The succession question every CEO should ask before December

Most succession plans are documents. The real ones are people who already know they are being built.

Every year around this time, succession grids get refreshed across the industry. Names move between boxes. "Ready now" becomes "ready in two years" and back again. The committee approves, the file closes, and everyone returns to the actual business.

I have spent a good part of my career overseeing succession planning for executive and leadership positions, and I can tell you where most of those plans fail. Not in the drafting. In the twelve months of silence that follow.

The question

So here is the one question I would put to any CEO before the year closes: "If your most critical leader resigned this morning, does the person on your succession grid know they are the plan, and have you done anything this year to make them ready?"

If the answer to either half is no, you do not have a succession plan. You have a document that will be overtaken by a headhunter's phone call.

Why plans stay paper

Three patterns show up again and again. Confidentiality becomes an excuse. Yes, succession is sensitive. But there is a difference between not announcing a successor and never investing in one. The candidate does not need the title of "successor", they need the stretch mandate, the exposure to the board, the hard assignment that closes their gap.

Readiness is assessed, not built. A grid records that someone is "ready in two years." Almost nowhere is anyone accountable for what happens during those two years. Readiness without a development owner is a forecast, not a plan.

The bench is external by default. When every critical vacancy triggers a search mandate, your best internal people read the message clearly, and they respond to the next call they get.

What the strong ones do

The organizations that get this right treat succession as a build program, not an annual review. Each critical role has two or three genuine candidates. Each candidate has one named gap and one live assignment closing it. And when the vacancy comes, and it always comes, the transition is measured in days, not in the six months a search takes.