Seeing Talent Below The Top Team

Talent visibility below the top team improves when an HR adviser runs one cross-unit forum. Each business unit brings a single page of critical roles and named people. The group tests the evidence behind each name, and the output is a list of moves with owners and dates.

Korn Ferry reported in May 2026 that 87 per cent of organisations have visibility into leadership potential and readiness at C-suite level.

Visibility into leadership potential falls to fewer than 3 in 10 organisations for mid-level and emerging leaders.

The page attributes both figures to the firm's Talent Suite research and gives no sample size, so they describe a pattern that each organisation should check against its own data.

CAHRS, the human resource studies centre at Cornell University, convened twelve companies in September 2024.

Their working group reported that visibility into talent across business units remains a challenge for many organisations.

A few of those companies have started with the HR partners from each unit coming together.

The partners share succession plans and discuss talent, and that is the starting point used below.

Why Visibility Drops

Three mechanisms recur when a business tries to see its talent across units.

• Ownership. The line manager holds the only record of what a person has done, in a conversation, an appraisal form or a personal spreadsheet

• The unit boundary. Nobody outside a unit has a reason to ask about its people, and the unit head may lose the best of them if the answer is shared

• Scales that differ. One unit calls a person strong for meeting targets, and another keeps the word for people ready for a larger job

Smith and Campbell describe a talent assessment grid as a way to provide a calibration of ratings across the enterprise to ensure consistency.

That calibration is impossible while each unit scores on its own definition, so the forum fixes the definitions before any name is heard.

Gotte and Wilde, drawing on their experience leading talent management practices at General Mills, name two traps behind overconfident talent decisions.

The first is no consensus on what the destination role requires, and the second is a single evaluation point on the person.

Both traps widen across units, because each unit supplies its own single evaluation point against its own picture of the role.

Setting Up One Forum

One forum is enough for a first cycle, and the attendance list decides whether it works.

• Chair. The HR adviser, who owns the agenda, the timekeeping and the record

• HR partners. One for each unit, able to speak to the page their unit brings

• Unit heads. The leaders who can release or receive people, and who own the evidence on the page

• Sponsor. One member of the leadership team, who receives every case the forum cannot settle

The group should be small enough that every unit's page receives the same discussion time.

Cadence varies among the CAHRS companies, with quarterly reviews more common where accountability is being built at higher levels and annual reviews sufficient in other contexts.

One company in a July 2026 CAHRS benchmark of three organisations holds monthly people forums where leaders identify rising talent.

A first cycle can be annual, provided the moves agreed in it are checked within a quarter.

The Single Page

Each unit brings one page in the same layout, so the group can read every unit in the time it would take to hear one.

1. Critical roles. The roles whose vacancy would stop work in the unit, with the holder and the date the holder could leave

2. Named people. For each role, up to three people, each with the destination role named and a readiness statement from the shared set

3. Evidence. For each person, two things done in the last eighteen months that bear on the destination role, and who saw them

4. Risk. What would make the person fail in the destination role, and the likelihood of leaving

5. Mobility. Whether the person would move to another unit, and what would have to be true

6. The unit's ask. One role the unit needs filled from outside it

One side of paper is the limit, which forces each unit to choose.

The CAHRS reports describe companies using a nine box grid, a four box grid or neither, and the page works with any of them.

The forum uses one readiness vocabulary for every unit, such as ready now, ready in one to two years and emerging.

Companies in the 2026 CAHRS benchmark define readiness by time, by the type of move or by development stage.

Any of the three works when all units use the same one.

The choice of roles follows the approach in choosing the population a talent review covers, which starts from roles and not from people.

The Evidence Standard

A name enters the output only when the group can examine the evidence behind it.

The standard is short enough to fit on the same page as the layout.

• Observed behaviour. Work the person did, with a date and the name of someone who saw it

• A second observer. At least one observer outside the person's reporting line

• Written criteria. The requirements of the destination role, agreed before the forum

• A failure statement. How the person could fail in the destination role, and what is known about it

Gotte and Wilde report that the seeds of derailment are often visible in earlier 360-degree surveys or appraisal comments, years before the derailment happens.

They add that such negatives are often known and tolerated because of towering strengths or overly protective sponsors.

Their remedy is an inventory of past leadership failures in the organisation, used as a framework for spotting the same seeds in current talent pools.

The chair can bring that inventory to the forum and read the failure statements against it.

The forum does not average ratings from different units, because the scales differ, and it discusses evidence instead.