Would your organisation face immediate collapse if a key member of your top team were to vanish unexpectedly and permanently?
What system component would fail first in this situation?
The system?
The processes?
The team’s morale, or the people’s knowledge?
These usually fail simultaneously. The only way to prevent this is to have a proper procedure for succession planning within your organisational structure. If you don’t have one, your organisation can generate business operational debt. It means all the processes and knowledge in your organisation that depend on irreplaceable individuals.
The implementation of succession planning extends beyond disaster prevention. A well-implemented succession process operates as a driving force for the professional development of these individuals.
Why Succession Planning Is in fact a Risk Management procedure.
Organisations function as engineered systems, so succession planning functions as a built-in redundancy system. The Superior’s Dilemma: Engineering Yourself Out of the System
Now, let’s flip the perspective.
You’re a senior leader. You’ve built your team. You’ve delivered impact. And now… you’re irreplaceable.
Congratulations? Not really.
Irreplaceable individuals usually develop bottlenecks, which are their own selves.
As a leader, the best form of leadership involves letting go of control. It’s legacy. Leaders who want to create a lasting impact must develop organisational systems which operate independently from their personal involvement.
So what do good leaders do?
Good leaders choose successors who show potential by being both top performers and system thinkers.
Leaders should distribute complex assignments to team members and let people decide within safety boundaries. Even if it means failing sometimes. This is a true learning experience.
How to prepare yourself for the deputy role?
Ask to shadow. The company should provide opportunities for cross-functional learning. Record all information learned from the experience. Present your thoughts in formats that help others grasp and extend your concepts.
Let’s be tactical for a moment.
Succession planning needs a systematic framework. There are three operational tools that have proven successful in the organizations I was helping in the past:
Succession Risk Heatmap
Review every vital position to evaluate both readiness metrics and coverage benchmarks. Red = no successor, Yellow = partial coverage, Green = fully ready.
Successor Development Scorecard
The tool connects competencies with visibility to learning appetite and feedback adaptability. Make the conversation fact-based.
Shadowing Matrix
The pairing system requires watchers for roles that have high-risk functions. Not just once—but as a routine. Shadowing needs to transition from being an exceptional arrangement to becoming a regular organizational practice.
Exit Playbook
Every senior position must maintain documentation that outlines “I will do this” and “I will do it this way.” A user manual exists to explain your position to others.
And yes—talk about it. GRC lives in transparency. Succession plans should not be confined to secret information. The succession plan operates as a common document which welcomes feedback and challenges while adapting through time.
What We Get Wrong—and What We Can Fix
Succession nominations from leaders get avoided because they feel successors have not achieved sufficient readiness. The situation typically shows that employees never received clear definitions of readiness standards.
Some potential successors actively work against themselves by taking no action while believing their loyalty will suffice.
There are also cultural blockers. Leaders at times treat their potential successors as possible threats to their position of authority. Leadership groups interpret succession planning as an HR administrative requirement instead of an essential organisational process.
We need to address this perspective. The failure to train our successors leads to system weaknesses.
Succession planning isn’t disloyal. It’s an act of care. And a sign of real leadership.
Governance Doesn’t Stop at Compliance—It Lives in People
Let’s be honest. The main purpose of GRC frameworks is to develop systems through the creation of tools for audits, while creating checklists. All necessary. But insufficient.
The success of organizational resilience depends entirely on the effectiveness of the people architecture. And succession planning is the heart of that.
Leadership demands that you step away from being the most knowledgeable person in the room. Your organizational intelligence needs to be sustained by you after you leave.
A professional needs to have more responsibility than just possessing expertise in their work. The objective is to create your professional growth so that it can be observed by others, while being quantifiable and scalable.
As GRC practitioners? We must recognise internal silence as the most dangerous risk for our organisations instead of external threats. They are internal silences. Such critical points do not require a bus to make them evident to anyone.