03 · Understand — Potential for What?
A better way to assess leadership for what comes next.
How to assess people relative to a mandate and a context — weighing evidence, inference and explicit uncertainty, so that assessment informs judgement rather than replacing it.
Potential for what? And under what conditions?
“High potential” is often used as if it were a property of a person. In practice, potential only has meaning relative to a specific contribution, in a specific context, under specific conditions.
No single construct equals potential, and no single tool should carry a consequential decision. Potential is read from a mosaic of evidence — person, context and time — and interpreted against the mandate.
This guide helps distinguish what you have evidence for, what you are inferring, and what remains genuinely uncertain — so that assessment informs the decision instead of replacing it.
Use this guide when
- you are comparing internal and external candidates
- a promising leader is being considered for a larger mandate
- assessment results feel precise but hard to connect to the decision
- a management team must be judged against a new value-creation agenda
Three perspectives from the guide
Assess against the mandate
Every observation should be read against what the role must make possible — not against an abstract ideal of leadership.
Separate evidence from inference
What has this person demonstrably done? What are we assuming they could do? Where is the gap, and how large is it?
Name the conditions
Which support, authority and team would make success more likely — and which conditions would make it improbable?
The assessor as translator
The quality of the assessment depends partly on the quality of the evidence — and equally on the quality of the interpretation.
No instrument carries the decision on its own. Its findings are evidence; their meaning depends on the mandate, the context and the moment — and on the judgement that connects them.
How Stefan approaches assessment →- Evidence
- What has been observed, demonstrated or reliably reported.
- Inference
- What we conclude from it — and why we believe that conclusion.
- Uncertainty
- What remains open, named rather than averaged away.
Whose question is this?
Potential means something different when it concerns a candidate, a team or yourself. Begin where the question actually sits.
A candidate or senior appointment
Begin with the mandate the person must meet, then weigh evidence against it rather than impression.
See where this leads →Or explore whether assessment would help →Go deeper
What makes one assessor better than another?
The instrument is evidence. The assessor is the translator — and translation is where most of the quality lies.
Why this next: the decision underneath the question. →Voice from practiceSenior HR Executive, Technology
“It helped us understand not simply who could do the job today, but who could create value in what the business was becoming.”
Why this next: what this looks like from the other side of the table. →Question · My own next chapterWhat would a serious assessment tell me that I do not already know?
Not who you are, but what you could carry next — and under which conditions.
Why this next: the decision underneath the question. →