A Guide to Creating a Succession Planning Template

How critical is a succession planning template? Extremely, for organizations with key leaders close to retirement age. Or those with highly skilled leadership positions that are difficult to fill. It’s also vital for organizations that have not been mentoring a pool of High-Potential Employees (HiPos).

It’s essential to the health of these organizations to have a detailed succession plan in place. Is your organization prepared to replace key senior leaders if they suddenly leave? Is there no emergency succession plan? Please read on.

“Failing to plan is planning to fail.” —Benjamin Franklin

What Is an Organization’s Succession Planning Process?

An organization’s succession planning process identifies and develops new leaders. These key individuals can replace those who retire or leave leadership positions that are crucial to the organization’s operations.

“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” —Abraham Lincoln

Why the Need to Address Succession Planning?

Having a detailed succession plan in place means a more stable future for the organization. It is critical to protecting the organization’s growth and market share. And there are many more reasons why organizations need a succession plan:

• Provides the opportunity to expand the leadership team with diverse talent
• Keeps the organization moving forward when transitioning from one leader to the next, ensuring a smooth transition
• Syncs new and established leaders on goals, future growth, and ways to prepare for change.
• Saves recruitment costs by promoting HiPos from within the organization.
• Helps ensure a higher success rate by promoting internal employees who have a strong understanding of the company culture and have proven their loyalty rather than recruiting new hires

Actionable Steps to Create a Succession Planning Template

As a starting point, here’s the six-step succession action plan template. You can download the worksheet and start planning.

Step 1: Create a Mentorship Program Template

According to the 2024 Mentoring Impact Report, 98% of all Fortune 500 companies have a mentorship program. And the median profits for those companies are over 2X higher than those without mentoring programs.

Creating a mentorship program is the first step to developing future leaders. It also brings together employees with a wide range of backgrounds and levels of experience. This will create better relationships and more cohesive teams.

Mentors foster leadership skills and facilitate skills development in crucial areas like active listening and conflict resolution, preparing mentees for advancement. The mentor/mentee relationship fosters engagement, builds motivation, and expands career options for the mentee. A mentorship program also helps to retain HiPos and high performers. Read HSI’s Mentorship Program Template: A Guide to Creating a Mentoring Program to learn more.

Step 2: Establish a Leadership Training Program

Without proper leadership and soft skills training, new leaders will lack the knowledge they’ll need to successfully lead the organization. Research shows ongoing leadership development leads to personal growth and boosts the happiness, meaning, and vitality of the employees’ experience. This in turn drives performance and retention.

It’s critical that training aligns with the organization’s key competencies to drive promotions and growth. The ongoing training program must be powerful enough for HiPos to meet their goals and be well-positioned for the next opportunity. Leadership development helps strengthen the internal talent pool and increase the retention of top talent.

Step 3: Draft a HiPo Policy

Organizations need a HiPo policy to better identify, develop, and retain future leaders. This comprehensive document will be unique to each organization. Be sure it’s clear and consistent throughout. Here are a few best practices to follow:

• Determine how to find growth opportunities.
• Identify hard-to-fill critical roles that are available.
• Know which key roles on the leadership team will be opening within the next 5-10 years.
• Collaborate with department leaders to gain perspective on changing business needs.

After identifying these critical roles, list the key positions, timeframes, and responsibilities of each position. Then, determine the qualifications, aspirations, and engagement an employee must have to be successful. Examples of qualifications include strategic thinking, drive, commitment to the organization, key competencies, creative problem-solving, and self-management. Also, consider any unique needs specific to the organization. Document detailed and well-defined rules around a HiPo’s persona.

The HiPo policy should also address:

• Ensuring your leadership team includes varied perspectives and brings people of a mix of cultures, roles, and lived experiences to the table to foster inclusion and belonging.
• Creating space for marginalized groups to have access to succession planning and promotion pipelines.
• Developing a clear plan to create a mentorship program and build leadership and soft skills training into the learning program.

The HiPo policy should stress that corporate board members, senior leaders, HR, and management take ownership of a HiPo’s career progression. Their crucial role is to find and create new opportunities for the HiPos. Achieve this by:

• Creating commitment milestones for both the leadership team and HiPos to reach the end goal
• Outlining tactics to keep HiPos engaged: rewards, experiences, promotions
• Regularly assessing HiPos’ career aspirations as they may change over time

The policy must be measurable. It must be fair and take favoritism out of the selection process. and take favoritism out of the selection process. Document all project contributions. Ask other leaders and managers their opinions and insights if the HiPos’ contributions are difficult to measure.

Like all policies, continually refine the HiPo policy based upon feedback and new experiences. The main objectives are to keep in step with the organization’s goals and retain the HiPos.

Step 4: Identify HiPos

Once the HiPo policy is finalized, it’s time to identify the potential future leaders within the organization’s talent pool. The goal is to determine the likelihood of someone becoming a leader in the organization.

First, identify key individuals who have the high potential, ability, and aspiration to hold leadership positions. Some organizations hire a consultant to help facilitate this selection process. Be sure the consultant is in alignment with the organization’s inclusion and belonging goals.

The leadership team and HR can also evaluate employees by using performance data. Achieve this by simply creating an employee information form template. This form would include education, experience, qualifications, aspirations, and performance reviews. The form will also document leaders’ feedback. The form allows HR and leaders to be on the same page on how to evaluate employees.

Next, compare a potential HiPos’ skills against the HiPo policy’s leadership skills and qualifications. A few questions to ponder:

• Who is effective in communicating between departments?
• Who is always at the center of projects and adds real value?
• Who is always wanting to learn something new?

It can be challenging to identify HiPos. High-performing employees have overlapping qualities but are not true HiPos by definition. High performers constantly exceed expectations and take pride in their work. However, they may not have the aspiration to be a leader nor possess leadership qualities. HiPos are strategic thinkers and are successful at making big-picture decisions. These potential future leaders have the knack to be team builders and mentors. They also aspire to be a top leader in an organization.

Remember to look for potential, not necessarily current performance. Job fit is essential when assessing HiPos, as their current roles may not fully reflect their capabilities or future potential. Look at their strengths. Work closely with these employees and explore the idea that they could be a future leader. Consider ways to help them grow in performance and leadership. Perhaps this may bring out the best in them.

Step 5: Develop HiPos

The next step is to develop and prepare HiPos to become potential successors. This is an intentional and calculated process. HR and leaders have already assessed the skills needed for these most critical roles. Remember, these leadership roles will be open in the next 5-10 years. They also understand how the organization and market may change during this timeframe.

Now, the development process begins. The development plans should include HiPos partaking in ongoing mentorship, leadership, and soft skills training programs. Preparing for future roles through training helps close skills gaps and equips HiPos for specific critical positions. Leaders should create milestones HiPos must meet to prove commitment and capability.

Development plans provide HiPos with a career path and a firm reason to stay with the organization. They feel they have a successful career ahead of them. Encourage leaders to frequently remind HiPos of the big picture and future roles to help them understand the value they bring to the table.

Step 6: Retain HiPos

Organizations make an investment in their HiPos, from mentoring and training to promoting. All of which takes time and money. These efforts do not pay off if the HiPos leave the organization. So, how do organizations retain HiPos?

• Be respectful, honest, and realistic. Transparency is key as a company’s needs and future key positions change.
  • Never promise anything. Things can happen beyond one’s control.
  • Be open and candid about the how and why of advancement decisions.
  • Keep them abreast of organizational structure updates that impact them. For example, someone retiring sooner than expected, changes in timelines, and the next key steps for advancement.

• Continually motivate and engage them. Assign unique, high-visibility initiatives to benefit their career goals. Have them lead meetings, teams, and projects.
  • Ask for their opinions on the organization’s succession planning process and areas of improvement. This gives them a say and allows for strategic thinking.

• Give them freedom to manage their own schedule. This allows them to navigate through different situations and discover new interests.

• Provide ongoing mentorship, training, and shadowing.
  • Remember the inclusion and belonging promise in HiPo policy:
    • These initiatives should always be on company time. It’s critical not to eliminate employees who may not be available outside of working hours due to family commitments, etc.
    • If additional education is necessary, include tuition reimbursement. Training should be accessible to employees so no one misses an opportunity for advancement.
    • Update on employee progress. Discuss their strengths and areas of improvement.

• Meet with HiPos each quarter. This is a good idea so they know exactly where they stand. Update on employee progress. Discuss their strengths and areas of improvement. Explore career goals further. Understand how they want to advance in their career and what their career track looks like. Offer career development opportunities. And ask them what experiences they see as most beneficial.

How HSI Can Help?

Training is one of the top key components of your succession plan. HSI can help in a variety of ways!

Want to learn more about effective corporate succession planning? HSI has specific training just for this critical topic:

• Identifying HiPos
• Creating a HiPo Policy
• Retaining and Developing HiPos
• Diversifying Your Leadership Team
• How to Create a Mentoring Program
• The Importance of Succession Planning

HSI also offers leadership training, as well as, soft skills training in core competencies, such as communication, problem solving, and time management. Improve employee interactions with courses on collaboration, conflict management, emotional intelligence, and more. HSI’s communication skills courses include active listening, persuasive communication, and nonverbal communication.

Request a consultation to experience HSI’s unique approach to learning with both video and article-based lessons that can be delivered ad hoc or curated to fit your company's needs.

Please download a PDF of HSI’s succession action plan template and get started today!

Additional Resources

• • Preparing Employees for a Bigger Role
  • How to Develop the Next Generation of Leaders
  • Autonomy: You want to give it to your employees. But are they ready?