The benefits to your organization?

Succession planning is the process of identifying and preparing leaders for critical roles before those roles become vacant. Done well, it's an ongoing process that shapes hiring decisions, development investments, and promotion criteria across the leadership pipeline — not a list of names on a spreadsheet reviewed once a year and forgotten.

Most organizations struggle with succession planning, and the data backs that up: in PNL's research, nearly three-quarters of leaders gave their own organization's succession process a failing grade. A few patterns show up repeatedly, each with a different fix:

• Planning without follow-through. Organizations build detailed plans and talent grids, then don't invest in the development work needed to get people ready. The shift: move the effort from calibration to preparation — most organizations spend roughly 80% of their time on analysis and planning and only 20% on actually developing people. That ratio needs to flip.
• Politics over capability. Succession decisions often reflect who a senior leader wants to promote rather than objective data on readiness, including "talent hoarding," where leaders quietly protect their best people from being developed elsewhere. The shift: hold senior leaders accountable for building the pipeline, not just their own team's results.
• Too much scope, too little depth. Organizations try to build succession plans for too many roles at once, spreading attention so thin that no plan gets the depth it needs. The shift: narrow to a small number of critical roles, get those right, then expand.
• Outdated cadence and tools. Once-a-year reviews and static spreadsheets can't keep pace with how fast roles and strategy actually change. The shift: move from a static, replacement-focused list to a living process built around where the business is actually headed.

The organizations that get this right don't treat succession planning as a once-a-year event. They build it into how the business runs — reviewed quarterly, tied to real strategic shifts, with accountability for the development work in between. That shift, from exercise to ongoing practice, is what separates organizations whose successors are actually ready from those still discovering the gap when someone unexpectedly walks out the door.

For a deeper dive on this topic, check out our research: Why Succession Planning Fails and How to Fix It

Leadership development is about building capability across a population of leaders. Succession planning is about identifying and preparing specific individuals for specific roles. They are complementary but distinct. A strong succession planning process uses leadership development as one of its methods — putting high-potential leaders into development experiences that prepare them for the roles for which they’re being considered . But succession planning also includes the assessment work needed to evaluate readiness, the organization design thinking needed to define what the role demands, and the transition support needed when a succession decision is made.

Objective evaluation requires moving beyond performance ratings and manager impressions — both of which are heavily influenced by proximity bias and current-role fit rather than future-role readiness. Rigorous succession assessment includes structured behavioral interviewing, multi-source feedback from people who have worked with the candidate across different contexts, and role-specific assessment against the capabilities the target role actually demands.

We assist clients in developing an objective process for succession decisions: defining role expectations, conducting rigorous assessments of potential successors, recommending targeted development for key candidates, and providing an outside perspective on candidate selection that helps organizations avoid the common pattern of promoting the most familiar person rather than the most ready one.

Most organizations discover two things when they conduct a rigorous succession review for the first time: the pipeline is thinner than they thought, and it is less diverse than their stated commitments suggest. A succession review also typically reveals that the criteria being used to identify high-potential leaders are outdated and weighted toward the capabilities that mattered in a previous organizational context rather than the capabilities that will matter in the next one. Redefining what ‘ready for senior leadership’ means is often as valuable as the list of names the review produces.  Done well, a good succession review can give you an accurate “crystal ball” on how leaders would do in the role if they were in fact promoted or hired into the position.

Succession planning is one of the highest-leverage places an organization can act on its diversity commitments — and one of the places where those commitments most commonly fail. When succession criteria are implicitly built around the profile of the leaders who have historically held those roles, the pipeline tends to replicate that profile. Changing the pipeline requires explicitly examining and updating the criteria.

This means defining senior leadership capabilities in terms of what the role demands going forward — not who has held it in the past. It means broadening the candidate pool that gets assessed rather than relying on the nominations of current leaders whose networks may be homogeneous. And it means investing in development for high-potential leaders from underrepresented groups who may have the capability but not yet the visibility or sponsorship to be on the succession list.

Unplanned departures — a sudden resignation, a health crisis, a termination — are the test of whether a succession process actually works. Organizations that treat succession planning as a real-time, living process rather than an annual documentation exercise tend to navigate these situations significantly better. That means having a clear answer to 'who steps in tomorrow if this person is gone?' for every critical role, not just the CEO.

In many cases, effective organizations have an “emergency” succession plan for key roles that create stability while longer term decisions are made.  This is especially important at the CEO and executive team levels.  

Our succession diagnostic tool helps organizations assess how ready they actually are for both planned and unplanned transitions. It evaluates the depth and quality of the pipeline, the readiness of specific candidates, and the gaps that need to be addressed through development or hiring. The goal isn’t a perfect plan — it’s an organization that can move quickly and confidently when a transition happens, rather than scrambling.