One of HBO’s most watched and iconic series is “Succession”, a drama about the future of a media company and the succession battle facing its founder, tycoon Logan Roy. Three of his children fight to become the next CEO, alongside long-serving executives who believe they have earned the right after years of loyalty.
What makes the show so gripping is that it is never entirely clear who is best suited for the role. Even Logan himself is not sure, and he tests his candidates in unorthodox ways, sometimes brushing up against the limits of integrity and social values, and sometimes rewarding the very behaviour a healthy organisation should discourage.
In the real world, the challenge is not so different. Companies face genuine difficulty when succession moments arrive, and everyone recognises how critical and strategic getting it right can be, even though candidates are rarely perfect or fully ready.
The root of the problem lies in detecting the right profile and the right capabilities, the ones that will match what the organisation actually needs for the future rather than what it needed yesterday. A Corporate Executive Board study found that 50 to 70 percent of executives fail within the first 18 months of a promotion, regardless of whether they were promoted from inside the organisation or hired from outside it.
Five challenges recur again and again.
1. Clarity about the profile: The first is a lack of clarity about the profile the new leader needs. Planning for a future succession means deeply understanding today’s business strategy and where it is heading, so that the requirements and selection criteria are clear from the outset. Too often, instead of doing this work, organisations default to looking for leaders who resemble the person retiring, or who fit the demands of today’s success rather than tomorrow’s. Both shortcuts may seem efficient, but they quietly anchor the organisation to its past.
2. Identification and evaluation: The second challenge is building a correct process for identifying and evaluating candidates. Given how critical these positions are, and their impact on the wider organisation, two things matter most. One is multidimensional input: structured interviews, 360-degree evaluations, psychometric tests and other sources that together build a holistic picture of how a candidate manages the business, the people and the stakeholders around them.
The other is a complex, simulated future situation assessment, where candidates work through the pressures of the new role inside a simulator. These virtual exercises are excellent at revealing a candidate in action, and they provide a great deal of information about how someone genuinely thinks and behaves under pressure, rather than how they present themselves in an interview.
3. Creating readiness: It is unlikely that any internal candidate will be fully ready from day one, so much of the success of a succession process comes down to deliberate preparation: training, coaching, stretch assignments, special projects, and moments created specifically for candidates to experiment, learn and grow before the stakes become real.
4. Transparency of the process: The fourth challenge, and a theme that runs through all four seasons of Succession, is the lack of transparency. Its absence breeds internal wars between candidates, confusion across the organisation, and a steady loss of value as no one stays focused on the actual business. Transparency is never easy to achieve, not least because of legitimate confidentiality concerns, but the better planned and communicated the process, the fewer the doubts and problems that follow it.
5. Onboarding into the role: The final challenge is how to bring someone into the position in a way that sets them up to succeed rather than merely survive. The first years in a new role are decisive: a new CEO must build trust, credibility and vision with their team in order to consolidate the business and drive the strategy forward with conviction.
The objective in this period should be to reduce risk by creating a safe zone where the new leader can explore different approaches, evaluate challenges openly, communicate to diverse audiences, establish relationships and dynamics, develop their executive team, and make proposals and decisions during that critical first year. This process is often reinforced by keeping the previous CEO involved for a period, or by bringing in an executive coach to support the transition.
To transfer corporate culture successfully and stay prepared for any type of transition, organisations need to treat succession planning as a fundamental part of their business strategy, not an afterthought reserved for moments of crisis.
With a holistic, transparent process, anchored in a clear profile of what success looks like both today and tomorrow, it is entirely possible to guarantee the organisation’s future.
Dr Philios Andreou Sphika is the Deputy CEO and President of the Other Markets Unit, including Thailand and Asia, at BTS Group, a leading global strategy execution consulting firm specialising in the people side of strategy. For executives who are interested in connecting, Dr Philios can be reached at philios.andreou@bts.com or visit his LinkedIn profile.