Who is ready to succeed the current leadership?

There are two versions of succession. In the first, a chief executive announces a departure eighteen months out, the board runs a considered process, and a successor is appointed with time to hand over properly. In the second, the incumbent leaves suddenly — health, a competitor's offer, a governance failure — and the board discovers that its succession plan consisted of a name written in a board pack two years ago that nobody has since tested.

The plan that is really a list

Most organisations have a succession plan. Very few have a succession process. The distinction is that a plan names people, while a process develops and tests them against a defined standard, and revisits that judgement as both the people and the standard change.

A name in a board pack tells you who looked most promising at the moment the pack was written. It does not tell you whether that person has since been given the exposure they needed, whether they still want the role, or whether the requirements of the role have moved.

The internal candidate is not the safe option

Boards tend to treat internal succession as lower risk. Continuity is real: an internal appointee knows the business, the people and the customers, and requires far less time to become productive. But the risks are simply different rather than smaller.

The most common failure with internal succession is promoting someone who was excellent in a functional or divisional role into a general management role that requires a different set of capabilities — external representation, capital allocation, holding peers to account who were recently colleagues. Strong performance in the previous role is weak evidence for the next one when the nature of the work changes.

The second failure is a board that has watched a candidate for years and has therefore stopped assessing them. Familiarity produces confidence that is not always proportionate to the evidence.

Benchmarking without a cynical process

The most useful thing a board can do for an internal candidate is to benchmark them honestly against the external market. Done well, this produces one of two outcomes: either the internal candidate is confirmed as the strongest available option, which converts an assumption into a decision the board can defend, or a materially stronger external candidate emerges and the board has learned something it needed to know.

Done badly, it becomes a process where an internal favourite is run against a token external shortlist. That wastes the external candidates' time, damages the firm's reputation in the market, and gives the board false comfort. If the internal candidate is going to be appointed regardless, the honest course is to appoint them and skip the theatre.

Emergency succession is a separate exercise

Planned succession and emergency succession require different answers. The person who should run the business for three years is often not the person who should hold it steady for six months while a proper process runs. Boards that conflate the two either appoint an interim who then becomes the permanent answer by default, or lose time they do not have deciding.

A working emergency plan identifies a named individual, confirms with them that they would accept, and defines the scope and duration. It is a short document and it should be reviewed annually.

A realistic timeline

For a chief executive appointment where internal and external candidates are both in scope, twelve to eighteen months is a reasonable horizon: several months to define the requirement and assess internal candidates properly, three to four months of external search, and a handover period that is long enough to transfer relationships but short enough to avoid two people appearing to run the company.

Compressed timelines are survivable. What is not survivable is a compressed definition stage, because everything downstream is built on it.