Succession Planning Is Broken: You're Confusing It With Replacement
You don’t have a succession plan
You have a spreadsheet.
Somewhere in your HR system, there’s a document that lists every senior role and the name of the person who would fill it if the current leader left. Maybe it has a second name. Maybe it has a “readiness” column — ready now, ready in one to two years, ready in three to five. Maybe it even has a development plan attached, though if you opened it right now, most of the actions would be incomplete or vague enough to mean nothing.
Most companies call this succession planning. It’s not. It’s replacement planning — a way to answer “who do we slot in when someone leaves?” instead of the question that actually matters: “are we building leaders this company will need in three years?”
That’s not a wording difference. It’s a structural one. And it’s why over three quarters of CHROs say they don’t trust their bench strength for critical roles, even in companies that claim to have succession plans.
What no succession plan actually looks like
I’ve walked into this firsthand. One of my roles existed because there was no clear successor when the previous leader left. This happens a lot in companies with heavy M&A activity. Operational teams like support are usually the last to get any attention after an acquisition. Leadership focus goes to product integration, revenue synergies, go-to-market. Support? It gets absorbed as a cost line. Nobody thinks about who’s leading it until the escalations pile up enough to force the conversation.
When I came in, the damage was baked in. Leadership was unclear. Most of the teams were still running on their own, leftovers from separate companies that had been acquired but never actually brought together. They rarely talked to leadership — not because they didn’t want to, but because nobody had built the connections to make that happen.
My first move was to sit down with the entire org. About two hundred and fifty one-on-ones in a single month. Not skip-levels or town halls. Real conversations where I asked people what was working, what wasn’t, and what they needed.
The patterns showed up fast. People felt isolated. People felt ignored. And one theme kept coming up that went deeper than morale: the people who held critical knowledge — the only person who knew a product, a process, a customer setup — told me they couldn’t take a day off. They couldn’t unplug on weekends. They couldn’t take a real vacation because there was nobody to cover them. Some had been living like that for years. They weren’t burned out in the obvious way. They were stuck, and they knew it.
That’s not a headcount problem. That’s what happens when succession planning fails all the way down to the individual level. When nobody is being developed, the company leans on people it can’t afford to lose — and those people pay for it with their time, their personal lives, and eventually their willingness to stay.
Why replacement planning feels like enough
Replacement planning sticks around because it lets the company feel prepared without actually having to do the work.
It’s a checkbox. The board asks if there’s a succession plan. The CHRO says yes. The CEO reviews it once a year in a talent review where names get shuffled around a nine-box grid with the confidence of someone rearranging furniture in a house they’ve never lived in.
The names on the list feel good. They’re usually the safe picks — solid performers one level down, loyal people, people who interview well internally. The problem is that doing well at your current level tells you almost nothing about whether someone can handle the next one. The skills that make a great director — getting things done, managing a team, knowing the product — aren’t the same skills that make a good VP. And what makes a good VP isn’t what makes an effective executive.
Walmart just went through its own CEO transition, with Doug McMillon handing over to John Furner after a twelve-year run. In his exit interview with HBR, McMillon was blunt about what made it work: Furner had been running Walmart U.S. — the biggest piece of the business — and had already proven he could operate at scale. That wasn’t an accident. It was years of putting him in roles where he’d get tested. Most companies don’t do that work. They assume leadership is a ladder — good on one rung, good on the next. I’ve watched enough transitions to know that’s wrong more often than it should be.
What real succession planning looks like
Real succession planning is a system for developing people, not a document you file away. It asks harder questions:
What kind of leaders will this company need in three to five years? Where are the gaps between who we have and what’s coming? What do our potential successors need to go through before they’re ready — and are we actually giving them those experiences?
This matters because the answer to “who steps in if the VP of Engineering leaves tomorrow?” is almost never the same as “who should be running engineering in three years?” One is about keeping things going. The other is about building capability. Most companies never get past the first one.
When I took on that post-M&A role, succession planning was the first real initiative after fixing the org structure. We started at the top — who steps into each director role? Then we pushed it deeper. Were the right people in place one level down? Some were ready. Some had the raw ability but weren’t there yet — not because they lacked talent, but because they’d never gotten the chance. Companies are bad at this. They tag someone as high-potential and then leave them in the same seat doing the same work, like sitting near leadership is the same as being ready for it.
For the people who had potential but gaps, we built specific plans. Not fuzzy goals in a performance review. Real actions: bigger scope, cross-team projects, decision-making they hadn’t been trusted with before. We ended up with succession plans from my role down to managers, plus key individual contributors where we were one-deep on critical knowledge — the same people who’d told me in those early conversations that they couldn’t take a day off.
The reaction caught me off guard. Leaders didn’t push back. They leaned in because it addressed a risk they could feel but hadn’t known how to fix. And the key people — the ones who’d been carrying too much for too long — were relieved. For the first time, someone was doing more than acknowledging the problem. They weren’t just getting a backup. They were getting permission to have a life outside work.
The experiences that build leaders
Leadership development isn’t training. It’s exposure.
The research is clear: leaders grow through hard experiences, not courses or competency models. The kinds of experiences that speed up readiness are well known. Most companies just don’t provide them.
Working outside their lane. Future leaders need to operate beyond their own function. A support leader who has never worked closely with product or engineering is going to struggle at the VP level, where the job is as much about influence across teams as it is about managing one. That means rotations, cross-functional projects, and assignments where they have to earn credibility in areas where they aren’t the expert.
Owning a number. Understanding how the business makes money — not in theory, but by being on the hook for revenue, cost, or margin — changes how a leader thinks. It moves the lens from “what does my team need?” to “what does the business need?” Most succession candidates don’t get this until they’re already in the big seat.
Making hard calls on people. Nothing substitutes for having to make a real decision about someone’s career. Restructuring a team, letting someone go, hiring when you’re not sure because the seat can’t stay empty. These calls build judgment that no training exercise can replicate. If your successor candidates haven’t done this with real stakes, they aren’t ready.
Getting it wrong and recovering. Leaders need to have been wrong about something that mattered and come back from it. Not a catastrophe — but a project that didn’t land, a strategy that missed, a call that turned out to be the wrong one. They had to own it, adjust, and rebuild trust. Companies that shield their best people from failure are shielding them from the one thing they need most.
Seeing how the next level works. Future leaders need to watch decisions get made above them. Not through summaries, but by being in the room. Sitting in on executive reviews, presenting to the board, joining strategic planning sessions — this takes the mystery out of the next level and builds the instincts that separate someone who’s ready from someone who’s guessing.
The proof is in the pipeline
Here’s something that gets missed in the succession planning conversation: a good succession plan doesn’t just protect the company when people leave. It produces leaders that the rest of the company wants.
Our support org runs at about three percent annual turnover — way below the norm for support teams. Some of that is people leaving the company, but a real chunk of it is promotions out of support into other parts of the business. We’ve become a talent pipeline. Product management, customer success, professional services — they pull from our teams because our people have been developed broadly, not just deep in one thing.
That’s not a retention problem. That’s the succession plan doing its job. When you develop people on purpose, you build leaders who outgrow what you can offer. The company benefits even when your team loses someone. And because the pipeline stays active and current, losing a strong leader doesn’t cause a scramble. The next person is ready — not because their name was on a spreadsheet, but because they’ve been doing the work.
This only holds if you keep at it. A succession plan you look at once a year is a document. One you maintain, test, and adjust all the time is a real capability. The gap between those two is the gap between feeling ready and being ready.
Why companies don’t do this
If the playbook is this straightforward, why don’t more companies run it? Because real succession planning asks leaders to do things that cost something right now.
You have to share your best people. If your strongest director is the one holding your function together, loaning them to a cross-functional project for six months feels like a loss. It is — for you, today. It’s an investment for the company over the next five years. But most leaders aren’t rewarded for making that trade.
You have to accept short-term dips. When you drop a high-potential into a stretch role, they won’t perform as well as the person before them — not right away. That’s the point. But companies wired for quarterly results don’t handle learning curves well. They pull people back to where they were comfortable, which is exactly where they’ll stay.
You have to be honest. Real succession planning means telling people the truth about where they stand, what they’re missing, and whether they’re really on the track they think they’re on. Most companies dodge this because it’s awkward. So people spend years thinking they’re being groomed for roles they’ll never get, and the company avoids the hard conversation.
You have to stay committed. Developing successors takes years of real attention. Regular conversations, smart assignment choices, coaching in the moment, and active sponsorship. Most senior leaders are too buried in day-to-day operations to keep this up. The plan becomes something they glance at in January and forget about until December.
The uncomfortable truth
Your succession plan is a risk register dressed up as a talent strategy. It tells you who you’d call if someone got hit by a bus. It doesn’t tell you whether that person could actually do the job, because you never did the work to get them ready.
Companies that get this right treat succession as a core part of how they operate, not something HR owns. They find future leaders early. They put them through experiences that stretch them, not just confirm what they already know. They accept the short-term hit of moving good performers out of roles where they’re crushing it and into roles where they’ll struggle and grow. They have direct conversations about readiness, even when it’s uncomfortable. And they think beyond leadership roles to the individual contributors whose knowledge makes them quietly irreplaceable — and quietly stuck.
Companies that don’t will keep updating their spreadsheets, feeling ready, and then panicking every time a leader walks out the door — hiring externally at a premium, losing years of institutional knowledge, and starting over on relationships that took forever to build.
You can fill a role in six weeks. You can’t build a leader in six weeks. That’s the math most succession plans ignore, and it always catches up.
— Bruno