Succession Planning Best Practices: How to Close the Leadership Readiness Gap

Best Practice #1: Start with Your Most Critical Leadership Roles

Instead of building a comprehensive program, start where it matters most: roles that have the greatest impact on operations and business performance. This clarifies where your actions will drive immediate results.

1. Identify Critical Roles

The first step is figuring out where leaders have an outsized influence on performance. Ask:

• Which roles drive revenue?
• Who leads major strategy execution?
• Who influences large teams?
• Which positions require specialized experience?

Your succession planning strategy should prioritize these roles. The list might include regional business leaders, product innovation leaders, or transformation leaders. But the red thread is that your organization depends on them.

2. Pinpoint Leadership Gaps

Next, figure out where risk is highest: 

• Which critical roles have no ready successor? 
• Which leaders are likely to leave or retire soon? 
• Which roles are hardest to replace externally? 

This step highlights where your succession plans need to focus first.

3. Evaluate Current Bench Strength 

Finally, evaluate what your leadership bench strength looks like now:

• Who could step into these roles today? 
• Who could be ready with the right support?
• What new capabilities might these roles require as business needs evolve?

This step might feel uncomfortable, but it reveals important information about your leaders' current and future capabilities. Even if the list is short, you’ve made progress. 

Start here: It’s okay to start small and scale. Focus on the ten leadership roles most critical to business success. Using the questions above, identify where succession risk is highest. From there, you can take targeted action and expand over time.

Best Practice #2: Replace Guesswork with Objective Leadership Data

In many organizations, talent decisions still come down to opinion. That’s a problem because leaders consistently overestimate readiness. 

Part of the issue is failing to distinguish between performance, potential, and readiness. While the lines can blur, they're different benchmarks, and confusing them leads to poor decisions.

One common mistake is relying on 360-degree feedback or performance data from a current role to predict success in a future one. While this data shows how leaders perform today, it doesn’t measure potential or readiness for the next level.

Strong performance in a current role doesn’t guarantee success in a future one. For example, a high-performing salesperson won’t automatically succeed as a sales leader.

Objective leadership assessments are the antidote because they provide both broad and deep insight into leaders’ current skills and capabilities, and how those strengths and gaps may translate to new, future, or more senior roles.

That distinction becomes even more important as leadership requirements change. Organizations need to understand not only whether someone has performed well, but whether they have the potential and capabilities to succeed with greater complexity, ambiguity, and strategic responsibility.

Benefits of Assessment-Driven Succession Planning 

Assessment transforms succession planning from an expensive guessing game to evidence-based leadership decisions. When talent management leaders use assessment effectively, they help organizations:

• Reduce promotion risk.
• Identify hidden potential that might have gone overlooked.
• Build a solid foundation for targeted development.

Promotions are 1.6X more likely to succeed when assessments inform leadership selection.

Start here: If you’re not already using assessments in your succession planning strategy, begin with the high-risk roles you identified earlier. Pilot assessments with a small group, measure impact, and scale over time.

Best Practice #3: Spot High-Potential Talent Before Gaps Appear

Many organizations discover leadership gaps too late—after a role becomes vacant. Without early visibility into emerging talent, organizations struggle to fill roles, spread development investments too broadly, and default to reactive leadership decisions. 

A strong succession planning strategy creates visibility early, helping leaders understand not only who’s ready now, but who could be ready next. 

Once you’ve defined your critical roles, the next step is to identify individuals who could potentially grow into those positions. Search for signals using:

• Structured talent reviews.
• Input from senior leaders.
• Evaluation of current performance and growth trajectory.
• Observations from real leadership experiences, including:
  • Leading complex projects.
  • Managing cross-functional initiatives.
  • Taking on stretch assignments.

This is another area where objective data strengthens decisions. Validated leadership assessments can reveal strengths, uncover motivational fit, clarify development needs, and clarify future readiness. That’s how you move beyond subjective labels like “high potential.”  

But identifying high-potential talent is only the beginning. Organizations also need to understand what those individuals will need to develop before they're ready for their next role. Otherwise, succession plans may identify promising leaders without creating a clear path to readiness.

Start here: Make sure your definition of high potential is anchored in the requirements of future leadership roles. Identify the skills, experiences, and capabilities needed for critical roles, then evaluate employees against those success profiles using assessments and talent reviews.

Best Practice #4: Accelerate Readiness with Targeted Development

Even with a good understanding of your leaders and high-potential talent, growth doesn’t happen automatically. Organizations must intentionally develop leaders to prepare them for future roles and support successful transitions. 

When done well, development significantly improves promotion outcomes. DDI’s research shows that internal promotions are more successful when leaders: 

• Participate in cohort development programs. (3.7X)
• Experience sequential leadership learning. (3.2X) 
• Receive frequent manager coaching. (2.6X) 

But not all development is equal. One-size-fits-all programs may build baseline skills, but they don’t prepare leaders for what’s next.

Leaders stepping into more complex roles need targeted development that equips them for the challenges ahead. Targeted development accelerates readiness by building the specific capabilities leaders will need to excel at the next level.

And those capabilities need to extend beyond strategy alone. DDI's research on future leadership skills shows that only 28% of organizations invest in both the strategic skills leaders prioritize and the interpersonal capabilities they tend to overlook. Yet organizations investing in all eight capabilities examined are 2.1X more likely to expect a strong leadership bench three years from now.

That's an important distinction for succession planning. Preparing leaders for bigger roles means building both the strategic judgment to navigate complex business challenges and the interpersonal skills to bring people along.

Provide learning experiences in multiple formats:

• Stretch assignments expose learners to new or future responsibilities within a business context and challenges with real stakes.
• Manager or executive coaching helps learners apply new skills with targeted guidance and drive behavior change.
• Leadership programs provide a structured learning journey that helps learners develop new skills with assessment, practice, and peer support.
• Cross-functional experiences broaden the way leaders think about the enterprise and help them build networks across functions.

Start here: Prioritize development that directly reflects leaders’ responsibilities and the business situations they might face in future roles. Give leaders opportunities to:

• Solve real organizational problems. 
• Lead strategic initiatives. 
• Navigate complex change.

This accelerates leadership capability and lets you see how leaders perform in high-stakes situations based on their target roles. You can use your observations to refine development and succession decisions, alongside assessment data.

Best Practice #5: Make Succession a Leadership Priority

Of course, none of this work matters in the long term if succession plans fizzle out. Sustaining progress requires making leadership development a shared organizational priority, not just an HR initiative. Here’s what stable succession plans share:

Visible Executive Sponsorship

Executive support can make or break succession strategies. Bring executives into the process and make it visible to reinforce the importance of leadership bench strength to the business. Ask them to:

• Participate in talent discussions and succession reviews. 
• Reinforce the importance of developing internal leaders. 
• Treat leadership development as a business priority tied to future performance. 

Intentional Stakeholder Alignment 

Succession planning gains traction when leaders share a clear understanding of leadership priorities and talent gaps—and actively engage in the process.

HR and talent leaders enable this alignment, but leaders across the business must apply it. That’s how succession management becomes part of business strategy.

Defined Success Metrics 

Track a focused set of leadership pipeline indicators to monitor your bench's health. For example: 

• Number of successors for critical roles 
• Internal promotion rates  
• Progress on accelerated development plans or goals
• Time required to fill key leadership positions 
• Readiness levels for successors identified for critical roles

Clear Accountability and Follow-Through 

Effective succession strategies require clear ownership. HR and L&D design the development strategy and provide the tools, but managers are also accountable for developing their people.

They play a key role by helping emerging leaders apply new skills, tackle meaningful stretch experiences, and navigate challenges and transitions.

Define how you’ll review progress and who is responsible at each stage. Regularly revisit readiness assessments and development plans as the needs of critical roles evolve, ensuring potential successors continue building the capabilities they'll need to succeed.

Robust Communication 

Clear and transparent communication builds trust and reinforces leadership growth as a priority. Make sure employees understand:

• How leaders are identified and developed.
• What it takes to grow into leadership roles.
• Why development matters to the organization’s future.

Start here: Find your stakeholder champions—the leaders who already root for you—and lean in by partnering with them early. Their influence can amplify your efforts and expand buy-in across the organization.