Your succession plan is ready? The role has already moved on.

I sat in on a board meeting recently, where the director asked a fair question. If our CFO left tomorrow, who steps up? Someone offered a name. Someone else said that person wasn’t quite ready. The conversation moved on.

It always moves on. But that wasn’t the interesting part.

The name they offered had been the answer for two years. Trained, developed, told they were next. And in two years the CFO role in that business had changed shape entirely as it now runs a data function, owns half the AI investment case, and spends more time with the board than with the ledger.

They’d spent two years developing someone for a seat that no longer exists.

This is the bit succession planning gets wrong, and it’s not laziness. It’s a hidden assumption. We map who’s ready for the role, which quietly assumes the role holds still while we do it. Roles don’t hold still anymore. Senior ones move fastest, because they absorb every strategic change before anyone else feels it.

The usual question is who’s ready. The better question to ask is ready for what?

Which changes the work. Instead of naming a successor and developing them toward today’s job description, you name what the seat is becoming, and develop against that. One, two years out. What will this role own that it doesn’t own now? What’s leaving it? What capability does it need that nobody in the business currently has?

That’s a harder conversation than a name on a page. It’s also the one that stops you being surprised.

And it fixes a problem most boards don’t realise they have. Reviewing succession once a year, somewhere between the audit paper and the people report, made sense when the org chart was stable. The same board would never review its capital plan annually and call that managed.

All of it takes deciding.

Start here: Take your top three seats. For each one, write what the role will need to own in two years. Then write who’s being built for that.

If the second column is empty, you haven’t found a talent problem. You’ve found the plan for the year, and you’ve found it while there’s still time.

At LEAD Executive Search | Impact Leadership, succession is one of the conversations I have most often with boards and leadership teams. Not once a year, but as roles keep shifting shape underneath everyone. If you’re working through who your top seats are becoming, or want a sounding board as you build the plan, I’m always happy to connect. Reach out to me on [email protected] or through LinkedIn.

Written by Karly Boast, CEO @ LEAD Executive Search & Consult Recruitment