What Is Succession Planning? Why Your Business Needs It Now.

In a fast-moving competitive labour market, critical departures can destabilise even the strongest teams. Succession planning ensures you’re ready, with the right people, processes, and pipeline in place. 

It’s not just about replacing individuals, it’s about building organisational resilience and aligning talent with future strategy.  

What Good Succession Planning Delivers 

Business Continuity

Keeps the business moving when key people leave. Especially vital for specialised or senior roles, where talent can be hard to find and even harder to replace at speed. 

Stronger Talent Decisions 

Prepares high-potential individuals for broader roles through structured development, not just promotion. Builds confident leaders who are ready, not rushed.  

Mentoring and Knowledge Transfer 

Connects senior leaders with emerging talent through coaching and mentoring to build capability, confidence, and continuity. 

Higher Engagement and Retention 

People stay where they feel invested. Succession planning signals a long-term commitment to their growth, and strengthens the business in return. 

Employee Engagement and Retention

By supporting peoples’ development, engagement and satisfaction levels are often enhanced and succession planning anchored as a key part of retention strategy. People you invest in and develop for future roles are more likely to show commitment to the organisation.

So, what next?

Drawing together the key data in performance appraisals and using the information to start mapping out where potential lies is a good starting point. Using the insights from internal and external assessment and development processes adds rigour. Running structured career ‘round tables’ of senior leaders to collectively talk through data, share their experience and impressions of people and get alignment on possibilities all help pull together a shared view of where talent lies and how it should be developed. All this sounds like motherhood and apple pie, but just about every survey identifies that most organisations haven’t got their succession covered and are strategically vulnerable to loss of key talent.

Start Building Your Succession Strategy Today

Identify your critical roles, assess your talent pipeline, and future-proof your organisation, before you need to.