Leadership Longevity. From Assessing Talent To Understanding Trajectories
By Simonetta Cavasin and Laura Fabbro, October 2026.
People are working for longer, navigating more transitions and seeing their skills and roles evolve repeatedly. Yet many assessment systems still rely primarily on past performance, established categories and readiness for the next level. The challenge is not to refine the framework, but to change the object of observation: from a snapshot of an individual at a particular point in time to the trajectory they may be able to sustain, in relation to a role, a time horizon and a specific set of organisational conditions. Longer working lives thus bring the limitations of more static assessment systems into sharper focus and invite us to view talent review and succession planning as matters of governance too.