“Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.” — Warren Buffett
Why Succession Planning Goes Wrong
Organizations don’t experience change–they exist within it–with a great example being leadership transitions. During these transitions, new leaders are expected to adapt quickly to continue performing highly despite their expanded responsibilities, while simultaneously setting direction, driving alignment, and building the capabilities of their new teams. These situations stress the importance of getting the right leader in the right role at the right time, which effective succession planning to build leader readiness can do, but is often not what happens.
Most organizations recognize the benefits of succession planning in creating stability, enabling growth, and protecting business momentum during leadership transitions. But in reality, succession planning is often a reactive, stop-and-start exercise that only happens when the situation demands it. This gap often happens for familiar reasons: leaders are consumed by short-term and pressing demands, HR is positioned as administrative, and traditional succession tools are built for rigid, linear processes that do not reflect the complexity of how organizations actually operate. As a result, organizations resort to emergency successors, rapid and underassessed external hires, and over-promotion of available (but not ready) talent. Each resolves an immediate need, but none build sustained leadership readiness and effectiveness.
The consequence is that succession planning is reduced to a “check-the-box” exercise (if done at all) rather than what it should be—an integrated and proactive business process to build leadership readiness and pipelines that ensure the right leaders are set up for the right roles at the right time.
How Effective Succession Planning Supports Business Needs
At ExecLead, we believe succession planning is not simply an HR activity–it is a proactive, deliberate, and enterprise-level investment by senior leadership to build leadership readiness and pipelines of the future. When done effectively, succession planning is anchored in strategy, supported by structure, and powered by talent.
1. Strategy: Aligning to Business Objectives
Succession planning should always start within the context of business strategy to successfully compete in the market. Key approaches include:
Strengthening HR’s partnership with business leaders to build understanding and enable cross-functional succession decisions
Establishing governance and accountability to clarify ownership, decision rights, and oversight
Embedding succession planning into ongoing business and HR routines to continuously align the pipeline with current and future business needs
2. Structure: Informing Organizational Design
Once aligned to strategy, succession planning should help evaluate and inform how the organization is structured to enable its right to win in the market. Key approaches include:
Planning around roles–not individuals–to align structure with strategic priorities and required capabilities
Leveraging organization charts to assess role oversight and responsibility with spans and layers
Identifying where structure supports or limits leader readiness, movement, or value creation
3. Talent: Strengthening the Leadership Bench
When structure is aligned to strategy, succession planning should evaluate talent to assess strengths, identify capability gaps, and advance readiness for leaders to take on more. Key approaches include:
Accelerating readiness by developing leaders through new experiences and stretch assignments as aligned with the 70-20-10 framework
Leveraging talent assessment and other data to better understand leaders’ strengths and potential to take on more
Maintaining an enterprise view of talent by assessing internal capabilities and evaluating external candidates when gaps exist
The ROI of Successful Succession Planning
Succession planning is most effective when it is treated as a continuous and prioritized investment in leadership capability, not a reaction to filling open roles or unexpected departures. When succession planning becomes part of how organizations operate, it shifts from a periodic exercise to a reliable mechanism for maintaining performance and growth.
Organizations that take succession planning seriously see meaningful returns on their investment. Strong succession planning processes create stability during transitions, improve the success rate of internal promotions and external hires, and strengthen leadership readiness by giving rising leaders the experiences they need to step in effectively. They also reduce reliance on last-minute hiring and improve retention of high-potential employees by making development pathways visible and credible.
More broadly, a transparent, development-focused approach signals disciplined talent stewardship. The process reinforces that leadership capability is not something the organization hopes will emerge–it intentionally builds, sustains, and ties the process directly to culture and performance. When succession is treated this way, leadership development and business outcomes become mutually reinforcing elements of a well-run enterprise.
References
Center for Creative Leadership (n.d.). Center for Creative Leadership Evidence-Based Succession Report. Center for Creative Leadership. Centerhttps://www.ccl.org/articles/research-reports/succession-planning-and-leadership/.
Cohen, M (2026). What HR leaders need to know about succession planning in 2026. Society for Human Resource Management. https://www.shrm.org/executive-network/insights/what-hr-leaders-need-to-know-about-succession-planning-2026
Collings, D. G., & Mellahi, K. (2009). Strategic talent management: A review and research agenda. Human Resource Management Review, 19(4), 304–313. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j. hrmr.2009.04.001
Dennison, K. (2024). The Importance Of Succession Planning, Now More Than Ever. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/ sites/karadennison/ 2024/06/25/theimportance-ofsuccession-planningnow-more-than-ever/
Popera, A. (2025). Why succession planning should go beyond the C-Suite. Society for Human Resource Management. https://www.shrm.org/enterprise-solutions/insights/why-succession-planning-should-go-beyond-c-suite
Rosenthal, J., & Rosen, M. (2025). Where traditional succession planning falls short. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2025/07/where-traditional-succession-planning-falls-short
Routch, K., Monahan, K., & Doherty, M. (2018). The holy grail of effective leadership succession planning. Deloitte Insights. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/leadership/effective-leadership-succession-planning.html