Talent reviews are a sort of spin-off from Performance management. It gives you a further idea into the State of the org - from the perspective of people.
When we say Talent Reviews, most of us are thinking automatically about the 9Box grid exercise where you place people into specific boxes based on their latest performance score and an assessment of Potential in order to see who is suited for succession or succession development.
The 9-Box Talent Review, or 9-Box Grid, originated in the 1970s at General Electric (GE) as part of its performance management practices. The 9-Box Grid was initially created as a simple visual tool to help identify high-potential employees (often referred to as "high potentials" or "HiPos") and to map out where employees fell in terms of both their performance (measured on the vertical axis) and potential (measured on the horizontal axis).
Besides the fact that it is from the 70s, it has embedded in it the beliefs of the times, that potential can be assessed and that that assessment has a predictive value.
There is a huuuuuuge problem with assessing potential, well several huuuuuge problems:
- We don't know how to assess it - Evaluating potential often relies on subjective judgment, which can be influenced by personal biases. Managers might favor individuals who resemble their own style, background, or values, leading to a narrow view of who is considered to have "high potential." This can result in gender, racial, or cultural biases, limiting diversity within leadership pipelines.
- We don't know what that is - The concept of "potential" is often vaguely defined. While performance can be measured through tangible outcomes and metrics, potential is more abstract and can mean different things to different people. Without a clear, standardized definition, assessing potential becomes inconsistent.
- We don't know how Potential looks like - Many organizations equate potential with current high performance or with interests in particular areas in the detriment of others (eg. focus on strategy, able at upward or network leadership, etc.)
- Context-Dependence: Potential can be highly context-dependent. An individual might show high potential in one environment but struggle in another, current performance does not predict future performance in a different role.
- Risk of Creating Fixed Mindsets: Labeling employees as "high potential" or otherwise can create fixed mindsets, both for the individuals labeled and for those doing the labeling. This can result in "high potentials" feeling undue pressure or others feeling demotivated if they are not identified as having potential. Besides, People live up and live down to the expectations in the environment - not necessarily because of them, but because we treat them differently if we consider them high or low potential. (countless studies prove this)
- Overlooking Non-Traditional Talent: Traditional assessments of potential may overlook individuals who have unconventional career paths, introverted personalities, or other characteristics that do not align with typical HiPo profiles.
What to put in place? If you do Talent reviews for Succession Planning or for Promotion Planning - replace Potential with Readiness to operate at next level. Choose what are the experiences and expertise that are critical for succession readiness and where is the threshold.
If Succession bench strength is NOT important for you right now, you don't need to do Talent Reviews for Succession. You can do them for other purposes.
The effort invested to review talent can be used for so many more use cases. The fundamental idea is that this an exercise where you use data (subjective and objective) to view the state of your workforce (for the whole org or for slices of the org) so you can make predictions, generate hypotheses, identify patterns, make decisions, craft strategies, etc.
If you want to view the Talent, my first question would be WHY? WHAT FOR?
- To know what is the current situation with your org, to support decisions around workforce planning, strategic direction, org design, etc.
- To identify critical skills distribution
- To know what are the future risks around the workforce (attrition, disengagement, pressure on promotions, risk of underperformance, etc)
- To see patterns emerging within functions, across levels, after redesign, after shift in strategy, etc.
- To know what is the succession bench strength either for critical roles or critical levels or functions. This does not apply only for senior leadership, it could be also for specialised ICs, complicated pipeline ICs or first level leaders, M&Ms, anywhere where attrition poses a business continuity risk.
- To know what performance or development interventions make sense for the strategy you have in mind or for customised or prioritised development plans.
- To know if there are contextual factors that impact performance
- And any other inquiry you can think of ...
After you decide WHAT FOR you do the review, you can look and see what is the data that can best answer your need. You can visualise that data in a 9 box grid, but after the 70s we have excel, and we can do much better by moving from 2D to nD. :)
A few examples (you can add more, choose or remove some that best support why you are doing the reviews - WHAT DO YOU NEED TO VIEW)
- Employee name
- Employee level
- Team (eg. combine this with risk of underperformance and see what comes up)
- Org
- Date of hire (eg. combine this with performance score and see recruitment compromises)
- Time in role
- Date of last promo
- Date of last manager change
- Last performance score
- Trending performance (eg. combine this with last performance score and see what becomes apparent)
- Stability of performance
- Predicted performance score
- Risk of under/over performance
- Impact level (eg. combine this with trending performance)
- Risk of attrition (eg. combine this with critical skills)
- Engagement level (eg. combine this with date of last promo)
- Critical skills for 12 months roadmap
- Specialised skills
- Skill range
- Transferable skills
- Readiness for next level
- Readiness for cross-domain
There are two things to note:
- Do this for a reason, and design it so that it solves for that reason.
- Acknowledge that you need to mitigate bias in assessments. One manager's view is not the truth. Introduce group completion, calibration, validation after 12 months.
You can still use the 9Box grid, you can make it 12 box, 6 box, whatever serves your purpose. Just replace the axis with the combo of two dimensions that you want to use to make the decisions you need to make.
