The Succession Plan: Your Company's Favorite Fairy Tale🧚♂️📊
Good morning, readers!👋
How are you doing today?
Let's talk about the succession plan.
That glossy PowerPoint slide with a neat org chart, boxes with names, dotted lines full of hope, and a title like "Talent Pipeline 2027."📈
Every company has one. Almost none of them work.
Yet HR keeps polishing this document like it's the Shroud of Turin🕯️, when really it's more like a grocery list you wrote while hungry: ambitious, unrealistic, abandoned the second reality walks through the door.🚪
Somewhere in a shared drive, buried in a folder called "Strategic_2025_FINAL_v3_ACTUAL_FINAL,"📁lives a document saying Marco from Finance will be ready to become CFO "within 18-24 months, pending development."
Marco has no idea this document exists.
Marco is currently trying to expense a client dinner without HR asking questions.🧾
Marco is not thinking about becoming CFO. Marco is thinking about lunch.🥪
That's the beautiful absurdity of succession planning: built in the abstract, by people in a room, about people who never agreed to want that future.🙃
Then there's the "HiPo" tag⭐slapped on like a gold star sticker from kindergarten, except instead of a sticker you get more meetings and vague promises about "visibility with leadership."
Being called High Potential is like being told your soup "has potential"🍲a compliment, technically, but you're still eating lukewarm soup.
Most succession plans exist to satisfy an audit, not to develop anyone.
It's corporate theatre.🎭
The board wants a slide, the slide gets made, everyone claps👏, and the actual successor turns out to be whoever survived the reorg and didn't quit.
The real test comes when someone important quits on a Friday.
Not a graceful eighteen-month transition just gone, LinkedIn post already drafted, "excited for what's next."✨🚪
Watch the plan evaporate.💨
The "ready now" successor is suddenly not ready.
An "interim" appointment drags on for fourteen months.
Someone external gets parachuted in🪂because, plot twist, nobody internal was actually being developed; they were just being talked about in a slide.
Why does it keep failing?🔪
It's built top-down, without ever asking people what they actually want; some don't want your job, and that's fine🙅♀️.
"Stretch assignments" are usually just extra work wearing a bow🎁.
Plans get reviewed once a year like a gym membership🏋️♂️, full of intention in January, forgotten by March.
And somehow, nobody tells the successor they're the successor🤐; they find out after accepting a job elsewhere.
Here's the real point, sarcasm aside: a succession plan only works as a living conversation, not a static document.🗣️
Name successors and tell them.
Invest in real development: actual projects, actual mentorship, actual budget, not "coaching TBD."
Revisit it quarterly, not annually🔄, because ambitions and job markets move faster than your calibration calendar.
And accept that not everyone wants a ladder; some want mastery🪜🎯, and a good plan makes room for both.
Charts don't retain talent. Conversations do.💬
So next time someone proudly presents the "Talent Pipeline 2027" slide, ask one question: does the person in that box know they're in it?🔍
If the answer is no, you don't have a succession plan.
You have a beautifully formatted guess.🤷♂️
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#SuccessionPlanning #HRTalk #TalentDevelopment #LeadershipPipeline #FutureOfWork
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