Your company has a succession plan. Great. But does anyone know who is developing the next generation of leaders and how?
In most consumer and retail organisations, the honest answer is not really. Boards talk strategy. HR runs the process. And operational leaders stay focused on running the business. The result? Succession planning that looks good on paper and quietly fails in practice.
The problem is the gap between strategic awareness and day-to-day practice. Boards and senior management are genuinely talking about succession. But when you look at the operational indicators - who is actively being developed, how ready internal candidates really are, are managers held accountable for growing talent - the picture becomes much more moderate.
It's the difference between succession planning as a governance exercise and succession planning as a living leadership practice.
Because leadership is constantly absorbed by operational complexity. Supply chains, pricing pressure, store operations, rapid product cycles. When a commercial leader must choose between hitting next quarter's numbers and investing time in a potential successor two levels below, the choice is rarely the latter.
This isn't negligence. It's a structural problem: developing talent is invisible in the short term and critical in the long term. That combination makes it easy to deprioritise, until a key person leaves and you realise there is no one ready to step in.
You embed it into the accountability framework for leaders, not just HR. That means asking: who are your top three successors? What specific development actions are underway? What is the timeline to readiness? And then tracking the answers quarter after quarter.
Some organisations go further and link a portion of senior leader evaluation to the strength of their talent pipeline, not just business results. It changes the conversation immediately. Developing successors stops being a "nice to have" and becomes part of the job.
The organisations that do this well share a common trait: succession thinking is embedded in commercial roles, not just HR processes. It's the business unit head who owns the pipeline, not the talent team. The HR function supports, challenges, and facilitates, but the accountability sits with line leadership.
Practically, this means successors are given real stretch assignments, not just training programmes. They are exposed to board-level conversations, and their development is reviewed with the same rigour as financial performance.
The question to ask your own organisation is simple: if three of your key leaders left tomorrow, who steps up — and are they truly ready?
If the answer requires a pause, the gap between governance and execution is already costing you.