The talent management process starts with recruitment, selection, and onboarding; proceeds with performance management, talent development programs, and high-potential identification; and integrates succession planning, leadership development, and executive coaching. Yes, this high-level overview of talent management necessarily leaves out detail and nuance. But the point here is that effective succession planning is dependent on the health of your overall talent strategy and processes and on connection to the business strategy. In other words, if your organization lacks effective processes for leadership development or for identifying and developing high potentials, your succession planning efforts aren't likely to succeed either.

Treating succession planning as part of the talent management process—and as a business process—helps reduce the perception that succession planning is a one-time event, as opposed to an ongoing process.

Identifying and developing future leaders on an ongoing basis means that you continually strengthen your leadership pipeline and mitigate the risk of leadership gaps. This strengthens your organization's ability to retain talent. Not to mention, organizations that move too slowly in offering leadership development opportunities could lose high-potential talent to what candidates perceive as better opportunities elsewhere.

Start Leadership Development Early

Building a strong pipeline requires investing in development across multiple levels of the organization, well before specific succession demands arise. Organizations that prioritize early leadership development, especially with enhanced opportunities for high potentials, create stronger benches of succession-ready candidates. Furthermore, data-driven development approaches help address competency and skill gaps or personality risk factors that might derail a leader's performance after promotion.

A common challenge among leaders is recognizing that behaviors that made them successful at one level might be counterproductive at the next level. For example, a leader whose collaborative style may have served them well in lower and midlevel leadership roles might need to learn to take unpopular stances at higher levels. Pairing personality assessment with 360 feedback gives leaders critical insight about their reputations and which behaviors need adaptation. When combined with stretch assignments or rotational experiences, these tools reveal exactly which competencies require development for the leader to succeed upon advancement.

Within this integrated framework, one critical action is distinguishing between current performance and future potential. Too many organizations conflate these distinct concepts, leading to costly succession mistakes. It's true that the best predictor of future performance is past performance—but only when the criteria are consistent. When future roles include increased scope and complexity, trends of high performance can be used in screening for potential but they aren't sufficient to identify it.

The unique context of every critical role has implications for the competencies required.