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Succession planning is crucial for ensuring business continuity and maintaining a strong leadership pipeline. Yet despite its importance, many organizations struggle to prepare successors effectively for larger roles. Two common barriers I often see are: 1) lack of accountability for development follow-through, where plans are created but not tracked or executed, leading to stalled growth and missed opportunities; and 2) development efforts that don’t address the most critical skill or experience gaps, defaulting instead to generic, low-impact activities. Leaders also tend to rely on vague timelines like “ready in 12 months” to assess readiness. While directionally useful, this approach overlooks the specific skills that must be developed, the tactics for building them, and the time required to do so. An alternative is to define readiness by the “number of development moves away”—the distinct number of development experiences or actions a successor needs to complete before being considered ready for the role. Against this backdrop, I’ve created a one-page cheat sheet with nine questions and tips to help leaders think in terms of development moves required for readiness. Focused actions like these, paired with clear accountability, are what truly move the needle on accelerating successor readiness.
