The Secrets To Better Succession Planning
Succession planning is more than just a buzzword: it’s a strategic process that ensures organizations have the right people in place to take on critical roles, both now and in the future.
Roles evolve, people move on … and the nature of work itself is changing faster than ever (by 2030, 70% of the skills used in most jobs will change, according to LinkedIn). Meanwhile, 37% of CHROs say their organizations aren’t planning effectively for future workforce needs, and 35% feel too focused on short-term growth to prepare for long-term talent demands (Korn Ferry).
Without knowing who’s ready to step up – and how to prepare them – businesses risk losing critical knowledge, stalling operations, and falling behind in an increasingly competitive environment.
What Is Succession Planning?
Succession planning is a proactive approach to identifying and developing employees to fill key positions within an organization. It ensures business continuity by preparing future leaders in advance – not scrambling when someone resigns.
This process involves:
- Identifying critical roles and tasks
- Assessing and understanding the capabilities in your workforce
- Forecasting future talent needs
- Developing talent pipelines
It’s about ensuring there’s no single point of failure if a key person leaves, and maintaining continuity of knowledge and operations.
Why Is Succession Planning Important?
Risk Of Key Role Vacuums
SHRM reports 7 in 10 employers are struggling to fill full-time positions. At the same time, the latest Workday Global Workforce report found 75% of industries are experiencing an increasing volume of voluntary high-potential turnover.
When senior leaders or specialists leave without successors ready, operations slow, projects stall, and institutional knowledge disappears. A succession plan prevents these costly disruptions.
Impact On Employee Retention
Retention is a pressing concern. More than half (57%) of organizations cite talent retention as a top challenge; for mid-to-large companies (1,000–50,000 employees), the figure rises to two-thirds (UNLEASH & Talent Tech Labs).
Employees are more likely to stay when they see a future in your organization. Offering transparent career paths through structured succession planning boosts engagement and reduces churn.
Research by Culture Amp found that 54% of immediate retention can be attributed to an employee’s belief that their employer contributes to their professional development. Those who felt they had access to the upskilling they needed to remain successful in their role were 21% more engaged than their colleagues.
Competitive Agility
Organizations that can quickly move talent into critical roles outperform those that can’t. A clear succession strategy builds agility, helping you pivot faster to new market demands and innovations.
Succession Planning Framework: How To Build It
Succession planning safeguards business continuity, culture, and competitiveness – yet many organizations are still underprepared. Two thirds (66%) of HR leaders say their workforce planning is limited to headcount, making it difficult to demonstrate ROI or implement a truly strategic approach (Gartner).
A well-designed framework gives your organization a consistent, data-driven process for identifying, developing, and promoting internal talent.
- Define critical roles: Identify which positions are business-critical – not just the most senior.
- Assess current talent: Map employees’ existing skills and the tasks they perform every day. Encourage cross-functional experience to prepare future leaders for diverse challenges.
- Identify successors: Use data to pinpoint internal candidates who could step into those roles in the short or long term.
- Close gaps: Build personalized development plans to prepare potential successors for the specific work and challenges of future roles. Collaborate with business leaders to anticipate strategic priorities and define the skills that successors will need. This ensures succession plans are aligned with tomorrow’s business, not just today’s.
- Engage leaders and employees: Make succession a shared responsibility. Business leaders should mentor, coach, and track development, while employees should participate in career conversations to understand future opportunities.
- Review and refresh regularly: Succession plans should evolve with the business – update them as strategies, structures, and skills needs change.
Traditional methods – manual spreadsheets, subjective assessments, limited visibility – are no longer enough. Modern succession planning requires skills intelligence, task intelligence, and AI-powered insights to stay relevant and objective.
The Role Of Skills & Task Intelligence In Succession Planning
Skills intelligence refers to the systematic collection, normalization, and analysis of data on employees’ skills and competencies. Skills intelligence has formed the basis of workforce planning for smart enterprises for some years now – but this understanding of the “supply of skills” is not quite enough on its own.
You need to also understand demand for skills, or the work that needs to be done: that is, the tasks that make up each role.
“We talk about skills, but you tend to talk a lot about skills at the hiring stage… What are the critical skills within your entire organization? Because if you then start to think about critical skills, you start to talk about critical roles.” – Katharine Rooney, VP Talent Attraction & Acquisition, Mimecast
Task intelligence reveals how work actually flows through an organization: how often it happens, how much effort it takes, where duplications occur, and what skills are required. It provides the operational context that skills data alone cannot.
How AI is Transforming Succession Planning
AI is also a crucial ingredient here. --Explainable AI enhances succession planning by:
- Inferring and updating skills and task data from resumes, job descriptions, and performance histories
- Predicting leadership potential through patterns in performance, learning agility, and career progression
- Reduce bias by grounding recommendations in transparent, explainable data rather than subjective judgment
- Continuously improve as new data is added, adapting to evolving workforce and market conditions.
Using AI-powered workforce intelligence for succession planning means organizations can:
- Identify future leaders with precision: Understand not just who has the right skills, but who already performs critical tasks or contributes to outcomes aligned with future roles.
- Address skills and task gaps proactively: Spot emerging or unassigned tasks that will be essential to business success, and develop employees to take them on.
- Enhance employee development: With detailed insights into employees’ strengths, weaknesses, and daily work, HR teams can create personalized development plans that prepare people for future challenges.
39% of HR Leaders are actively looking to find talent that hasn’t yet surfaced, while nearly two-thirds of organizations are prioritizing improving workforce productivity and skillsets (UNLEASH & Talent Tech Labs 2025).
Combining skills and task intelligence gives organizations a living view of how work happens. It helps succession planning shift from static org charts to dynamic workforce design – where leaders can see which tasks drive business impact, who performs them today, and who could step up next.
Best Practices & Common Pitfalls
Despite the opportunities AI and data bring, many HR leaders still feel unprepared to close capability gaps. Seventy-two percent of HR leaders say they struggle with closing successor capability gaps, and only 38% of CHROs are confident they can deliver on succession management goals in the next year (Gartner).
Best Practices
- Integrate your data: Bring information together from HR systems, learning platforms, and performance reviews for a complete view of your people and the tasks they perform.
- Keep it transparent: Explain how AI-driven recommendations are made so employees trust and understand the process.
- Invest in development: Provide training aligned with future skill and task needs, particularly in digital and AI literacy.
- Prioritize soft skills: Emotional intelligence, adaptability, and problem-solving are critical for leadership success.
- Encourage cross-functional experience: Job rotations and internal gigs build agility and give employees experience across the organization’s full task landscape.
Common Pitfalls
- Focusing only on senior roles instead of all mission-critical roles.
- Treating succession planning as a one-time project instead of a living process.
- Relying on tenure or performance alone instead of potential, skills, and task data
- Neglecting diversity by overlooking emerging leaders from underrepresented groups
Sixty one per cent of HR leaders say succession plans are too senior-level focused, leaving little room to account for roles that are both business-critical and hard to fill (Gartner).
Metrics & KPIs For Succession Planning Success
To ensure your succession plan delivers measurable value, track:
- Succession coverage ratio: percentage of critical roles with at least one ready-now successor
- Time-to-fill key roles: reduction in time compared to external hires
- Internal promotion rate: how often roles are filled from within
- Readiness index: how many successors are ready in 6, 12, or 24 months
- Diversity of successor pool: representation across gender, ethnicity, and background
- Retention rate of high potentials: are future leaders staying and progressing?
- Task continuity index: how effectively essential business tasks are maintained during transitions
Use these metrics to refine your approach and demonstrate the impact of your succession strategy to leadership teams.
In an era where business agility is key to survival, succession planning is more critical than ever. By integrating skills intelligence and AI into this process, organizations can ensure the right people are in the right roles at the right time, on an ongoing basis; enhancing efficiency, reducing costs, and gaining a competitive edge.