Broadcast your potential

While we're talking about specific words and phrases and verbiage, any other gems you'd like to share? Well, this one will be likely familiar to those, especially, in a management position or in an HR function, which is the nine-box matrix and its nine boxes. Along the bottom are the labels low performance, medium performance, high performance, and along the edge is low potential, medium potential, high potential. Now, folks are thinking, "Well, that's not an unspoken rule. That's a performance management framework." Mm-hmm. What I didn't appreciate until I started doing these interviews is that it's actually not common sense that doing your job is only part of your job. The rest is about showing that you can be trusted with more important responsibilities. So what does it mean to show high performance while you're reliable? You're doing what you say you will do. You are being responsive. You are showing detail orientation, all of these basics. But what people don't appreciate is that…