A CEOs guide to succession planning

Succession planning is something that all CEOs/Executives should be well-versed with. They’re a way to safeguard the future of your organisation but equally, are an effective methodology to ensure that you’re moving the individuals within your business forward. 

A business is nothing without its people - and keeping your finger on the pulse of how people can evolve and grow is as beneficial to them as it is to you. 

Succession planning can vary depending on the size of an organisation and may sit within Talent Acquisition or HR as a key responsibility. However, a lot of CEOs still want top-level oversight on succession planning for good reason - it’s their business!

Here’s our 5-step guide on how CEOs succession plan:

Identify a pool of current, prospective, and “in-training” leaders

Succession planning is mostly used at leadership level - identifying who is going to become a leader, who is showing key leadership traits, and also seeing how your leadership team is going to evolve over time. You can do this in three key ways: current, prospective, and “in-training” leaders.

Current

Who is currently in your leadership team, and how are they performing? What is their trajectory with the business over the next 6–18 months? Who are they currently working with, and how do they slot in (or even add to) your company culture? 

Prospective

These can be identified as ideal candidates who will be successors to those who are in current leadership positions. What is the likelihood that they will progress within the chosen timescales? Are they showing an interest in leadership? Do you have enough prospective internal candidates? 

In-training

These can be identified as junior candidates who wouldn’t move into a leadership role for potentially 2-3 years. It can be harder to forward plans for individuals who are still in the earliest stages of their careers - but it shouldn’t be discarded completely. 

Seeing the potential is equally important as creating a specific succession or progression plan for someone. Seeing who is in training and the traits that they possess can enable you to develop a long-term view/plan for the future of your business. 

Prioritise business-critical positions

Although in an ideal world, CEOs would love to succession plan for every single role within their business, it sometimes just isn’t possible. Instead, business-critical positions should be prioritised, with the rest being seen as “nice to haves”. 

What can be done internally, and what can be done externally? 

Succession planning isn’t all about the individuals within your business - you should also be looking at external resources such as hiring someone permanently into your business or even looking at contract or interim support. You should always look at external support as a backup if there isn’t a suitable candidate internally for a specific role. 

You can also use a combination of contract and permanent support to ensure transitioning into a role is easier. For example, hiring someone on a 12-month contract for maternity support to ensure that the employee leaving to have a baby can not just have a great handover process, but still feel supported post-partum. That in itself is a great example of quality succession planning!

Identify, mitigate, and forward-plan risk

A huge part of succession planning is mitigating risk - just because you’ve decided that you want to progress specific individuals into specific roles, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to happen. You can’t assume that someone is still going to stay with you even 6 months down the line, so forward planning risk and having a “Plan B” is crucial. 

This could be looking at your organisational structure internally and assessing who would be a good backup for a specific role, or it could be ensuring that you have strong talent partners (such as recruitment agencies or even your internal talent team) who will have talent pools of candidates available. Succession planning should simply be seen as forward-planning, rather than a set-in-stone solution that will always be followed through with. 

And finally, ensure that training and development are at the forefront of your succession planning efforts. You cannot expect individuals to progress into a role without the right professional support. Whether it’s sending people off-site onto leadership training or implementing a mentorship plan - you want to make your succession planning as (pardon the pun) successful as possible, and that can only be done with training and internal support.