In the Hot Seat: Richard Hodge on High-Potential Leadership

"We were seeing (companies) wanting to innovate, seeing them not having the bench strength they wanted, seeing too high of a failure rate," Hodge says. "There's quite a bit of recent research popping out that's talking about the problem, not necessarily the practices of what you can do to make an impact or how might we innovate going forward ... quite a bit of information out around what's not working."

Here's an excerpt from the podcast about Truth #3, in which they found that HIPO programs are most effective when they are designed to drive behaviors that lead to improved and measurable business performance and impact. 

"With the new tools of various kinds of new digital technologies that are available to the learning community today, it gives them a handle on data analytics and information that they've never had before. So being able to connect these key goals, key objectives, job level performance, bench strength, readiness, etc., across all their fronts, being able to gather this data, actually enables them to create connections to real work and measure the impact on it from their investments.

"This is a whole new world that's opening up for talent leaders, and it's going to give them a seat at the table, but they have to pay attention, it has to get connected, and they have to keep score. That was another important thing we found, some really interesting areas that people are beginning to track that they never did before and what that enables them to do in both learning design as well as measurement of business impact."