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A succession planning checklist turns a notoriously unpredictable process into a structured one, giving committees a way to identify, cultivate and ultimately secure fresh talent while minimizing disruption during transitions. The need is pressing.
Spencer Stuart counted 168 new S&P 1500 CEOs in 2025, the most in more than 15 years, and Challenger, Gray and Christmas tracked 2,032 U.S. CEO exits across the same year.
Preparedness has not kept pace. According to the What Directors Think 2025 report from Diligent Institute, Corporate Board Member and FTI Consulting, only 21% of directors rated their CEO succession planning process as excellent, and 69% said the sudden departure of the CEO or a key executive would have significant consequences.
This guide covers how to build and maintain a succession plan that holds up under pressure:
The five phases run in order: preparation; analysis and planning; candidate development; transition planning; and execution and monitoring.
Identify a group of key stakeholders who will oversee the succession planning process. If developing a board succession plan, this is often the nominating and governance committee. C-level succession, on the other hand, is typically overseen by the CEO, other C-level leadership, the board of directors and representatives from HR.
Working within the committee, identify who is accountable for each aspect of succession planning. This includes identifying successors, managing the succession planning template and overseeing the final decision.
Succession planning should follow a structured process. Your committee should collaborate to formalize its approach. Consider the purpose and scope of succession planning, including any guidelines committee members should follow. Succession policies often touch on key issues like board composition and the organization's stance on diversity, equity and inclusion.
Who within the organization needs a succession plan? This could replace individuals already expressing departure plans, such as a board director anticipating retirement. However, it should also include C-suite and board positions with a high organizational impact. Your committee needs a plan if these valuable individuals depart unexpectedly.
Assess internal talent before beginning a broad external search. Review existing leadership at all levels to identify promising internal candidates. This can simplify the search or allow the committee to determine the organization's talent gaps and opportunities that a fresh candidate can fill.
A successful candidate will look different for each role. Consider the skills and competencies, experiences and values that best serve the organization. The skills you desire should also account for the gaps you need to fill. For example, if board responsibilities include areas where directors have weak technological capabilities, prioritizing directors with a tech background can make the board more effective.
Criteria should screen for contribution, not just credentials.
"Invest in merit-based leadership. When you invite a newcomer into your ranks, listen to them. Many people want to serve on boards, and not many understand or have what it takes. You need to be on the board for the right reasons and you need to be providing value," says Anastassia Lauterbach, technology expert and board member, in Diligent Institute's Risk and Opportunity Outlook.
Identify the likelihood of succession for specific roles. Consider turnover and skill gaps for each key position. Assess how unforeseen changes could affect the role. Your board committee should also evaluate how likely a board director or executive is to leave the company or whether the organization may need to take action based on poor performance. A consistent evaluation process and assessment questionnaires supply the raw data for this step.
Create a detailed profile and job description for each role. List its required competencies and objectives. While you may not need the descriptions immediately, they will help you visualize the right type of candidate to drive the organization forward. A board skills matrix helps here by mapping current director skills against the profiles you build, so gaps become visible. Build the profiles around where the organization expects to be in three to five years.
Compare the profile you created with external trends and your competitors. Does the CEO of a successful competitor come from a specific background? Are more companies in your industry appointing board chairs with a specific type of expertise? Use benchmarks to validate the needs you have already identified rather than as the sole basis for the decision.
Compare your profiles with internal and external candidates. Use performance reviews and leadership assessments to compare internal candidates with the ideal profile. Track external candidates to maintain a pipeline for essential positions.
A 9-box grid is a practical tool for this step. It plots each candidate's current performance against their future potential on a low/medium/high scale. The committee gains a shared visual map of where its talent actually stands. Combining the grid with succession planning frameworks can sort candidates into "ready-now" and "ready-later" successors and concentrate succession attention on the "stars" who score high on both axes. A simple version looks like this:
| Low performance | Medium performance | High performance | |
|---|---|---|---|
| High potential | Develop in current role | Ready-later candidate | Star: succession focus, often ready-now |
| Medium potential | Coach and monitor | Core contributor | Ready-later candidate |
| Low potential | Assess role fit | Solid performer | Valued specialist, not a succession priority |
If you have internal candidates with high potential, consider how you can cultivate their talent. This might include addressing skills gaps and preparing them for challenges through exposure to responsibilities their new position would call for. Preparing internal candidates smooths transitions because the organization already has successors ready if a board member or executive departs.
Identify training opportunities that could strengthen candidates' capabilities. Use mentors and executive coaching to address gaps in a candidate's profile. Pair each development plan with a named mentor and a review date so the training produces evidence of readiness rather than attendance records.
Pressure-test promising candidates. If the role you are considering them for has responsibilities they haven't been exposed to, rotate them into new roles or special projects. These cross-departmental experiences increase their awareness and understanding of the new functions they must tackle successfully.
Articulate your transition plan. This includes outlining how potential successors will move into their new roles over time. While you may not have that luxury if a company leader departs unexpectedly, taking a staggered approach to transition can be effective when managing retirements.
Test transition plans before a leader departs. Assign potential candidates an interim role or task them to act as if an emergency succession has occurred. This is an effective way to observe how your candidate will respond to the pressures of their potential new role.
The same discipline that governs strategic planning applies to leadership transitions.
"Always work with scenario planning, especially with different political and economic scenarios. Ensure that you have a core strategy and work on how it would be polished and shaped depending on the developments in each potential scenario. Understand what you can and cannot control," says Ana Dutra, an experienced public and private company director, in the same Risk and Opportunity Outlook report.
Emergency succession deserves its own element in your plan, distinct from long-term planned succession. An emergency plan covers a sudden vacancy and names an interim leader in advance. Research from Spencer Stuart notes that an interim CEO typically maintains strategy and leadership continuity and handles communications, which is distinct from a longer-term successor whose focus may be on strategy or driving change.
The same research identifies the most common interim leaders in emergency successions as the board chair, another director, the CFO, the COO and occasionally a division president or general counsel. Build a named-interim placeholder into your written plan for each critical role: Interim successor for [role]: ______.
Your emergency plan should also define a 30-day initial activation period. During those 30 days, formally transfer authority to the interim leader, notify the board, communicate with employees and investors, and schedule a board review of both the interim arrangement and the longer-term succession process.
Start preparing onboarding and integration plans for new leaders. Be specific about how you will orient them to their new role and the order in which they will take on new responsibilities. Sequencing responsibilities this way avoids overloading someone during their first weeks in the role.
Change can be unsettling, especially for employees who work directly with either the position you are filling or the candidate you're moving into a new role. Succession plans can also disgruntle employees who may have been eyeing the open role. Plan how you will communicate changes internally and externally to minimize disruption and gain buy-in from key stakeholders for your candidate of choice.
Investors and employees are key stakeholders in transition planning. Board members oversee the process. Conducting transparent succession processes makes stakeholders feel valued and builds their confidence in the integrity of the process.
Document the successors and estimated timelines for each role. Add contingency plans for unexpected departures. This gives you a trusted resource for managing changes in key positions. Allow this document to evolve as organizational needs and available candidates change.
Present your succession plans to the board and secure their approval as part of its governance role. Their approval validates the succession planning process and its initial results without confirming the candidates. Gaining their buy-in will help smooth future transitions.
Your succession plan should be a living document. The candidates you've cultivated could leave the organization or change their career path. Likewise, individuals who plan to retire could decide to remain in the workforce. Review and update the full plan at least every six months, with lighter quarterly checks on readiness ratings for your most critical roles.
Track a small set of measures at each review so the committee and the board can gauge successor readiness and documentation quality:
As executive success profiles evolve, keep skills criteria current too. AI fluency is now part of that conversation.
Use the CEO succession planning template to assign ownership, document candidate requirements and prepare for leadership transitions.
Preparedness of this kind is what separates an orderly transition from a scramble.
"Resilience is key. To build resilience, an organization needs to both acknowledge known risks and appreciate the reality of uncertainty. Scenario planning can help to ensure an organization is as prepared as possible when the unexpected hits," says Lisa Bougie, C-suite executive, board director and advisor at Plan C Advisors, from the Risk and Opportunity Outlook report.
Maintaining that readiness becomes harder as candidate data, reviews and approvals multiply across committees and review cycles. Centralized technology closes those coordination gaps and keeps readiness decisions current.
A succession planning checklist provides structure, but tracking candidates across documents and spreadsheets makes evaluations inconsistent and approvals difficult to follow. Diligent Boards brings centralized document storage, secure board review, e-signatures, voting and full audit trails into one coordinated process, so sensitive succession materials stay organized as plans move from committee review to board approval.
Organizations apply these capabilities according to their governance stage:
Flexco took this approach with Diligent Boards and streamlined how its governance materials move between preparation and board review. The documented audit trail gives committees a consistent record of reviews, votes and approvals, while centralized records make it easier to update candidate information and revisit readiness ratings at each scheduled review.
The urgency is not theoretical. According to What Directors Think 2026, 51% of directors named executive turnover and succession the human capital topic demanding the greatest board attention. Structured succession oversight depends on records that stay current between meetings, not on spreadsheets that age between review cycles. Request a demo to see how Diligent Boards keeps succession records, approvals and readiness reviews in one place.
Authoritative sources vary on the count, from four steps to ICMA's eight-step guide, with several government frameworks, including the OPM succession model, using five. Diligent's succession planning process uses five phases across 21 steps: preparation; analysis and planning; candidate development; transition planning; and execution and monitoring.
Succession planning often requires a multiyear preparation window, and CEO succession can run longer. Spencer Stuart recommends boards begin two to three years before an anticipated transition, while Russell Reynolds Associates advises four to five years, with intensive assessment in the final 18–24 months.
Three tactics can help: Present a data-driven case aligned to organizational goals, frame succession planning as an investment rather than an expense and start small with one leader and one role to demonstrate value before a full rollout. SHRM's Executive Network adds that making successor identification visible helps other leaders understand bench strength and provide feedback.
Ready to keep succession records, approvals and readiness reviews current? Schedule a demo to see Diligent Boards in action.
