Choosing the right people for coaching shapes everything that comes after. The mechanics of Mento are the same regardless of who you nominate, but the partners who run the most successful programs put real thought into who lands in their first cohort and why. This is a short field guide to how some of our most effective partners approach high potential (HiPo) identification, plus the questions worth asking before you finalize a list.
Coaching works best when the member is leaning in. That's true at any seniority level, but it compounds at the leadership tier. The single biggest predictor of program ROI isn't curriculum or coach quality (those are table stakes). It's whether your nominated members are people who actively want to grow.
HiPo identification is the upstream lever. If you select people who are eager, manager-supported, and ready, your program creates real momentum. If you select people who were assigned coaching as a development gap remediation, you'll spend the program convincing them to engage.
This isn't unique to Mento. It's the consistent pattern across every coaching engagement we run.
HiPo can mean different things at different companies. Within coaching, we've found four characteristics travel well:
Notably absent: tenure, level, or specific role. We've seen senior ICs, brand new managers, and seasoned VPs all thrive in coaching. What ties them together is the four characteristics above, not where they sit on the org chart.
Different shapes, all working.
Some of our partners (especially mid-market and enterprise) run a 9-Box review during their annual or biannual performance cycle. They identify the top right quadrant (high performance, high potential) and nominate from there. This works well when you already have a structured performance review process feeding clean data into a matrix.