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Succession planning is the process of identifying and preparing people to fill leadership and other business-critical roles when an employee leaves, changes role or is promoted. Its purpose is continuity. A business should be able to keep important work running after a predictable move or an unexpected departure, and the people who step in should have been prepared in advance rather than found in a rush.
The practice goes beyond naming a likely replacement. According to the CIPD, the UK-based professional body for HR and people development, the work typically includes practical experience tailored to the future role. Within a wider talent strategy, it connects future role needs to business direction, identifies capability gaps and builds a pool of people who can take on important work.
How the three parts fit together
Succession planning does three jobs at once, and a plan that does only one of them tends to be weak.
- Continuity: it prepares for foreseeable movement, such as retirements or planned promotions, and for unexpected departures in roles the organisation depends on.
- Development: it gives potential successors real work to prepare them, through assignments, coaching, mentoring, formal training, secondments, rotations and structured knowledge transfer.
- Workforce linkage: it reflects where the business is heading and connects those future needs to recruitment, learning, performance management, engagement and retention.
Who the plan should cover
Traditional succession programmes often concentrated on senior executives and mapped particular individuals into named posts. The CIPD describes a broader approach: identify business-critical roles at different levels and, where it is useful, create pools of people for groups of roles that require similar skills. Its guidance also notes that a critical expert may be a scientist or another individual contributor who does not want a management career, and that such a person still needs coverage.
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The scope decision should rest on the business’s dependence on a role, the consequences of a vacancy and the time it takes to build the required capability. Those criteria are applied in step 2 of the planning sequence below.
Named-post plans compared with talent pools
There are at least two real design options. The table compares them on the points the CIPD guidance raises.
| Feature | Named-post succession plan | Talent pool for a group of roles |
|---|---|---|
| Starting point | A specific position and the people identified as possible successors to it | A group of roles that draw on similar skills, regardless of title |
| Specificity | High: focuses on an identified vacancy or likely move | Lower: prepares people for a range of related roles |
| Flexibility | Limited: clarifies coverage for one post | Higher: supports several possible placements across functions and levels |
| Typical breadth | Often senior posts, though it can cover critical roles at any level | Designed for business-critical roles across levels and specialist functions |
| Development horizon | Can separate short-term emergency cover from longer-term successor preparation | Mainly longer-term development of a shared capability base |
| Transparency needs | Criteria and development opportunities must be explained to each named candidate | Criteria, pool membership and how placements are made must be explained to members |
Source for the comparison: CIPD guidance on succession planning. The cell descriptions are a reader-friendly reading of that guidance rather than a formal classification.
Deciding what counts as a critical role
A role can be critical because the business would struggle if it were vacant, because specialist knowledge is concentrated in one person, or because qualified cover is scarce or slow to develop. The question is not whether a job is senior. It is whether the work stops, slows or suffers if the post is empty for a period.
The planning sequence, step by step
The CIPD guidance supports a sequence that moves from business direction to review. Each step feeds the next, so the order matters.
- Read the business direction. Identify likely changes in strategy, structure, skills and operating context. Avoid building the plan only around current skill needs. For critical roles, the process should consider the capabilities the business will need later.
- Identify business-critical roles. For each candidate role, consider the impact of a vacancy, how concentrated the specialist knowledge is, how available qualified cover is, and how long it would take to build the capability. Coverage can include senior roles, middle managers and essential individual contributors.
- Choose the coverage model. Plan successors for individual posts where a specific vacancy is likely, or build talent pools where several roles draw on the same capabilities. Many businesses use both, applying named-post plans to a handful of top roles and pools elsewhere.
- Assess people against clear criteria. Use performance and evidence of role-relevant capability, but keep current performance separate from future readiness. Define potential in terms of organisational values and strategic goals, and use objective assessment and a review mechanism.
- Build individual development plans. Give potential successors relevant assignments and experience. The CIPD lists coaching, mentoring, training, secondments, networking and exposure to real business issues as the main approaches to talent development.
- Protect knowledge and continuity. Document essential responsibilities, workflows and key relationships, and use shadowing or transitional mentoring where it fits. SHRM’s 2025 article presents these as ways to transfer institutional knowledge when important people leave.
- Review and refresh. Revisit role coverage, readiness and development as business needs and employees’ career choices change. Check whether the plans are actually used and whether the talent process is supporting organisational goals.
Assessing potential without relying on visibility
Most of the difficulty in succession planning sits in step 4. Potential is easy to describe loosely, and loose descriptions favour the people managers already know well. The CIPD recommends making assessment criteria understandable and objective, being consistent about what “potential” means, and reviewing decisions.
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In practice, that means a fair process should:
- define the roles included and the capabilities each one needs;
- explain how people are assessed and how readiness is described;
- consider diverse routes into critical work, rather than relying only on visibility or informal sponsorship;
- review who is included and who is overlooked;
- distinguish a development opportunity from a guaranteed promotion; and
- allow employees to discuss their own interests and constraints.
This checklist is a practical synthesis of the CIPD’s advice on openness, objective assessment, diversity, employee agency and review. It is not a separately tested or standardised framework.
Who owns the process
The CIPD assigns responsibilities as follows:
- Line managers own succession planning for their teams.
- Senior leaders champion it and make it a business priority.
- People professionals facilitate assessment, prepare candidate information, advise on development and help maintain the information systems the process depends on.
- Succession committees can challenge decisions, which is part of what makes the process objective.
The CIPD also recommends being open about the methods used to assess potential and the jobs considered suitable for each person. Employees need to understand the process and have room to make their own career and family decisions.
Middle managers and the knowledge gap
SHRM’s 2025 article argues that middle managers and people leaders often hold practical knowledge about vendor relationships, systems, team dynamics and operational decisions. It recommends auditing where succession planning stops and identifying roles where knowledge or decisions are concentrated in very few people. Those are the posts where a departure causes the most disruption, even when they sit well below the executive team.
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SHRM CHRO Jim Link, SHRM-SCP, made the point in the same article, published June 5, 2025, under the title “Why Succession Planning Should Go Beyond the C-Suite.” He said: “Without strong middle managers, strategy gets lost in execution.” He also said: “Succession planning can’t stop at the top.” And he described the process as: “Succession should be a continuous, evolving process — not a one-time event.” These are SHRM’s published quotations attributed to Link.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Why succession planning belongs inside talent and workforce strategy
The CIPD defines talent management as the systematic attraction, identification, development, engagement, retention and deployment of people who are valuable because of their potential or their critical role. Succession planning is one element of that wider strategy, alongside recruitment, talent pools, lifelong learning, leadership development, performance management, engagement and retention.
OPM, the US federal human capital consultancy, describes workforce and succession planning as a systematic way to determine staffing needs, analyse the current workforce, address gaps in numbers and competencies, and build continuity and bench strength. That description is useful for seeing how a plan turns business needs into workforce action.
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In short, talent management is the broader strategy for getting and growing the right people, and succession planning is the part that protects continuity in critical roles.
What the survey figures show, and what they do not
SHRM’s 2024 report includes three figures that are often quoted. Each carries a qualification that matters.
- 64% of HR professionals said their organisation had a succession plan in place or planned to develop one, compared with 97% of business leaders (SHRM, 2024). The two groups answered differently, so this is not a single universal rate for all businesses.
- 98% of business leaders with a succession plan said their organisation often or always followed it, compared with 63% of HR professionals (SHRM, 2024). This records differing perceptions of follow-through, not an audited measure of how plans were executed.
- 31% of HR professionals whose organisation lacked a plan cited insufficient time and resources as a reason (SHRM, 2024). SHRM also reported 18% citing the organisation being too small and 15% citing family operation and ownership. These are reasons given within that respondent group, not a census of all businesses.
Signs the plan is not working
A succession plan is most often weak in ways that are visible if you look for them. Check for the following:
- Names without development. A successor is listed, but no assignments, coaching or training are recorded for that person.
- Knowledge still held by one person. Essential responsibilities and key relationships are undocumented, and no shadowing or transitional mentoring is scheduled.
- Criteria employees cannot describe. Staff do not understand how potential is judged or how they could demonstrate it.
- No review cycle. The plan has not been revisited since the business direction or the team changed.
- Diverging views on use. HR and business leaders disagree about whether the plan is actually followed. The SHRM 2024 figures above show exactly this gap in reported perceptions, so the disagreement itself is worth investigating.
When several of these appear together, the usual fix is not a new chart of names. It is to return to step 2, confirm which roles are genuinely critical, and rebuild development and knowledge transfer around them.
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The CIPD’s further reading list includes William J. Rothwell’s Effective Succession Planning: Ensuring Leadership Continuity and Building Talent from Within, 5th edition. Check the publisher’s current edition details before buying.
The sources reviewed for this article do not establish a universal, quantified business outcome, such as a productivity or retention gain, caused by succession planning. The SHRM figures above are the only dated numbers used, and they describe reported views of the respondent groups named. This article also does not establish that succession planning is legally required in any country or region, and it does not offer jurisdiction-specific employment law advice. If a plan affects promotion or selection decisions, check the applicable employment rules with a qualified adviser before changing the process.
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