I know a guitarist of real ability. He plays with a kind of feel you either have or you don’t. In his working life he handles customer service calls for a mid-sized company. Competent. Reliable. Not exceptional.
That is what his file says. And for that role, in that organisation, it is accurate.
Last month I was in a room with a leadership team. They were deciding who to develop, who to invest in, who to move forward. Several people said carefully that not everyone can be a high potential. They were right.
But labels do not stay where you put them.
When the label leaves the file
The sociologist Erving Goffman spent years studying what happens when institutions attach labels to people. His book Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963) showed that the label does not sit quietly on a file. It changes how managers speak to the person. How colleagues read them. How opportunities get offered or quietly withheld. And eventually, this is the part that stayed with me, the person begins to see themselves through the label.
The institution does not intend this. It happens anyway.
I have watched it happen across organisations in different sectors. The person who was told, directly or indirectly, that they were solid but not exceptional. Who adjusted quietly. Who stopped putting their hand up. Who stopped offering the thing the organisation never thought to measure.
We do not see this as damage because nothing breaks visibly. The person still comes to work. Still does the job. The file still says competent and reliable.
But something real has been lost.
What the instrument cannot see
The economist Amartya Sen argued that what matters about a person is the full range of what they are genuinely able to do and be. Not what a particular system measures. Not what a particular role rewards. His capabilities approach, developed over decades, asks a different question of institutions. Not what did this person produce, but what were they able to become.
An organisation’s talent framework is a narrow instrument. It was built to identify specific capabilities for specific needs at a specific moment. It was never built to measure a whole person. The problem is not that it measures narrowly. The problem is when the narrow measurement gets handed back to the person as a complete verdict on who they are.
The guitarist is not unrealised potential. He is a complete person that this instrument cannot see.
Every person carries capabilities that are real, specific, and not visible in every role. The woman with a quality of attention I have rarely encountered, she was categorised as solid. She knew what her file said. She stopped offering the attention. Why would she? Nobody was counting it.
We lost twice. Once when we failed to see it. Again when she stopped showing it.
What to do with a limited instrument
Goffman tells us why the label damages. Sen tells us why the label is also simply wrong. It is not just that calling someone not high potential is harmful. It is that it is an inaccurate description of a complete human being, measured by an instrument that was never designed for that purpose.
The solution is not to stop making talent decisions. Organisations have to choose where to invest. The solution is honesty about what the instrument can and cannot do.
Separate the role from the person in the room. Say clearly, to each other and eventually to the person, that you are assessing fit for a particular path, not worth as a human being. Most talent reviews blur this completely and never correct it.
And when you sit with the person, say what the instrument cannot see as clearly as what it can. Not as consolation. As accuracy.
The guitarist is gifted. That is true whether or not his file says so. The organisation that cannot see it is not seeing clearly. And the organisation that hands him its limited view as his complete story is doing him a harm it may never know about.
He may not know either. That is the worst of it.
When the label leaves the file