Key points
- Critical roles are defined by strategic impact and replacement difficulty, not by seniority, so some will sit below the executive team.
- A talent review is a decision meeting, and it only works when leaders bring evidence and leave with named development actions.
- Potential should be judged against specific future roles using multiple sources of evidence, not a single manager's rating.
- Most leadership readiness comes from carefully chosen experiences such as rotations and stretch roles, supported by coaching, not from classroom programmes alone.
Every succession effort eventually hits the same wall. The organisation has named successors, but when a senior role opens, nobody on the list is quite ready, and the job goes to an external hire. The problem is rarely the list itself. It is that the wrong roles were prioritised, the talent reviews produced ratings instead of decisions, and development was left to chance.
This article covers the engine room of succession: how to choose critical roles, how to run a talent review that leads to action, how to assess potential with reasonable confidence, and how to build readiness through experience. If you are designing the overall system first, start with how to build a succession planning strategy that lasts.
What makes a role critical
Critical roles are the ones where a vacancy, or a weak incumbent, would hurt the strategy most and where a replacement would be hardest to find. Seniority is part of the picture, but it is not the definition.
In practice, a critical role list for a large GCC organisation usually includes most of the executive team plus a handful of less obvious roles: a head of a regulated function, the person who manages the relationship with a key government stakeholder, a senior engineer who holds knowledge nobody else has, or the leader of a new business line the strategy depends on.
The common mistake is to go the other way, and declare every role at grade X and above critical. That produces a list of 150 roles that nobody can actively manage. I would rather see 20 roles managed properly than 150 managed on paper.
A simple scoring method for critical roles
Use two dimensions and score each candidate role from 1 (low) to 3 (high).
Strategic impact. How much does this role affect delivery of the strategy, revenue, service to citizens or customers, regulatory standing or major relationships?
Replacement difficulty. How scarce is the capability inside and outside the organisation, how long would an external search take, and how much institutional knowledge sits with the incumbent?
Then use the combination to decide what to do.
| Strategic impact | Replacement difficulty | Classification | What to do |
|---|---|---|---|
| High | High | Critical | Full one-page plan, named successors, active development, reviewed by the executive committee |
| High | Low or medium | Important, replaceable | Emergency interim named, rely on the talent pool and external market |
| Low or medium | High | Knowledge risk | Document knowledge, cross-train, consider redesigning the role to reduce dependency |
| Low | Low | Standard | Normal workforce planning, no individual succession plan |
The third row is often overlooked. A role with modest strategic impact but high replacement difficulty is usually a design problem, not a succession problem. The answer is to spread the knowledge, not to name a successor.
Worked example: say a utility has 40 roles that someone nominated as critical. After scoring, 18 land in the top row, 12 are important but replaceable, 6 are knowledge risks and 4 are standard. The executive team now has a list of 18 to manage actively, and a separate action list for the 6 knowledge risks. That is a manageable programme.
Running talent reviews that end in decisions
A talent review is a structured meeting where leaders discuss the people in a function or pool, agree an assessment of their performance and potential, and commit to actions. Too many of them are spent defending ratings and end with nothing more than an updated grid.
Here is the format I use.
- Pre-work. Each manager submits a short profile for their people: performance evidence from the last two cycles, assessment data, aspirations, mobility, and a proposed potential rating with reasons. HR checks that the evidence is there before the meeting.
- Context first. Open with a reminder of the critical roles in scope and what the strategy needs from them. Potential only makes sense against a destination.
- Calibration. Leaders discuss each person in turn. Peers challenge ratings that look inflated or unsupported. HR keeps the definitions consistent across functions.
- Slates and pools. For each critical role, confirm the successor slate and readiness levels. For wider pools, agree who is in and who is not.
- Actions. Every person discussed leaves with at least one agreed development action, an owner and a date. If there is no action, the discussion was not worth having.
- Follow-up. HR circulates the actions within a week and opens the next review by checking what was delivered.
If a talent review ends without named development actions, it was a rating exercise, not a talent review.
The 9-box grid, which plots performance against potential, is a reasonable visual aid for step 3. It works when potential has a clear definition and ratings are backed by evidence. It fails when it becomes a permanent label, or when "high potential" simply means "someone the boss likes".
Assessing potential and readiness with evidence
Potential is the hardest thing in the process to judge, and the easiest to get wrong. Current performance is necessary but not enough. Many excellent specialists do not want to lead, and some average performers in a poor-fit role would thrive at the next level.
I recommend judging potential against a defined leadership competency model for the target level, using at least three sources of evidence.
- Track record in varied situations. Has the person delivered in more than one context, such as a turnaround, a new build or a cross-functional project.
- Structured assessment. Assessment centres, business simulations and competency-based interviews show how someone handles situations they have not yet faced in their current job. They are expensive, so reserve them for successors to critical roles.
- Multi-rater feedback. A 360-degree review gives a view of leadership behaviours that the line manager alone cannot see.
- Psychometrics, used carefully. Personality and reasoning tools can add useful insight when interpreted by a qualified practitioner. They should inform a conversation, never decide an outcome on their own.
Readiness is a separate judgement from potential. I use three levels: ready now, ready in one to two years, ready in three or more years. The test for "ready now" is blunt: if the role opened tomorrow, would the executive committee appoint this person without an external search. If the honest answer is no, they are not ready now.
In the GCC, it is worth checking the assessment approach for bias. Tools and competency models built elsewhere can undervalue the relationship and stakeholder skills that matter a great deal here, or favour styles that are more common in some nationalities than others. Validate your model locally and look at who is being rated as high potential across nationality and gender.
Building readiness through experience
The widely quoted 70-20-10 guideline says most leadership learning comes from experience, a smaller share from relationships and the rest from formal training. Treat the ratio as a rule of thumb, not a law. The direction is right, and it tells you where to spend your effort.
Rotations and stretch assignments
A well-planned cross-functional rotation is the strongest development move available for future general managers. A finance leader who spends 18 months running an operational unit comes back with judgement that no programme can teach.
Rotations fail for predictable reasons: the sending manager blocks them, the receiving unit sees the person as a tourist, and nobody plans the return. Fix this by making rotations an executive committee decision for successors to critical roles, giving the person real accountability in the new role, and agreeing the next move before they start.
Where full rotations are not practical, use stretch assignments: leading a transformation project, setting up a new unit, or acting in a senior role during an extended absence.
Simulations and exposure
Business simulations are useful both to assess and to develop. A well-designed simulation lets a future leader make decisions on budget, people and stakeholders under time pressure and see the consequences, without the real-world cost of mistakes. Pair this with exposure to real executive decisions: attending executive committee meetings, presenting to the board, leading a negotiation.
Coaching and mentoring
Coaching and mentoring do different jobs. An external coach helps someone work on specific behaviours and blind spots. A senior internal mentor helps them understand how decisions really get made, and opens doors. Successors to critical roles usually benefit from both.
For mentoring to work, match people deliberately, agree what the relationship is for, and give mentors a light structure. A mentor who meets their mentee twice a year for coffee is not a development action.
Formal programmes
Leadership programmes still have a place. They build a shared language, create peer networks across the organisation and give people frameworks to reflect on their experience. They work best when participants apply what they learn on a real business project, and when the programme cohort is chosen through the talent review rather than by nomination alone.
Where to start
- Score your current list of "critical" roles on strategic impact and replacement difficulty, and cut it down to the roles that genuinely need active management.
- Write one-paragraph definitions of performance and potential that everyone in the next talent review will use.
- Redesign your talent review agenda so that every discussion ends with a named action, owner and date.
- Identify two or three rotation or stretch opportunities for successors to your top critical roles, and take the decision to the executive committee.
- Check who is rated high potential across nationality, gender and function, and ask whether the pattern reflects talent or bias.
At Humanyx we help organisations define critical roles, design talent review processes and build development plans that move successors from named to ready.