It is behavioral, contextual, and immediate. And it gives you the succession planning data that assessments alone cannot provide. See the results page for measurable outcomes across industries. It's also usually the first honest signal of why your emerging leaders aren't ready for the next level — the gap the assessment never caught.
For more on why pressure reveals what assessments miss, read why leadership development needs pressure, not slides.