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From subjective to Strategic: CATIL for leadership performance and bonus allocation

Railways Inc.

Challenges

Railways Inc., an international leader in advanced technologies for railway safety, faced increasing difficulty ensuring consistency and fairness in how leadership performance was assessed and translated into reward decisions, as well as development priorities.

Their approach relied on internal evaluation surveys, filled only by managers and requiring manual consolidation. This led to subjective interpretations, inconsistencies in results, and a higher risk of calculation errors. As a result, performance evaluations were difficult to compare across teams, and bonus allocation decisions were not always perceived as fully transparent or grounded in reliable data.

Railways Inc. therefore sought a more rigorous and reliable approach to ensure consistency, support fair decisions, and gain deeper insight into leadership performance.

Solution

Railways Inc. partnered with AK+Partners to implement the CATIL® Talent Review, introducing a structured, evidence-based approach to leadership assessment for an initial population of 25 senior leaders.

CATIL® Talent Review replaced subjective, manager-only surveys with a standardized evaluation methodology, ensuring that every leader at a given level was assessed against the same criteria, by multiple independent assessors, and across all business units.

The solution also automated and systematized the performance rating process, eliminating manual consolidation, reducing calculation errors, and strengthening the reliability of the data.

Beyond improving accuracy, CATIL® Talent Review enabled Railways Inc. to map its leadership population more clearly, revealing strengths, capability gaps, and development priorities at both individual and organizational levels.

Results

The adoption of the CATIL® Talent Review delivered a step change in how Railways Inc. evaluates, differentiates, and develops its leadership population.

Performance assessments became significantly more consistent, structured, and comparable, enabling executives to make organization wide decisions with far greater confidence and objectivity.

Bonus allocation shifted from a fragmented process to a transparent, evidence driven system, strengthening trust among senior stakeholders and reducing the perception of bias. Leaders understood not only how ratings were determined, but why, a major cultural shift from the previous subjective approach.

At the same time, CATIL® Talent Review provided the organization with a granular, data-rich view of leadership capabilities, strengthening the alignment between performance, reward, succession planning, and organizational priorities. By creating a direct link between evaluation and action, the solution enabled leaders to be rewarded more fairly and transparently, development plans to be targeted more precisely, and succession decisions to be made with greater confidence.

Overall, Railways Inc. gained a more reliable, actionable, and strategic foundation for managing leadership performance transforming a previously inconsistent process into a robust, enterprise level capability.

Concluding Remark

Following the success of the initial project, CATIL® Talent Review continues to expand to assess both leaders and individual contributors internationally, across Railways Inc. and its subsidiaries. In the second year, the process was used to assess 40 leaders, and in the third year it was extended to more than 240 leaders and individual contributors across the group.

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211

Management-level employees assessed

98

Individual contributors assessed