17th March 2026
Your Succession Plan Is Probably Useless. Here’s How to Tell.
Let me be direct about something that most talent professionals already sense but rarely say out loud: a great-looking succession plan and a genuinely functional talent pipeline are not the same thing, and confusing the two is costing organisations more than they realise.
This is the third post in a series. In the first, I wrote about identifying critical roles, the ones where vacancy or underperformance creates disproportionate business risk. In the second, I drew a distinction between succession planning, the process, and succession management, the outcome, specifically, continuity in critical roles. If you have not read those, the short version is this: the process only has value if it produces the outcome. Which brings me to the uncomfortable question at the heart of this post.
If your most critical role became vacant tomorrow, do you have someone ready to step in?
Not ready in 12 months. Not “high potential with the right development.” Ready now. If you cannot answer that question with a confident yes, your succession plan, however beautifully constructed, is not working.
The problem with measuring the wrong things
Most succession programmes are evaluated by completion, not by coverage. The talent review happened. The nine-box was updated. Development plans were written and filed. Boxes were filled with names. The process ran on time and the deck looked good in the board report.
None of that tells you whether the business is protected.
What organisations are measuring, almost without exception, are lead indicators: pipeline size, potential ratings, readiness timelines, development plan completion rates. These are inputs. They are proxies for the thing you actually need. They tell you what you put in, not what came out.
Ready Now candidate coverage in your critical roles is the lag indicator. It is the proof point. It is the only metric that maps directly to the question every CEO and board member should be asking: if something changes tomorrow, are we covered?
The pipeline that looks full but runs dry
Here is a pattern that will be familiar to anyone who has sat through enough talent reviews. You have a critical role. In the succession grid, there are two or three names listed under “pipeline.” One is 12 to 18 months away. Another is 18 to 24 months. A third is flagged as high potential but relatively early in their development.
The review moves on. Everyone feels reasonably comfortable. The role has coverage.
Except the following year, you look at the same grid, and the same names are there, still 12 to 18 months away. And the year after that. The pipeline is not a pipeline at all. It is a waiting room. And the critical role has had, in practice, zero Ready Now coverage for three years running.
This is not a failure of intent. It is a failure of measurement. Nobody was tracking the number that actually mattered.
The only number worth putting on a slide
Take your list of critical roles. For each one, ask a single question: do we have a Ready Now candidate today? Then express the answer as a percentage. What proportion of your critical roles have Ready Now coverage right now?
That number, tracked quarter by quarter, tells you more about the health of your talent pipeline than any nine-box grid, any potential rating, or any development plan completion report ever will.
If the number is low, you have a business continuity risk, and you need to say so in those terms. If the number is improving, your succession management is working. If it is static or declining despite all the process activity around it, the process is generating noise, not outcomes.
This is the diagnostic question I would encourage every Head of Talent to put to their next talent review: not “who is in the pipeline?” but “for which critical roles do we have a Ready Now candidate today, and what is that number as a percentage of our total critical roles?”
Why this belongs in the boardroom, not just the HR review
There is a reason this metric matters beyond talent management best practice. An uncovered critical role carries identifiable financial risk: executive search fees, time-to-productivity loss, revenue exposure, customer and team disruption. These are quantifiable. Ready Now coverage is one of the very few talent metrics that translates directly into the language of risk that CFOs and boards understand and respond to.
In the UK, this is becoming more than good practice. The FRC and institutional investors are paying increasing attention to leadership succession as a governance and risk disclosure matter, particularly for CEO and CFO roles. Boards that cannot demonstrate Ready Now coverage for their most critical positions are beginning to attract scrutiny in a way that was not true five years ago. The direction of travel is clear: succession is moving from an HR process to a board-level risk item.
If you are a CHRO or CPO, that is your opportunity to reframe the conversation entirely.
What this means in practice
The goal is not to abandon the work of succession planning. Pipeline development, potential assessment, structured development, all of it still matters. But it matters as a means to an end, and the end is Ready Now coverage.
That means being honest when the pipeline is decorative rather than functional. It means having the harder conversation when a high-potential individual has been “12 months away” for the past three years. It means reporting to the board on coverage, not just on process completion. And it means accepting that a beautifully executed succession process that leaves critical roles uncovered has, by the only measure that matters, failed.
Succession management is about continuity. Ready Now coverage is the measure of whether you have it.
Everything else is preparation.
If this landed a little too close to home, let’s chat.
The shift you need to make are probably simpler than you think.
Justin Miles
Categories: Uncategorised
