Succession planning: naming the risk before someone resigns

Succession planning is the exercise of deciding, in advance and in writing, what happens when a role you depend on becomes empty. Most companies do a version of it in their heads and discover the gaps on the day a resignation letter arrives. The written version is not much more work, and its value is almost entirely in the conversations it forces: which roles genuinely cannot be left vacant for three months, and who — specifically, by name — would step in.

Start from the roles, not the people

• List the roles where a sudden vacancy would stop work, lose a customer, or breach an obligation. In most companies this is between five and fifteen roles, not the whole org chart.
• For each, record what would actually break and how quickly — a week, a month, a quarter. This is the number that decides how much the plan is worth.
• Note what only that person knows or can sign: a relationship, a system nobody else has access to, an accreditation held personally.
• Record the realistic time to hire externally for that role, which is usually longer than managers assume.
• Then, and only then, name candidates: ready now, ready in a year, or no internal candidate.

The honest version of the ratings

A plan where every critical role has a ready-now successor is a plan nobody checked. "No internal candidate" is the most useful entry in the whole document, because it is the one that changes a hiring decision.

1. Rate readiness against the actual role, not against potential in general.
2. Where someone is named for three different roles, they are a single point of failure themselves, and the plan should say so.
3. Where a role has no successor, decide the response now: cross-train, document, retain an interim contact, or accept the risk explicitly.
4. Separate emergency cover from planned succession — the person who holds the fort for six weeks is often not the person who should take the job.
5. Review annually and after any departure, because a plan that named a leaver as successor is worse than none.

Be careful what you promise. Telling someone they are the successor creates an expectation you may not be able to meet, and telling them nothing wastes the development time the plan was supposed to buy. The usual middle path is to discuss the development, not the appointment: what they would need to be ready, without stating that the job is theirs.

What makes succession planning actually reduce risk

• Documentation of the things only one person knows, which is the cheapest mitigation available and the one most often postponed.
• Access that does not die with the individual — shared credentials handled properly, not a password in one person’s head.
• A named deputy for anything with a legal or contractual signature.
• Deliberate exposure: the successor sitting in the meetings and holding the relationships before they need to.
• A record of what the departing person actually did, gathered in the handover rather than reconstructed afterwards, and reinforced by what comes out of the exit interview.

Succession covers the few roles that must never be left empty. Workforce planning looks at the whole organisation: the headcount and skills the business will need over the next few years, compared with the people it has.

Where the plan lives

Ettex Records keeps one record per critical role — impact, time to hire, named successors and their readiness, review date — so the plan is a short filterable list rather than a slide deck rebuilt each year. Restrict it: a succession plan readable by the whole company causes more problems than it prevents, and the readiness ratings in particular are not for general circulation. It sits alongside the training matrix, which is where the development actions the plan generates should end up. Ettex does not assess anyone’s readiness and has no view on who should get the job.