Catch part 1 (A primer on unlocking greater talent reviews) and part 2 (How to use the 9-box for talent reviews) to unlock the most value from your talent reviews.
Why talent reviews?
If you’re a practitioner in the talent space, you know exactly how turbulent times have been recently. The post-covid era, initially characterized by the “great resignation”, quickly gave way to an era where the threat of a recession looms large, resulting in hiring freezes and massive reductions in force. As both employees and employers rethink their priorities, doing more with less is more pertinent now than ever.
Talent reviews provide a promising avenue to address these issues. How, you may ask? By adopting a forward-looking approach, talent reviews are the tool you need to future-proof your organization, helping you proactively plan successions for critical people and anticipate flight risks. In fact, the merits of talent reviews go beyond these – they also allow you to chart out individualized development plans to help place the right people in the right roles.
Informal talent reviews are still quite common throughout corporate and nonprofit organizations. Experts say that no matter what form they take, these informal reviews often share a common problem. Executives routinely overstate the performance of their own direct reports, while further down the ladder, managers will routinely confuse an employee’s performance with their potential… These types of reviews are overly complex, time-consuming, and cumbersome, so the wrong people attend and pay attention to the wrong things.”
- Carolyn Vavrek, a Korn Ferry senior client partner and leader of North American assessment and succession
However, not everyone is optimizing the use of talent reviews fully – some lack information, some have trouble translating the theory into practice, and some simply don’t know where to start. No need to fret, we have got you covered.
We already run performance reviews… do we really need talent reviews?
The short answer is yes, definitely.
Performance reviews and talent reviews might overlap in the data they work with, but they have very different objectives. While performance reviews measure past performance to make judgments on compensation and rewards, talent reviews identify capabilities across the organization and the capacity of the existing talent to meet business goals.
Performance reviews are retrospective in nature, looking back at past records of performance, whereas talent reviews look to the future to plan development paths based on different factors like skill sets and individual aspirations. Another key difference to note is that while the outcome of performance reviews is usually tied to rewards, recognition, and compensation; talent review outcomes include role changes (vertical and lateral), succession plans, and individual development plans.
Ideally, talent reviews should build on the outcomes of your performance review process in a way that complements the process rather than complicating it. The end goal of running both processes is to understand the capabilities the organization possesses today and what it needs to do to prepare its talent for the future.
Laying the groundwork for talent reviews
So, you get the basic idea, but how do you start?
As an HR practitioner, you should start by asking your objectives for running a talent review – What is your organization’s people strategy? Where and how does a talent review fit into this gamut? Why now? Who would be participating in the review? Would it be run org-wide or only on certain levels or teams?
Once you have answers to some of these questions, you can start gathering the data you want to consider as part of your talent review framework. Talent reviews usually evaluate the performance and potential of individuals – but how each organization defines potential can differ based on the needs of the business. The 9-box is a popular tool for the same, allowing you to see where the individual lies on a grid, plotting how well they are performing and how much potential they have to succeed in leadership roles in the organization.
A good place to start the search is the data you accumulate from performance reviews, but do ensure that this data is calibrated across the organization. Depending on what is relevant to your talent needs, you should look at other important sources of data as well. We have put together some of the most important talent review criteria across different companies to measure your team member’s performance and potential:
- Tangible instances of good performance
- Progress against documented goals
- Retention levers
- Individual aspirations
- Feedback received (across 1:1s, review cycles, etc.)
- Development plans and growth trajectory
- Information on the employee growth trajectory
Once you have identified objectives and collected the relevant data, it is time to get the major stakeholders on board. Focus on establishing a shared understanding among leaders in your organization, get buy-in, and define the agenda of the talent review meeting. All that’s left after this point is to conduct the talent review itself!
What are the steps of conducting a talent review?
Once you have established the objectives, criteria, and roadmap for your talent reviews, it is time to get into the actual steps of your talent review process. Keep in mind that each step needs to be conducted for each individual being evaluated.
You can find the detailed framework we recommend in our handbook for talent reviews, but we’ll present you with a short overview here:
- Assess performance in current role: At this stage, revisit the data from the previous performance review cycle to form an impression about the person’s goal achievement rates, wins, strengths, and development areas. Pay special attention to cases with the highest delta between ratings, e.g. if A was rated 5 in their mid-year review but 2 in their end-of-the-year review, prioritize discussing A's case before discussing B whose ratings have been consistent over the past few cycles.
- Determine future readiness: Take a look at the individual’s progress on their development plan, their future aspirations, and retention levers, and assess how much of a flight risk they might be. Identify any future roles they would be a good fit for.
- Determine talent review decision: Basis the data collected, figure out where to place the individual on the matrix of choice, and identify the next steps.
- Determine individual development plan: Depending on the results of the previous step, chart out individual developmental plans for each individual to help them optimize their progression.
What comes next?
So you followed all the steps, and actually pulled off your first talent review – yay! What now?
Inaction would be your greatest enemy. If, after unearthing all these insights, you don’t take any action, the entire effort might as well have been a waste.
The first step after populating individual development plans is to have managers socialize these results in 1:1 meetings. Without revealing explicit numbers, let each individual in on the final decision of the talent review and how that decision was arrived at. Your development plans should be individualized to the talent review decision – for example, top performers should be assigned stretch goals in line with their larger career goals. Low performers should be put on a PIP after sufficiently understanding the reasons for the low performance. Make sure that the individual has clarity on the next steps that follow after these conversations.
It is especially important to make sure that talent reviews don’t happen in silos and that managers follow up on the progress made against development plans consistently throughout the year. If needed, set up a regular cadence for these conversations. When these practices become regular enough, they help get you that much closer to maximizing the outcomes of your people strategy.
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You can check out the full episode on decoding talent reviews with Emmeline Kim, episode 1 of our podcast "How Do They Do It?" here.
