High Potential Test: Profile the Six Traits Linked to Leadership Success

High potential and high performance are not the same thing

When organizations talk about high potential, they usually mean something narrower than being good at your job. Silzer and Church's review of talent-management practice found that most large employers run a formal process to identify people expected to grow into bigger or more complex roles, and that performance in the current role is a necessary but weak signal for that. Plenty of excellent individual contributors do not want, or would not thrive in, the roles their employer has in mind, and plenty of people with real leadership capacity are stuck in jobs that do not show it.

The same review found little agreement on what potential actually consists of. Common ingredients include cognitive ability, learning agility, motivation, and a cluster of personality traits, with different companies weighting them differently. The six-trait model this page draws on is one attempt to name the personality cluster, proposed by MacRae and Furnham and built into their High Potential Trait Indicator. It is a useful shortlist, not a settled science, and a profile on these six traits says nothing about ability, skill, or whether you want the roles in question.

That distinction matters for how you read your result. A profile that fits the model well does not mean you are destined for senior roles, and a profile that does not fit does not mean you lack potential. Many organizations now assess potential against a specific role or level rather than in the abstract, which is why the same person can be high potential for one path and not for another.

What the evidence says about these six traits, and where it runs out

The strongest evidence is for conscientiousness. Across decades of work-psychology research it is the personality trait most consistently linked to job performance, and in Teodorescu, Furnham and MacRae's study of the six-trait model it was the strongest correlate of both subjective and objective measures of work success. Adjustment, the emotional-stability trait, comes next, and is also the one most tied to how people cope under pressure. Curiosity, risk approach, ambiguity acceptance, and competitiveness have thinner and more mixed records, and most of the published work on them as a set comes from the model's own authors.

The second thing the evidence says is that more is not always better. Le and colleagues found curvilinear relationships between conscientiousness and emotional stability and job performance: performance rose with the trait up to a point and then flattened or fell, with the turning point lower for simple jobs than for complex ones. That is the research basis for the optimal ranges on this page. Extreme conscientiousness shows up as rigidity and over-control, extreme adjustment can look like not noticing stress signals, and extreme competitiveness is linked in the wider literature to poorer collaboration.

Where the evidence runs out is prediction for any one person. Trait measures explain a modest share of the variation in leadership outcomes, and this page is not a validated measure of the traits in the first place. It is an original educational profile with no norm group, no reliability data, and no evidence that its bars predict anything. Treat it as a structured way to think about yourself before a real assessment, not as that assessment.

How to use the profile for development

Start with the bars that sit outside the middle range, not with the leading trait. A very high bar on conscientiousness or competitiveness is a development question as much as a strength, and the interpretation for each trait suggests what to practice. A low bar on adjustment is the one most worth taking seriously, because stress tolerance affects everything else and is the trait people most often underestimate in themselves. A low bar on curiosity or ambiguity acceptance tends to matter more as roles get broader and less defined.

Then pick one trait and one behavior. Potential research rewards specific, repeated practice far more than general self-improvement: volunteering for one ambiguous project, holding one difficult conversation earlier than you would like, finishing one piece of work to the standard you set rather than the one you can get away with. Pair this profile with the Leadership Style Quiz to see how you lead, the Work Style Test to see how you prefer to work, the Grit Test for sustained effort toward long goals, and the Emotional Intelligence (EQ) Test for the interpersonal side that the six traits leave out.

If you are early in a career, the Career Aptitude Test can help you decide whether the roles implied by high potential are ones you want. If you are mid-career and the question behind this test is really whether to stay, the Should I Quit My Job? Quiz is a more direct place to put it.

How employers actually assess potential

Organizations that take potential seriously do not use a free quiz. They use normed instruments, meaning your scores are compared with a reference group of people in similar roles, alongside ability tests, structured interviews, performance history, and sometimes an assessment center with simulated tasks. The proprietary High Potential Trait Indicator is one such instrument; the Big Five, the Hogan inventories, and others are also common. The results are given back in a feedback session with a trained practitioner, who puts the numbers in context and agrees development actions with you.

That feedback session is the part a self-test cannot replace, and it is also where most of the value is. If you are offered a formal assessment, go in with this profile in mind and ask the practitioner where their instrument agrees or disagrees with your own read of yourself. If you are not, the same conversation can be had with a career coach or, where the question is really about stress, confidence, or recurring patterns at work, with a therapist who works with professionals. The Big Five Personality Test is the closest free cousin to the trait measures employers use.

If the role you are considering involves starting a business, Entrepreneur Test: Do You Have the Traits? offers a separate reflection on that context; neither profile predicts career success.

Methodology & sources

We wrote 36 original statements, six for each of the six traits in the MacRae and Furnham high-potential model: conscientiousness, adjustment, curiosity, risk approach, ambiguity acceptance, and competitiveness. Each statement describes one observable work behavior and is answered on a five-point agreement scale scored 0 to 4, so each trait sums to a score from 0 to 24, shown as a percentage. The six groupings are our own educational constructs informed by the published descriptions of the model, not the subscales of any validated instrument, and the statements are not drawn from the High Potential Trait Indicator or any other proprietary tool. The engine shows all six bars and names the highest as your leading trait; the interpretation for that trait also tells you how to read a very high or a low bar, because the model and the wider research describe an optimal range for several traits rather than a maximum. Ties are reported as ties.

The High Potential Trait Indicator is a proprietary assessment developed by Ian MacRae and Adrian Furnham and published by Thomas International; it is named here only to identify the model this page is informed by, and nothing on this page is affiliated with or endorsed by its publisher. The six-trait model has published evidence linking it to work success, strongest for conscientiousness and adjustment, and the curvilinear relationships behind the optimal-range wording come from Le and colleagues' research on personality and job performance. None of that evidence applies to our 36 statements, which have not been validated, normed, or tested for reliability. This profile is for adult self-reflection and development planning, not for selection, promotion, or any decision about another person, and it cannot predict your career outcomes.

The reading thresholds used in the interpretations, roughly under 40 percent for low, 40 to 70 percent for the middle range, and over 70 percent for high, are educational conventions chosen to match how the engine displays percentages. They are not empirically derived cutoffs and do not correspond to the norm-referenced bands of any commercial instrument. Where a trait's interpretation says that a middle range tends to work best, that reflects the published model and the curvilinear findings, not a measurement made by this page.

Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW
Reviewed the original six-trait items, the optimal-range wording for conscientiousness, competitiveness and risk approach, and the sections that keep the profile distinct from an employer's normed assessment. Last reviewed October 5, 2026.

References

1. MacRae, I., & Furnham, A. (2014). High Potential: How to Spot, Manage and Develop Talented People at Work. Bloomsbury Publishing.
2. Teodorescu, A., Furnham, A., & MacRae, I. (2017). Trait correlates of success at work. International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 25(1), 36-42. doi.org/10.1111/ijsa.12158
3. Le, H., Oh, I.-S., Robbins, S. B., Ilies, R., Holland, E., & Westrick, P. (2011). Too much of a good thing: Curvilinear relationships between personality traits and job performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96(1), 113-133. doi.org/10.1037/a0021016
4. Silzer, R., & Church, A. H. (2009). The pearls and perils of identifying potential. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 2(4), 377-412. doi.org/10.1111/j.1754-9434.2009.01163.x

High Potential Test: Traits Linked to Leadership Success FAQ