Succession planning without the spreadsheets

If your succession plan lives in a colour-coded spreadsheet that gets updated annually by the HR team, it is almost certainly out of date, and it is almost certainly lying to you.

The spreadsheet version has three failure modes.

1. It is abstract. Names in boxes do not force the hard conversation about whether the named successor would actually succeed in the role.
2. It is static. Business conditions shift quarterly. Your plan shifts annually, if that.
3. It is private. Two or three people know what is in it. That is not succession. That is a secret.

Here is a lighter process that fixes all three. It takes an executive team half a day to run, two weeks of focused work to prepare, and produces a living artefact that actually changes decisions.

The four questions for every critical role

Succession planning is really just answering four questions, honestly, for every critical role.

1. If this person walked out today, what breaks?
2. Who is the internal candidate most likely to succeed in this role?
3. What does the gap look like, and can we close it in time?
4. What is our external option if we cannot?

That is the whole frame.

Notice what is not in the list. "Who is on the 9-box?" does not appear. "Who is ready now / ready in 1 to 2 years / ready in 3 to 5 years?" does not appear. Those are labels, not decisions.

Pre-work: the critical role list

Not every role needs a succession plan. You will drown if you try.

Define "critical role" as one where either:

• Unplanned departure creates material business risk in the next 12 months, or
• The role is a pipeline for another critical role (you cannot lose the bench)

For most organisations, the critical role list is 20 to 40 roles. Not 200.

Get this list agreed by the executive team before you start the detail. Otherwise every conversation becomes a debate about whether the role should be on the list.

The half-day session

Gather the executive team. Pre-circulate a one page per role brief. On the page:

• Role, incumbent, tenure
• Three bullets on the current-state risk
• Two or three internal candidates, with candid notes
• External benchmark if relevant

Then work through the roles live. For each role, the rule is:

The executive whose function owns the role leads the conversation. Everyone else pushes back.

You spend roughly 10 to 15 minutes per role. The session ends with three outputs per role:

1. Risk rating: green, amber, red (based on both exit probability and gap severity)
2. One move in the next 90 days: sometimes for the incumbent (retention), sometimes for the successor (development), sometimes for the business (redesign the role)
3. Named owner for the move

No spreadsheet. No 9-box. Just decisions with owners.

What to do about the "no obvious successor" problem

Roughly 30% of critical roles, in our experience, do not have an obvious internal successor. This is where honest succession planning separates itself from the decorative version.

You have three options. All three are legitimate. None of them is "hope."

Option A: Build the successor. Name the candidate who is closest and commit to a concrete 18 to 24 month development plan. Specific stretch, specific sponsor, specific measurable milestones. If you are not prepared to do the work, this is not a real option.

Option B: Hire ahead. Bring in a senior person now, into a role that is adjacent or sub-scale, so they are ready by the time you need them. This is expensive. It is also sometimes the right answer.

Option C: Redesign the role. Sometimes the role is structurally unfillable by your internal bench. Split it. Change the scope. Move pieces elsewhere. This requires executive courage but often produces the best outcome.

The wrong option is to write "no suitable successor" in the spreadsheet and move on. If the risk is real, the plan has to do something about it.

The living artefact

After the session, the plan is not a document on a SharePoint. It is a 90-day action list with owners.

Every 90 days, the executive team spends 30 minutes on one question: "What moved?" Not "what is the plan?", "what actually happened against the moves we committed to?"

At that rhythm:

• The plan stays honest, because forgetfulness compounds fast
• Bench depth actually improves, because accountability is live
• New risks get surfaced early, because the conversation is frequent enough

Four 30-minute check-ins a year plus one half-day refresh is less total time than most organisations spend producing a spreadsheet that nobody looks at.

Who should be in the room

A common mistake is running succession with just HR and the CEO. Two problems:

1. The functional leaders are the ones with the ground truth about who can actually do the job
2. They are also the ones who will have to execute the moves

Bring the executive team. All of them. Be willing for conversations to be uncomfortable.

The one exception: the incumbent in the role being discussed is not in the room. You need to be able to name real risk. You can share outcomes with incumbents separately where appropriate.

The retention overlay

Succession planning that ignores the retention question is a fantasy.

For every critical role and every named successor, ask: "What is the probability this person is here in 18 months?" And then: "What would move that probability up 10 points?"

Sometimes it is pay. More often it is:

• A specific next move they want and would believe in
• A sponsor relationship that has gone cold
• Visibility at the exec level on work they are proud of
• Honest feedback that they are being developed, not parked

Retention is a design choice, not an outcome.

A starting point

Welcome to better.