Succession planning check-in: Is your mid-year talent review actually working?

When your board asks who is ready to step in if your CFO left tomorrow, how confident is your answer?

85% of companies call succession planning a priority, but 61% admit they are not confident in their leadership pipeline, according to a 2023 McKinsey survey. Even more startling, only 20% of boards say they are confident in their leadership bench, according to DDI's 2025 Global Leadership Forecast.

Everyone agrees on the goal. Far fewer have built a process that actually gets them there. Mid-year talent reviews provide an ideal opportunity to check the health of your succession planning process.

Many organizations are currently facilitating mid-year talent reviews where senior leaders, HR business partners, and people managers look at the leadership bench as a whole. Who has real potential? Who is actually ready to move up, and when? Where the pipeline is deep enough to be resilient, and where it is dangerously thin?

But is that review producing value, or are you checking the box? The meeting happens on schedule. The same names circulate. Nobody leaves with a clearer picture of the bench than they had walking in. A good talent review looks different: names move between sessions, gaps get named out loud, and the room can point to evidence, not just impressions, for why someone is or is not ready.

Mid-year is a good moment to ask three honest questions about the process behind that meeting: is it producing value, are you having the right conversations, and are you actually moving the needle?

Question 1: Is it producing value? Your future-ready framework

Every talent review runs on some kind of framework, often a nine-box grid or a performance, potential, and readiness model. The tool itself is rarely the problem. What is worth questioning is whether the criteria behind it, the definition of "potential" and "ready" the room is actually calibrating against, still reflects where the business is headed.

A framework built on last year's strategy keeps producing motion without value, and the cost shows up downstream. 68% of CEOs report feeling unprepared for the role once they are in it, according to Egon Zehnder research. When the framework used to select and develop someone was never updated for where the business is actually going, that unpreparedness is not a surprise. It is the predictable result.

Ask this before your next session:

• Does the framework we are calibrating against reflect our 3- to 5-year strategy, or a version of the business that no longer exists?
• Have we clearly defined what "ready" and "high potential" mean in our specific culture, or is everyone in the room quietly using their own definition?

Question 2: Are you having the right conversations? Identification and assessment

This is where most talent reviews quietly lose their value, not because the meeting does not happen, but because of what fills the room once it does. When a talent review runs on manager instinct, recency bias, and whoever tells the most memorable story about a candidate, the room produces an opinion, not evidence, and that is a thin foundation for a decision your board may ask you to defend.

Validated data changes the conversation. Structured assessments, 360s, and business simulations that show how someone performs under real pressure surface things a manager's impression never will, and they give the room something more solid to calibrate against than a good feeling about one candidate.

Ask this before your next session:

• Are we calibrating against real assessment data, or against whoever advocated hardest for their candidate?
• Are we evaluating potential beyond current job performance, things like judgment, influence, and how someone handles ambiguity?

Question 3: Are you moving the needle? Candidate development

The real test of a talent review is not the meeting itself. It is whether anything is different by the next one. Too often, the same names get discussed twice a year with no visible movement between sessions.

Ask this before your next session:

• Can we point to specific movement since our last talent review, or are we discussing the same names in the same boxes?
• Are development actions tied to a named gap for each candidate, with someone accountable for checking in between sessions?

The mid-year test

Run your own talent review process through all three questions honestly, and you will likely find it is solid in one stage and quietly thin in the other two. That unevenness is normal. What is not normal is letting it sit there until your next scheduled review forces the question for you.

Here is what moving the needle actually looks like. If the framework is thin, do not wait for a formal refresh cycle. Update the criteria for the roles you already know are changing fastest. If the conversations are thin, bring one piece of real assessment data into the next candidate discussion instead of relying on memory and impression. If development has stalled, make the call today to the person whose plan has gone quiet.

None of that requires more budget or a new system. It requires acting on what your mid-year process check just told you, before the next review turns into another round of the same names in the same boxes.

Where is your process weakest right now: the framework, the conversations, or what happens after everyone leaves the room? That is where you start. Not next quarter. Now.

‍