This is Article 4 in the Succession Readiness series. Missed the start? Begin with Article 1. New here? Subscribe to The Ready Set so you don’t miss what’s coming.
Nobody becomes ready for a bigger job in a workshop.
Think about the people you’d trust with your role tomorrow. How did they get that way? Odds are it wasn’t a program. It was a boss who handed them something slightly too big. A bad quarter they had to explain to a room. A hard conversation someone didn’t let them skip. A mentor who told them, flat out, that they were doing a thing that would hold them back.
Readiness is built in the work. Mostly in small moments that never show up in a talent review.
That’s the uncomfortable part for any organization that treats succession as an HR program. HR can run the calendar, build the templates, and keep the records. HR cannot assign a stretch project, sit in the room when a decision goes sideways, or tell someone the truth about how they came across in a meeting. Only the leader next to that person can do those things. And they have to do them over and over, for months.
The Handoff That Never Happens
Here’s how it usually goes: The talent review ends. HR then sends a summary. Each leader gets a list of names from their area with a readiness rating attached and a note about “development actions.” Everyone agrees the actions sound reasonable.
Then the quarter starts.
Budgets need defending. A customer escalates. Two people quit. The development action, “give her exposure to the executive team,” slides to next month, then next quarter. Nobody intentionally decides to skip it, it just never beats anything on the urgent list. Three months later, the next talent review arrives and someone says she’s “still about a year out.”
She was a year out last time too.
This is the real failure mode. It’s not bad intent, but what tends to ring true is that development is important and never urgent, so in a busy week it loses to everything. The only thing that beats that pull is a leader who treats developing successors as part of the job rather than a favor they do when there’s room.
What Daily Actually Means
Daily sounds like a lot. But it isn’t a program, it’s a set of habits that fit inside work that’s already happening.
Hand over real decisions. Not tasks. Decisions, with consequences. When a leader makes every call and delegates only the execution, the person below never practices judgment. The next role is mostly judgment. So pick one decision a month that you’d normally make yourself, give it away, and let it be theirs. Tell them it’s theirs before they start.
Let the stretch show up in the real calendar. The best development I’ve seen was never labeled development. A leader sends the successor to present the quarterly numbers to the board because it’s useful, and because it happens to be the thing they’ll need to do in the next role. Nobody had to create a program. The leader simply asked, each week, “what’s one thing on my plate that this person could carry?”
Say the true thing quickly. Feedback that waits for the review is feedback that arrives six months too late. The leaders who build ready people comment on the work while it’s warm. “That email to the VP read as defensive. Here’s how I’d reword it.” Thirty seconds. Repeated across a year, it changes how someone operates.
Put them near the next level. Readiness for a role you’ve never seen up close is mostly guesswork. Bring people to the meeting where the harder decisions get made. Let them watch how the conversation runs, what gets argued, what gets dropped. Sit with them afterward and ask what they noticed. That debrief teaches more than a leadership course.
Tell them where they stand. If someone is being developed for a bigger role, they should know. And they should know the gaps. People can only close a gap that someone has named.
The Accountability Problem
None of this sticks unless somebody is responsible for it.
In most organizations, leaders are measured on results, retention, and budget. Whether they’ve produced a ready successor isn’t on the scorecard. So when a leader chooses between finishing a project and developing the person who could take it over, the project wins every time, and nobody blames them. The system rewarded that choice.
Change what gets measured and behavior follows quickly. Ask each leader a plain question at their own review: who on your team could step into your role in the next year, and what have you done in the last six months to make that true? If the answer is a shrug, that’s a performance gap in the same category as missing a revenue target.
Leaders get uncomfortable here, and I think that’s a good sign. It means the question is landing somewhere that matters. A leader who can’t name a successor isn’t a failing leader. They’re an exposed one, and so is the organization.
Why Culture Beats Process
Here’s a pattern worth watching for. Some organizations run mediocre succession processes and still produce a steady supply of capable leaders. Others have polished frameworks and keep hiring from outside.
The difference isn’t the process. It’s whether people at every level expect to develop the person behind them. In the first kind of place, it’s normal. A manager who isn’t growing a replacement is the odd one out. People talk about who they’ve developed with something like pride. Moving up is treated as a sign that someone did their job well, not as a loss.
In the second kind of place, talent is guarded. Strong performers get kept in their seats because the boss can’t afford to lose them. Development looks like a threat to the person doing it. And so the pipeline stalls, with a succession plan that looks fine on paper sitting right on top of it.
You can’t install the first culture with a template. You build it by what leaders do, what they praise, and what they let slide. If the senior team visibly invests in the people behind them, everyone below picks up on it fast.
A Small Place to Start
If you lead people, try this before your next one-on-one with someone you think could grow into a bigger role.
Write down, privately, three things they would need to be able to do in the next role that they can’t yet do well. Be specific. Not “needs more strategic thinking.” Something like “can’t yet make a call between two good options without asking me.”
Then ask yourself what you’ve handed them in the last ninety days that would build one of those.
For most leaders, the answer is humbling. It doesn’t mean you’ve been careless, it just means the pull of the urgent has been working on you the same way it works on everyone. Now you know where to push back.
A question for you: Who is one person you’re counting on to be ready someday? What did you give them this month that made them more ready than they were last month?
If you can’t think of anything, you’ve found your first move. I’d love to hear what you plan to try in the comments.
Subscribe to The Ready Set
By Ryan Carnes | A data-backed development experience
Providing executive caliber leadership and talent content and resources to everyone. Subscribe free and get new behavioral-based leader and talent insights every week.
Plus two Ready Set resources to put to work immediately.
The line that development is important and never urgent explains why a good action plan slides from month to month, and tying it to each leader's own review is the practical fix. I would also keep the idea of putting a successor near the next level and debriefing afterward, since what they noticed can teach more than a course. Asking each leader who could step into their role in a year, and what they have done to make that true, treats succession as part of the job instead of a favor. Thank you for making it so concrete.