Tips to Upgrade Your Succession Plan

In 2024, U.S. companies experienced record-breaking executive transitions, with 2,221 CEOs leaving their roles—according to Harvard Business Review (HBR). Early trends from 2025 also suggest turnover in critical executive roles will continue to rise. This leadership exodus has the potential to leave organizations dangerously exposed and unprepared for the future.

HBR offered three steps to upgrade your succession process:

1. Scenario-driven succession

By considering the most likely strategic scenarios of where the company would place “big bets” in the next three to five years, it can evaluate which leader would most effectively succeed in each scenario, then make their selection based on their predicted direction. In this way, succession planning can answer the question, “Who should lead if we take this path?”

2. From calibration to preparation

For years, many companies have used talent reviews as the primary activity in succession planning. A set of leaders will discuss potential successors for a role, rate them against a nine-box model or something similar, and then call it done.

By more aggressively developing key leaders with an explicit succession lens, companies can take a big step in strengthening their leadership pipelines by first articulating the skills, knowledge, and relationships future company officers will need to drive growth.

3. Talent assemblers to leadership producers

In a truly succession-strong organization, leaders are held accountable for developing the next generation of leaders—beyond just their own teams. The most effective organizations ask leaders to take a broad organizational view, recruiting and growing people not only for their own business, but for the long-term leadership pipeline of the whole enterprise.

This also requires incentives and expectations to be aligned. Leaders who hoard talent shouldn’t be considered successful, even if their business unit does well on its own. To be a succession-oriented enterprise leader, one needs to adopt the mindset of an executive recruiter: always thinking about sourcing candidates for both present and future roles.

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