Succession planning and coaching for future leaders
Here is a test that takes ten minutes and tells you more than the document does.
Pick your three most critical roles. For each one, write down the name of the person who would do that job on Monday morning if the incumbent resigned this afternoon. Then ask the incumbent, separately, to write the same name. Then ask the person you named whether they know they are the answer.
If those three answers do not match, you have a list, not a plan.
Most succession planning produces a grid of names against boxes with a readiness column that has said "one to two years" for four years. The document is real. The plan behind it frequently is not — because nobody has defined what the seat actually requires, nobody has told the candidates, and the person best placed to develop a successor has no reason to.
This page is about succession as an organizational system: the seats, the candidates against them, and the coaching that makes the difference between a name in a box and someone who can take the job. Developing identified talent generally, not against a specific seat, is high-potential employee coaching; the wider organizational picture is leadership development for organizations.
ICF ACC · MBA · Riyadh · Arabic and English
The unit is the seat, not the person
This is the distinction that reorganizes everything else.
High-potential development asks: who are our strongest people, and what would make them stronger? Succession asks a narrower and harder question: if this specific chair is empty, who sits in it, and what is missing between them and it?
The second question produces different development. A generic leadership program teaches a person to be more strategic. Succession development teaches a particular person the three things this particular seat will demand of them in its first ninety days — which might be a board relationship, a regulator, a technical judgment they have never had to make alone, or a team that will test them in week one.
Two questions that are constantly conflated, and neither gets answered:
Emergency cover — who holds this on Monday, with authority, if the seat empties without notice. This needs a name, a briefing, and the person knowing. It is not development; it is continuity, and it should take a week to arrange.
Succession — who could genuinely hold this role in two years, and what has to happen in between. This is development, and it takes years.
A plan that answers only the second leaves you exposed next month. A plan that answers only the first is a phone list.
You are probably planning for the wrong roles
Most organizations plan succession downward from the org chart: the chief executive, then the direct reports, then possibly one layer more.
The better criterion is different. Ask: which roles, if vacant for three months, would actually damage us? Score it honestly and the list changes. It will still include some senior roles. It will also include a specialist nobody can replace, the person who holds a critical external relationship, and the one individual who understands how a system that everything depends on actually works.
Those roles are frequently invisible to succession planning because they are not senior. They are also the ones where the loss is immediate and the replacement market is thin.
Run the criticality question before the seniority list. It is the cheapest correction available and it changes where the budget goes.
The seat brief
One page per critical seat — not per person. This is the artifact that turns a grid into a plan, and it is the thing to complete before commissioning any development.
THE SEAT ___________________________________________ 1 WHY IT IS CRITICAL What breaks if it is empty for three months: ______________________________________________________ 2 MONDAY COVER Name: _______________________________________________ Do they know? Y / N Do they have the authority? Y / N What they would need in the first week: ______________________________________________________ 3 WHAT THIS SEAT ACTUALLY DEMANDS Not the job description. The three hardest things the next holder will face in their first ninety days: 1. __________________________________________________ 2. __________________________________________________ 3. __________________________________________________ 4 CANDIDATES (two or three, never one) Name ____________ The specific gap: _______________ Name ____________ The specific gap: _______________ Name ____________ The specific gap: _______________ 5 WHAT WOULD CLOSE EACH GAP The assignment or exposure, not the course: ______________________________________________________ 6 THE INCUMBENT What they will do to develop a successor: ______________________________________________________ What they get for doing it: _________________________ 7 IF NONE OF THEM External hire / split the role / restructure — decided now, not in the week it happens: ______________________________________________________ 8 REVIEW Date: ______________ Owner: ______________________
Copy the block — nothing to download and no email required.
Replace every readiness time band with box 4's "specific gap". "Ready in one to two years" is not information. "Has never presented to the board, and has never carried a P&L" is information, because you can do something about it and you can tell when it is done.
Box 6 is the box that is always blank, and it is the structural reason succession plans do not move.
Box 7 is the mark of a serious plan. Deciding in advance that a particular seat will probably need an external hire is a legitimate, responsible answer — and it is far cheaper to decide now than in the fortnight after a resignation.
The incumbent problem
The person best placed to develop a successor is the person currently in the seat, and the organization has given them every reason not to.
They are measured on this year's delivery, not on the bench. Developing a credible successor makes them more replaceable, which feels like a risk even to people who would never say so. Nobody has told them what they get for it. And the effort is invisible: no incumbent has ever been thanked in a performance review for the vacancy that did not become a crisis.
This is a design problem, not a character problem, and there are three things that actually change it:
Make it an objective of the role, written down, with a named successor or named candidates as the deliverable. Not an aspiration in a values statement.
Make it count in the incumbent's own next move. The single most effective mechanism in practice: an organization where you do not get the bigger job until you have produced someone who can take yours. Say it out loud and the behavior follows within a cycle.
Remove the implied threat. An incumbent who suspects that succession planning is a polite prelude to their own exit will comply on paper and obstruct in practice. If it is not a prelude, say so plainly; if it is, that is a different conversation and it should be had honestly.
Buyer diagnostic
Score what is true, not what is documented. 2 = yes, 1 = partly, 0 = no.
| Score | ||
|---|---|---|
| 1 | We identified critical seats by impact, not by seniority | |
| 2 | Every critical seat has named Monday cover, and that person knows | |
| 3 | Each seat has two or three candidates, not one heir apparent | |
| 4 | Readiness is stated as a specific gap, not a time band | |
| 5 | Each gap has a live assignment attached, not a course | |
| 6 | Incumbents have developing a successor as a written objective | |
| 7 | We have decided what we would do if no internal candidate works | |
| 8 | The plan changed in the last twelve months |
13–16: you have a working system. Coaching here is about depth against specific seats.
8–12: rows 2, 4 and 6 first. None of them requires a provider, and together they are the difference between a document and a plan.
Below 8: you have a grid. Commissioning development now would develop people against gaps nobody has defined. Complete seat briefs for your three most critical roles first — it costs a morning.
Row 8 is the lie detector. A succession plan that has not changed in a year is not being used. People develop, people leave, roles change; a plan that reflects none of that is being maintained rather than run.
What the coaching actually does
Succession coaching works on three parties, and buyers usually think of one.
The candidate, against a named seat. Development defined by box 3 of the seat brief rather than by a generic competency model. This is the part that differs most from high-potential employee coaching: the gap is set by one specific role's real demands, and the work is measurable against them. When the candidate does take the seat, the first months have their own shape — C-suite transition coaching covers what changes at the top of an organization.
The incumbent, on handing over. Letting go is a genuine and underrated difficulty, and an incumbent who cannot delegate the parts of the job that would develop a successor will produce a successor who has watched rather than done. This work is short, specific and disproportionately useful.
The decision makers, on choosing. The most common failure in a succession decision is appointing the candidate most like the incumbent, because similarity reads as readiness. A structured conversation against box 3 — the seat's actual demands, not the last holder's style — is worth more than another assessment.
What succession planning cannot do
It cannot make an unattractive job attractive. If nobody internally wants the seat, that is information about the seat. Investigate it before you conclude there is a pipeline problem.
It cannot manufacture a capability that is not there. Sometimes the honest answer is an external hire, and a plan that will not allow that answer produces an internal appointment that fails in public. Box 7 exists for this.
It cannot survive being secret. A plan nobody is told about cannot direct anyone's development, and it leaks anyway. The workable position, as with any development list, is to tell candidates they are being developed for a kind of role, to be explicit that it is not a promise, and to name more than one candidate per seat so that nobody has been anointed.
It cannot compensate for a system that blocks internal movement. If good people cannot move between functions here, your successors are being developed in silos and will arrive without the breadth the seat needs. That is internal mobility and promotion readiness, and it has to work for succession to work.
It cannot be run annually and left alone. Succession is a standing conversation, reviewed when something changes, not an item that recurs each December.
How engagements are structured here
The stated organizational process is Understand → Design → Deliver → Apply → Review. For succession development the Understand stage is the seat briefs: without box 3, development is generic by default, and generic development against a specific seat is the thing that produces a successor who is impressive and unready.
Six organizational service areas are stated: executive and senior leadership coaching, manager development, career development for employees, internal mobility and promotion readiness, professional positioning, and career transition support. Succession work draws on the first and the fourth, and touches the last where box 7 turns out to be the answer for an incumbent as well as a seat.
Six audience levels run from emerging talent to executives — relevant here because a succession pipeline usually spans several of them at once, and the work with a senior leader two years from a seat is not the work with a manager eight years from one.
Entry configurations range from a single senior leader — often the incumbent or the leading candidate for one critical seat — to coaching attached to an existing program, where an organization already has a talent process and the gap is depth against specific roles.
On confidentiality, the stated position applies: "The organization pays. The session still belongs to the participant." In succession work this needs saying to candidates explicitly, because a participant who believes their sessions feed the appointment decision will perform rather than develop, and the performance is what you least need to see.
Delivery is in Arabic or English, and participants choose.
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In the Saudi context
In a family business, separate ownership succession from management succession, explicitly and early. They are different questions with different answers, and conflating them is the most common and most expensive succession error in this market. Someone can be the right owner and the wrong chief executive, and saying so is easier before a plan exists than after.
Where a founder or owner is still in the seat, the constraint is usually letting go rather than finding a successor. Candidates are often present and undeveloped because nothing has ever been fully handed over. This is work with the incumbent, and it is not solved by strengthening the bench.
Growth has created seats faster than successors. A succession system designed around replacing existing roles will miss the roles that do not exist yet — and in a fast-growing organization those are frequently the critical ones. Ask what seats will exist in two years, not only which ones are occupied now.
Where nationalization commitments shape leadership appointments, succession planning is the mechanism that makes them achievable rather than reactive. The risk is the reverse: appointing to meet a number before the development is done, which exposes the individual and makes the next internal appointment harder to argue for.
Board, owner and chairman proximity changes who actually decides. Where the formal succession process and the real decision sit in different places, a plan built only on the formal process will be overruled. Name the real decision maker in box 8 or the review is theatre.
Discretion matters more than in other development work. Candidates for the same seat are usually colleagues. Contracting explicitly about what is and is not shared — between candidates, with the incumbent, and with the sponsor — is not a formality here.
Common questions
How many candidates should we name per seat?
Two or three. One creates an heir apparent, demotivates the others and collapses if that person leaves. More than three usually means the seat's requirements have not been defined tightly enough.
Should we tell people they are successors?
Tell them they are being developed for a kind of role, be explicit that it is not a promise, and make sure it is visibly not a field of one. The unstated plan directs nobody's development and leaks regardless.
How is this different from high-potential development?
The unit. High-potential work develops strong people; succession develops named people against a named seat, which changes what the development is. Both can run together, and the seat brief is what keeps them distinct.
What if the incumbent will not engage?
Look at what they are being asked to give up and what they are getting for it. In most cases it is a design problem — see the incumbent section — and in a minority it is a signal worth taking seriously about how secure they feel.
What if the best candidate is external?
Then box 7 was worth completing. Deciding this in advance is responsible; discovering it in the fortnight after a resignation is expensive.
Do you assess candidates for us?
The seat brief is built so your decision makers assess against the seat's actual demands. Outsourcing the judgment weakens the decision and the accountability for it.
How often should the plan be reviewed?
When something changes — a departure, a new seat, a candidate's assignment completing — with a standing date as a backstop. Diagnostic row 8.
Can you work with the incumbent and the successor at the same time?
Yes, with the boundary stated at the outset: separate engagements, no content crossing between them, and a shared objective both have agreed to.
Start with three seats
Choose your three most critical roles by impact rather than seniority, and complete a seat brief for each. Box 2 will tell you whether you have continuity. Box 4 will tell you whether you have candidates or a spreadsheet. Box 6 will tell you why nothing has moved.
That is a morning's work, it requires no provider, and it will tell you exactly what — if anything — you need to buy.
A useful next step, matched to this topic
If you want support applying what you just read, start with the option closest to the problem in front of you.
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Saad Al-Wuqayan
Career & Executive Coach — ICF ACC, MBA
Saad Al-Wuqayan coaches professionals and executives in Riyadh. Nearly two decades across engineering, business development, financial leadership as a CFO and government transformation sit behind every session.
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