High Potential or High Maintenance? Watch What They Do With Feedback

By Angela Lane and Sergey Gorbatov

We ran a poll on LinkedIn. The question was simple: what best separates high potential from high maintenance? Four reasonable options: performance under pressure, impact on the team, whether they grow others, and how they respond to feedback.

The respondents, many of them senior leaders in Talent and HR, were clear. Around 40% agreed that a critical difference between those with true high potential and those who are ultimately just high maintenance is how they respond to feedback.  

This didn’t surprise us. It shouldn’t surprise you either.

How a person responds to feedback is a key indicator when it comes to potential. Identifying “potential” is your insurance policy against an unknown future.  It flags the talent within the organization with the ability to learn when the environment changes. 

The ability to learn starts with an openness to know what you need to learn. As such, how someone approaches feedback may be the closest thing we have to a live test as to whether they have the potential to learn what’s needed, which is, after all, the only point of identifying “potential”. 

So watch what happens when you give a talented person feedback that is fair, specific, and intended to be developmental. You’ll learn a lot. From our experience, the high-maintenance ones tend to do one of two things.

The first group challenges the feedback. Not always rudely.  Usually very articulately. They have a reason why it a)  doesn’t apply, b) involves context you’ve missed, and/or c) is refuted by their own excellent counter-example. Their energy goes into defending their current version of themselves rather than seeing feedback as the information they need to build their next, better version. You leave the conversation having negotiated rather than developed.

The second group is harder to spot because, on the surface, they do everything right. They nod. They take notes. They thank you. They say all the things a coachable person says. But then nothing changes. The acceptance was performative, a way to end the conversation without any real commitment to act on it. Three months later, you are having the same conversation. Not because they are incapable of change (we leave that for another post), but because their ego sees no reason for it.

Both groups cost you. The first costs you in friction. After a while, honestly, you conclude you don’t need the grief. The second costs you in time. Which may be worse. The world is changing faster than we can develop talent. Time is the one thing we don’t have.

Whether you get pushback or performative acceptance, both responses come from individuals with real talent. That is exactly what makes this difficult to spot. You see the raw material: the smarts, the immediate performance, the gravitas.  And confuse this with “high potential”.

Potential is a promise, not a guarantee. It is the capacity to learn quickly and apply that learning to drive results in ambiguity, complexity, and uncertainty. The underlying assumption is learning agility. And learning agility rests on the shoulders of feedback.

Feedback. Acceptance. Adjustment. Reflection. Repeat.

Someone who won’t take feedback, who argues it away, or won’t act on it, has disabled the mechanism that allows potential to be realised.

In this case, the label, “high potential”, does more harm than good. It gives the organisation a false sense of security. You think you have insurance, but your policy has lapsed. You overstate the quality of your bench. And miss the signal that would tell you that you need “better” talent.

Accurately spotting potential is the work of the “Better” lever in our More. Better. Now. framework: realising the potential of the talent you already have. It starts with spotting learning agility early. Not experience. Not credentials. Not confidence. We can mistake all three for potential. Potential requires the willingness and ability to take feedback and act on it. It is the leading indicator.

So ask yourself questions like, “When I give this Talent feedback they don’t want to hear, what do they do?” Do they get curious or dismissive? Do they own their part, or focus on the part you missed? Do they come back with questions, or their defence? Do they want to understand the feedback, or just who it comes from?

Apply the lens, and your high-potential pool starts to sort itself. The genuine ones lean in. The high-maintenance ones reveal themselves, eventually, one unchanged quarter at a time.

This is not a call to write people off after a single bad reaction. We have a bad day. We get caught off guard. We get hurt.  And some feedback may genuinely be inaccurate. But, as we like to say, a pattern is a pattern. How someone responds to fair feedback over time is a strong signal as to whether their potential is real or whether you’re spending good money on a bad insurance policy.

Your investment in spotting and developing potential only has an ROI if the potential is ultimately realised. Realising potential requires learning. And often learning starts within seconds of being told the very thing you didn’t want to hear.

The opinions expressed here are those of the authors, and not the organisations with whom they are associated.