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Tag: TalentStrategy

  • Will Your Organization’s Talent Review Fail?

    Will Your Organization’s Talent Review Fail?

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    Christy Suerth, MS, SPHR, CPC, CHC

    And What High-Performance Organizations Do Differently for Talent Reviews

    After facilitating more than 100 talent reviews across industries, I have seen a pattern that leaders rarely recognize. Organizations meticulously maintain their physical assets, yet neglect their human assets.

    In manufacturing, machines are inspected daily for safety, calibration, and production output.

    In telecommunications, towers are checked constantly for compliance, signal quality, and operational integrity.

    But when it comes to talent, the only asset capable of creativity, judgment, and innovation, talent assessment becomes an after-thought.

    This oversight is not because leaders do not care. It is because most organizations have never built a disciplined, repeatable system for evaluating and developing their people. And the consequences are some of the costliest problems in business.

    Below are the issues I see most often in broken talent review processes, and they represent the highest financial and organizational impact.

    The Most Common and Most Costly Breakdowns in Talent Reviews

    1. The Wrong People Are Rated “Top Talent”

    High performers are often identified based on popularity, visibility, or personal affinity rather than measurable contributions or leadership behaviors. This leads to misallocated development dollars, stalled innovation, and top performers leaving because they feel unseen.

    Impact: Millions in hidden losses from disengagement, misaligned promotions, and failed succession bets.

    2. Leadership Potential Is Mislabeled

    Many organizations confuse high performance with leadership readiness. As a result, they accelerate people into roles they are not equipped to handle, while overlooking those who actually demonstrate strategic thinking, emotional intelligence, and team leadership capacity.

    Impact: Failed promotions, team instability, and burnout created by leaders who were never prepared to lead.

    3. Talent Data Is Anecdotal, Not Evidence-Based

    Without clear criteria and structured evaluation, talent reviews devolve into a series of stories, opinions, and selective memories. This results in inconsistent ratings, inequitable decisions, and a leadership bench that is built on bias rather than reality.

    Impact: Weak succession pipelines and increased legal and reputational risk.

    4. No Real Follow-Through After the Meeting

    Organizations spend hours debating talent but do not convert insights into action.

    No development plans. No accountability. No leadership conversations. No tracking.

    The result is a process that “feels good” but creates no measurable change.

    Impact: Zero ROI on talent investments and persistent leadership gaps.

    5. Burnout and Flight Risk Go Undetected

    Without structured diagnostics, leaders fail to see early warning signs of burnout, misalignment, and attrition risk.

    By the time someone quits, the organization is already facing productivity loss, replacement costs, and operational disruption.

    Impact: Costly turnover that could have been prevented months earlier with simple, systematic monitoring.

    The Resounding Truth: Human Assets Are Undermanaged

    Across every industry I have worked in, one truth stands out.

    Companies rigorously protect the assets that sit on their balance sheets but they do not rigorously protect the assets that create their future.

    Physical assets deteriorate without maintenance.

    Human assets deteriorate without development, clarity, and leadership.

    Organizations lose their best people not because talent reviews are missing. They lose them because talent reviews lack structure, discipline, and follow-through.

    What High-Performance Organizations Do Instead

    They treat talent as a core operating system:

    • Clear, evidence-based criteria
    • Calibrated evaluations
    • Strength-based talent placement
    • Succession pipelines that reflect reality
    • Leadership accountability for development
    • Annual and quarterly check-ins
    • Diagnostics that surface risk before it becomes crisis

    This is not “HR work.” This is business continuity work.

    The organizations that get this right outperform their peers in retention, innovation, engagement, and speed of execution.

    If you are concerned about leadership gaps, flight risk, or legal exposure tied to biased talent decisions, let’s talk. A brief call can show you exactly where your risk sits, and how to eliminate it.

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  • The Costly and Hidden Risk in Your Succession Plan

    The Costly and Hidden Risk in Your Succession Plan

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    Christy Suerth, MS, SPHR, CPC, CHC

    I worked with a mid-sized company preparing for its talent review and succession planning meetings. HRBPs struggled to pull accurate data and managers arrived unprepared. During the session, leaders essentially guessed who was “at risk” of leaving. They added a few names to a spreadsheet, tagged them based on gut feel, and listed vague follow-ups like “connect soon” or “keep an eye out.”

    Six months later, two top contributors (one in senior engineering and one in product strategy) resigned. Both had been labeled “low risk.” Neither had a retention plan. Their departures stalled projects, upset customers, and forced the company into costly external searches because successors weren’t ready. Morale dipped. Momentum slowed.

    That experience stayed with me. When risk and impact assessments remain soft, unstructured, and unmeasured, high performers slip through the cracks. The organization pays for it every time.

    Why Risk-of-Loss and Impact-of-Loss Assessments Fail

    • They rely on gut feel.
      Leaders default to impressions (“She seems happy.” “He’s performing well.”) instead of real indicators like time since last promotion, pay-range position, or mobility history.
    • Impact scoring is inconsistent or inflated.
      Without a shared method, “impact” becomes storytelling. Leaders either exaggerate (“If she leaves, everything collapses”) or minimize (“We can hire someone else”). In reality, neither is accurate.
    • Retention plans (when they exist) don’t get executed.
      Competing pressures and lack of accountability mean most plans fade into the background.
    • Replacing top talent is expensive, even conservatively.
      Replacing an employee typically costs 50 to 150 percent of their salary. (G&A Partners). Senior specialists and executives can reach 200 percent or more. (HR Morning). These figures don’t include losses in knowledge, customer trust, productivity, or team morale. Those impacts compound quietly and significantly.

    A Better Way: Data-Driven Risk, Structured Impact, and Real Execution

    Here is the blueprint I use. It replaces guesswork with clarity, structure, and follow-through.

    1. Build a Composite Risk-of-Loss Score

    • Integrate multiple signals, including:
      • HRIS data (tenure, time since promotion, compensation percentile, mobility history)
      • Burnout and work-environment diagnostics (Areas of Work Life Survey (AWS), Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), engagement surveys)
      • Event triggers (manager changes, promotion windows, declined stretch roles)
      • Qualitative sentiment (manager feedback, pulse-text themes, documented concerns)

    This creates a rolling probability of risk based on real indicators, not impressions.

    2. Implement a Standard Impact-of-Loss Model

    • Define consistent criteria for every role:
      • Recruiting and replacement cost
      • Vacancy days and ramp-up time
      • Strategic significance (clients, product continuity, institutional knowledge)
      • Ripple effects on teams, culture, and project flow

    A shared model eliminates emotional scoring and allows leaders to compare impact in a meaningful way.

    3. Turn Risk and Impact into Action

    • Prioritize talent using a simple risk-by-impact matrix
    • Build individualized retention plans with clear owners, actions, and deadlines
    • Track completion and follow-through, not just planning activity

    4. Pulse Early and Often

    • Burnout and disengagement usually build quietly. Quarterly pulses that incorporate AWS or MBI indicators surface issues long before resignation letters appear.

    5. Use Analytics and AI as Supporting Signals

    • Research shows that fine-tuned language models can outperform traditional attrition-prediction methods when analyzing engagement comments and written feedback (arXiv). Treat these insights as early-warning flags, then validate through conversations, stay interviews, and coaching.

    What This Means for Organizations for Succession Planning

    • Churn is costing you more than you think.
      Even a $120K high performer can cost $120K to $240K or more to replace, before counting lost momentum. (Read more here.)
    • Risk is often hiding in plain sight.
      High performers rarely raise their hands until they have one foot out the door.
    • Without structure, retention becomes reactive.
      Most organizations don’t take action until after a resignation. By then, it’s too late.

    If you want a retention strategy that truly protects your top talent, you need signal, structure, accountability, and execution discipline in your succession planning.

    I’ve created a Retention Diagnostic Checklist that your HRBP or leadership team can use immediately. It’s practical, comprehensive, and designed to reveal blind spots quickly. Contact me if you’d like a copy.