TL;DR: Succession planning shouldn’t stop with the executive team. Any role that carries critical knowledge, relationships, or responsibilities can leave a significant gap when it becomes vacant. The first step is identifying those roles and understanding what makes someone successful in them.
When I bring up succession planning with clients, most of them assume I’m talking about the executive team. People like the CEO, the CFO, or the VP of Sales. But in my experience, that narrow focus is where a gap is created. Most organizations have no plan for the critical roles below the leadership level. So when someone important to daily operations unexpectedly leaves, there’s chaos.
Here’s what happens when a role opens with no plan in place and how to create one:
What It Costs When a Key Role Opens Without a Succession Plan
1) Chaos Erupts
Someone important gives notice, and suddenly everyone is reacting. A job description gets pulled from a folder (or written from scratch), a posting goes up, and hiring managers start squeezing interviews into already full calendars. Yet no one has taken time to define what the role requires to be successful. So the team defaults to what’s easiest to evaluate: resumes, experience, and how well a candidate presents in an interview.
Next thing you know, decisions are getting made under pressure. Hiring under pressure has a way of shifting the goal from finding the best match to simply filling a seat.
2) Vacancy Accrues Interest
While the search is happening, the work doesn’t stop. It gets redistributed across the people who are still there, and high performers start burning out. That’s the interest collecting on the vacancy. Projects stall, customers notice slower response times, and the longer the seat sits empty, the more that absence costs.
3) The Repeat-Fill Cycle Continues
When you don’t have a clear idea of what the role needs, it’s hard to know whether the person you hired is aligned with it. They may be qualified on paper and still struggle, because the role asks them to operate against how they’re naturally wired. When that hire doesn’t work out, you’re back the vacancy again. Each round compounds the total cost of the role.
How to Make a Succession Plan Before Anyone Leaves
The good news is that you can put a plan in place now.
Step 1: Understand the Role Requirements
Start with the job. What does 80% of the work week look like? Which talent traits would be most productive inside that 80%. For example, if you’re hiring someone to work in a call center, they’ll spend most of their day taking calls, listening, capturing information from the caller, and resolving problems. That calls for a particular set of talent traits. But if you’re hiring someone whose job involves very little interaction with people and requires long periods of independent work, the traits that support success may look very different.
Step 2: Look At The Work Environment
Will this person be working from home, in a cubicle, or in their own office? Are they on the road? Is there a lot of travel, and do they get to choose when they travel? All of these factors are part of the work environment, and each one will be more or less attractive to certain talent traits and work styles. A role that suits one person’s natural wiring perfectly can wear another person down, simply because of where and how the work gets done.
Step 3: Assess the Working Relationships Around the Role
This angle matters most when a position has a history of attrition. What kind of supervision is this person getting? What kind of training and opportunities? What’s their relationship with their manager like? Sometimes turnover comes down to difficult hours or pay that isn’t competitive. But sometimes there’s a blind spot in leadership, in how people are being managed, or in staffing. You may have a great manager whose plate is too full to support the people in that role.
Step 4: Look Inside Before You Need to Look Outside
Once you understand what a critical role really requires, look at the talent you already have. Is there someone in the organization whose natural talent traits align with this role? Someone who could grow into it? What experience, training, or exposure would they need to be ready?
Not every critical role needs a formally designated successor. But knowing where you already have potential talent gives you options before a vacancy becomes an emergency. And if there isn’t an internal successor, you still know that too. You can capture the institutional knowledge that would otherwise walk out the door, cross-train where it makes sense, and have a much clearer picture of what you’ll need when the time comes to hire. That’s succession planning before you need it.
You Don’t Have to Wait for a VP to Leave
Most companies only think about succession when a senior leader is on the way out, or when they’re worried one might be. But the same thinking that protects your executive team can protect every critical role in your organization too. Understanding the role, the environment, and the team around it works just as well for your office manager, your lead technician, as it does for your VP of Operations. Not every role needs a named successor. But every critical role should have a plan. Succession planning is about making sure the business keeps running when change happens, and giving the people you already have a path to grow into roles they’re naturally built for. The best time to build that plan is before you need it.
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