Leadership transitions can bring substantial disruption to an organization, so it’s crucial to proactively develop a plan for succession. Transition planning is a complex process that should begin long before a planned departure date to avoid organizational disorder, loss of employee and stakeholder confidence, and difficult exits.

Support operational stability, strengthen business continuity, and build the bench of available talent among your existing employees—whether you’re planning an owner exit, anticipating a leadership shift, or experiencing the departure of key technical staff member—with guidance from our professionals.

Developing tailored plans for key positions or creating enterprise-wide succession processes and toolkits, we can help you increase organizational resilience and emerge from leadership transitions stronger and more prepared for future challenges.

Succession Planning for Long-Term Success

A dynamic, well-managed, and clearly communicated succession plan can help your organization:

• Address needs and concerns of stakeholders, partners, and clients
• Retain and keep employees engaged
• Create organization value
• Preserve legacies
• Develop successors and prepare the organization to thrive moving forward

Key Focus Areas

Succession planning incorporate the following focus areas.

Management Succession Plans

We customize succession strategies to your organization’s needs by providing a framework for you to assess leadership needs and succession options.

We collaborate with your leadership to identify:

• Ideal timelines for leadership transition
• Key qualifications and skillsets for future leaders
• Potential successor candidates
• Processes or criteria to evaluate candidate strengths and weaknesses
• Gaps or opportunities in current employee development processes
• Actionable steps—such as training, mentoring, personnel changes, and new compensation strategies—to build the succession planning team

Succession Planning Assessments and Toolkits

Succession planning can address the comprehensive needs of your entire organization.

Instead of narrowly focusing on options to replace a single leadership position, we can assess your full management succession ecosystem, including:

• Future strategic needs of your organization
• Current talent
• Leadership pipeline and development
• Organizational culture and relationships
• General recruitment environment

We then develop succession planning templates, toolkits, and processes that can be institutionalized to address both the immediate and long-term needs of your organization.

How the Process Works

Succession planning initiatives often include the following collaborative efforts with your leadership team:

• Project initiation. Confirm expectations and review overall project scope, logistics, deliverables, timing, and progress reporting requirements.
• Fact-finding. Conduct a comprehensive review of relevant documents, perform interviews, host focus groups, or administer surveys to understand organizational needs, assess current leadership skills and gaps, and determine position requirements critical to the organization’s future.
• Collaborative work sessions. Surface key goals, activities, and success indicators for leadership.
• Plan or toolkit development. Develop specific succession plans, tools, or templates to support the organization.

Expansive Succession Planning Expertise

Deeply immersed in more than 30 industries, our professionals provide proactive succession planning solutions specific to the nuances, challenges, and operations of the sector in which you work—with plans customized to meet your unique needs.

We support a range of organization types—from small family-owned businesses to large public sector agencies, not-for-profit and tax-exempt organizations, and more.

We don’t simply provide routine templates; we determine appropriate solutions that will help build up your organization and provide foundations for long-term success—so you’re prepared to stay ahead of change and thrive under your new leadership.