A succession planning template you can fill in today
This succession planning template covers the 5 fields every plan needs: the critical role, its current holder, named successors, each successor's readiness, and the development step that closes the gap. Below it sit a filled-in example, a 9-box grid, an emergency variant and a checklist for your talent review.
What a succession plan has to answer
- A succession planning template records 5 things per role: the seat, its holder, successors, readiness and the development step
- Readiness is a date, not a compliment. "Ready in 1 to 2 years" is a claim you can check
- A named successor with no funded development action and no review date is a list, not a plan
- "No internal successor at any level" is a finding, not a failure. Write it down and act on it
- Worked examples of succession planning sit below, with a real gap and a next step in every row
The succession plan template
CRITICAL ROLE: [title] CURRENT HOLDER: [role holder, or Vacant] WHY IT IS CRITICAL: [what stops or slows if this seat empties] RISK OF VACANCY: [High / Medium / Low, and why] SUCCESSOR 1 Who: [current job title, not a name, in a shared doc] Readiness: [Ready now / 1 to 2 years / 3 or more years] Evidence: [what you observed that supports that rating] Gap: [the 1 or 2 things missing for this seat] Development action: [assignment, coaching or exposure that closes it] Owner: [the person accountable for that action] Check-in date: [date] SUCCESSOR 2 [same 7 lines] SUCCESSOR 3 [same 7 lines, or: none identified] NO INTERNAL SUCCESSOR AT ANY READINESS LEVEL? [Yes / No] If yes, external search opened: [Yes / No, date] KNOWLEDGE TO TRANSFER: [what only the holder knows, and to whom] INTERIM COVER: [who holds the seat on day 1 if it empties] PLAN OWNER: [one named role] NEXT REVIEW DATE: [date]
How to build a succession plan in 5 steps
- List the roles, not the people Rank every seat by what breaks if it empties tomorrow. Seniority is a poor proxy. A single maintenance lead or a sole payroll administrator can outrank a vice president. Aim for 8 to 15 critical roles on a first pass, not the whole org chart.
- Write the criteria for the seat before you look at anyone List what the role actually needs, in observable terms. Written criteria applied the same way to everyone is both the fair practice and the defensible one. "Has run a budget over [size]" beats "executive presence".
- Name candidates against those criteria, evidence first Go criterion by criterion and record what you have seen each person do. If a criterion has no evidence behind it, mark it unproven rather than assuming. Two people rate independently, then compare, then talk.
- Set a readiness date and one development action Convert each gap into a single action with an owner and a date. One funded assignment moves a person further than 4 listed intentions nobody owns. "Runs the [region] close for 2 quarters, owner [role], from [month]."
- Put the review date in the calendar before anyone leaves the room Reopen the plan whenever a named successor resigns or a critical role changes shape. A plan nobody reopens describes an organisation that no longer exists.
Which succession planning template to use
| Template | Use it when | What it names | Review cadence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Role-based succession plan | You have a handful of critical seats and want one page each. | The seat, its holder, 1 to 3 successors, readiness and development. | Annually, and whenever a named successor leaves. |
| Executive succession planning template | The seat is a C-level role and the decision sits with the board. | The same fields plus the interim holder and the board's decision path. | Annually, as a standing board agenda item. |
| Board succession planning template | You are filling board seats, committee chairs or the chair. | Seats, tenure, the skills the board lacks and who covers each gap. | Annually, before the nominations cycle. |
| Emergency succession plan | You need an answer for an unplanned absence starting tomorrow. | Who holds authority from hour 1, what they may decide, who is told. | Twice a year, because contact details rot. |
| Talent pool plan | Several similar seats will open and you want a bench, not a backup. | A group developed for a family of roles rather than one named seat. | Annually, alongside the talent review. |
| Individual development plan | A successor has been named and the gap now needs closing. | One person's route from current state to ready, with dates. | Quarterly, with the named owner. |
A filled-in succession planning example
Sole signatory on banking, owns the audit relationship and the year-end close. Risk of vacancy: High.
Successor 1: Senior Manager, Financial Reporting. Ready in 1 to 2 years. Evidence: ran the last 2 year-end closes and presented to the audit committee twice.
Gap: no treasury or banking exposure. Action: co-signs from [month], owner Head of Finance.
Holds the regulatory site licence and 20 years of undocumented process knowledge. Risk of vacancy: High.
Successor 1: Production Supervisor, Nights. Ready in 3 or more years. Evidence: covered 6 weeks of leave with no safety incidents and no missed shipments.
Gap: licence qualification and budget ownership. Action: enrol by [date], owner Operations Director.
The only person who has deployed the payments service. Risk of vacancy: Medium, rising while the knowledge stays in one head.
Successor 1: Senior Engineer, Platform. Ready now for the technical scope. Evidence: led the last 3 incident reviews and wrote the current runbook.
Gap: has never managed anyone. Action: mentors 2 graduates for 2 quarters, owner Engineering Manager.
Accountable for clinical standards, rosters and regulator contact across 4 units. Risk of vacancy: High.
Successor 1: Unit Manager, Surgical. Ready in 1 to 2 years. Successor 2: Clinical Educator. Ready in 3 or more years, first time in a line role.
Gap: neither has led a regulator inspection. Action: both shadow the next one, owner Director of Nursing.
Personally holds the 5 largest accounts in the region. Risk of vacancy: High, because the relationships leave with the person.
No internal successor at any readiness level. Evidence: the 3 candidates considered have never carried a team quota or run a renewal.
Action: external search opened [date], plus a 2-person account handover starting now.
Nonprofit chief executive. Holds the funder relationships and reports to the board. Risk of vacancy: High.
Successor 1: Director of Programmes. Ready in 1 to 2 years. Evidence: led the last funding renewal and presents to the board quarterly.
Gap: no finance or audit exposure. Action: joins the finance committee, owner Board Chair.
Readiness is a date, not a compliment
The word "ready" is where most succession plans quietly stop being useful. It gets used as praise, so it attaches to the people who are visible rather than the people who could do the job. Turning it into a time horizon fixes that, because a date is a claim somebody can check against evidence in 12 months.
The scale we recommend has 4 levels: Ready now, Ready in 1 to 2 years, Ready in 3 or more years, and Not a candidate for this role. No body sets a standard scale, so use your own if it already works. The sequence matters more than the wording. Write down what each level means before anyone is rated, then make every rating point to something you observed.
Readiness ratings, and what each one has to mean
| Readiness | What it means | What evidence supports it | What happens next |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ready now | Could take the seat this quarter with normal handover, not a rescue. | Has already covered the role, or holds an equivalent seat elsewhere in the organisation. | Tell them. An unspoken successor can resign before you use the plan. |
| Ready in 1 to 2 years | One or two named gaps, each closable by a real assignment. | Strong in most of the written criteria, with a specific area never yet tested. | Fund one development action with an owner and a check-in date. |
| Ready in 3 or more years | The trajectory is right and the experience base is not there yet. | Early evidence on some criteria, no exposure to the scope of the seat. | Give scope now, not training later. Review at the next cycle. |
| Not a candidate for this role | Not for this seat. It says nothing about the person's value elsewhere. | The criteria the seat needs do not match what the person does well. | Say it once, internally, and keep them out of this seat's list. |
The 9-box grid
9-box grid A 3 by 3 talent review matrix. One axis is performance, the other is potential, and every person being discussed is placed in 1 of the 9 boxes before succession decisions are made.
It is one succession planning framework you are likely to meet, and it is a conversation starter rather than an output. Box names vary between organisations, so agree what each axis level means in writing first.
The principle
The grid does not make the decision. Write what each axis level means, have 2 people rate independently, then meet. A box with no agreed definition behind it is just an opinion in a nicer shape.
Succession planning checklist
- Critical roles ranked by what breaks, not by seniority
- Criteria for each seat written down before any name was attached
- At least 2 successors named per role, or the gap recorded as a finding
- Readiness levels defined in writing and shared with everyone rating
- Every rating points to something someone actually observed
- One development action per successor, with a named owner and a date
- A knowledge transfer line for each critical role, naming who receives it
- An interim authority named for day 1 of an unplanned absence
- The next review date in the calendar before the meeting ends
What makes a succession plan fail
Do
- Separate the plan from the promise in writing, and say so to the people on it
- Rate against the written criteria independently, before anyone talks
- Fund exactly 1 development action per successor and put a name on it
- Record "no internal successor" as a finding and open the search
- Set the review date in the meeting, not afterwards by email
Do not
- Letting the plan be read as a promotion promise nobody meant to make
- Rating on loyalty, tenure or visibility instead of the criteria you wrote
- Naming a successor and funding no development, then calling it a plan
- Writing it once and reopening it only when someone has already resigned
- Using "potential" to mean "reminds me of me at that stage"
Fairness, and why the criteria come first
A succession plan is a set of promotion decisions made early. EEOC guidance on race and color discrimination says that in hiring and promotion decisions, employers must apply the same selection criteria to persons of different races, and apply them in the same way. It treats vague, subjective advancement criteria as a risk area, citing managers who relied on wording such as a "clean cut image" with no objective support.
The development side is covered too. That guidance says work assignments must be distributed in a nondiscriminatory manner, and notes that an employee's success may depend on integration into important workplace networks. The stretch project you hand a named successor is one of those assignments. This is guidance on promotion and work assignments, not on succession planning by name, so read it as the standard your plan is judged against.
Which lands on the same practice the rest of this page argues for. Criteria written before names, ratings tied to something observed, and a record of why each decision went the way it did are what make a plan both fair and explainable later.
Emergency succession plan
ROLE: [title]
EFFECTIVE: From the hour the absence is confirmed
INTERIM HOLDER: [role, not a name, plus a named backup]
MAY DECIDE ALONE: [spend limit, staffing, client commitments]
MUST ESCALATE: [decisions reserved to the board, owner or CEO]
NOTIFY, IN ORDER: 1. [internal leadership]
2. [the team]
3. [board or owner]
4. [clients, regulators or funders if required]
ACCESS AND RECORDS: [where credentials, contracts and licences sit]
[who else already holds that access today]
REVIEW THE ARRANGEMENT: [date, usually 30 days in]
PLAN OWNER: [role]
LAST CHECKED: [date]
When there is no internal successor
A plain-English brief becoming a structured search: the requirements are read out of the sentence and the results are ranked against them.
The Cognitive has no succession planning feature. No 9-box, no development plans, no performance data. It sources, screens and tracks people outside your organisation. The one place it fits this page is the finding above: a critical role with no internal successor at any readiness level is an external search, and it should start well before the seat is empty.
Next steps inside your own process
Interviewing an internal successor · Leadership interview questions · Scorecard generator · Employee turnover rates
Frequently asked questions
What should a succession planning template include?
Five fields per critical role: the role, its current holder, named successors, each successor's readiness, and the development action that closes the gap. Add an owner and a next review date or nothing moves. The US Office of Personnel Management asks its Succession Management Plans to include strategies to meet succession targets, an implementation plan, and an evaluation accountability plan.
How do you build a succession plan?
List the roles rather than the people, ranked by what breaks if the seat empties. Write the criteria for each seat before you look at anyone. Name candidates against those criteria with evidence. Set a readiness date and one funded development action with an owner. Then put the review date in the calendar before the meeting ends.
What is an example of a succession plan?
A worked row looks like this. Critical role: Head of Finance, sole banking signatory, high vacancy risk. Successor 1: Senior Manager, Financial Reporting, ready in 1 to 2 years, evidenced by running the last 2 year-end closes. Gap: no treasury exposure. Action: co-signs from next month, owner Head of Finance. That is one sample succession plan row; the succession plan examples above follow the same shape across 6 roles.
What is the difference between a succession plan and a replacement chart?
A replacement chart names a backup for each seat and stops there. A succession plan adds readiness and a development action, so it says when the backup would actually be usable. A talent pool develops a bench for a family of similar roles instead of one named seat. Those 3 succession planning models are the ones you will meet most often.
What goes in a board succession planning template?
Board seats and committee chairs, each director's tenure, the skills the board is missing, and who covers each gap if a seat empties. CEO succession belongs in the board's version rather than the management plan. SEC Staff Legal Bulletin 14E (CF), dated 27 October 2009, states the staff will generally not allow a company to exclude a shareholder proposal focused on CEO succession planning as ordinary business.
How often should a succession plan be reviewed?
There is no standard cadence and no source we can cite sets one. Our recommendation is annually, alongside your talent review, with the plan reopened immediately whenever a named successor resigns, a critical role changes shape, or an emergency arrangement is used. Emergency plans need checking more often than that, because contact details and access lists go stale fastest.
How do you rate successor readiness?
Use a time horizon rather than a compliment. We recommend 4 levels: Ready now, Ready in 1 to 2 years, Ready in 3 or more years, and Not a candidate for this role. Define what each level means in writing before anyone is rated, and require every rating to point to something observed. EEOC guidance treats vague, subjective advancement criteria as a risk area.
Where can I download a succession planning template?
The template and the emergency variant on this page are on the page itself, so you can copy them without giving an email address. If you want a file, Smartsheet lists 8 succession planning templates in Excel, Word, PDF and Smartsheet formats, Indeed offers one in PDF and Word, and AIHR offers a collection as a ZIP. Check each site for what it asks for before downloading.
Does The Cognitive do succession planning?
No. The Cognitive is hiring software: AI candidate sourcing, email and SMS outreach, live AI video interviews with a scorecard, and pipeline tracking with ATS integration. It has no succession planning module, no 9-box grid and no development plans. The one overlap is the finding this page keeps returning to. When a critical role has no internal successor, the next step is an external search.
Explore: Internal interview questions · What is a chief people officer · Employee turnover rates · Interview feedback examples