It's a question that every organisation has to face: how are we going to fill the gap left when a key executive moves on?

Look at the big picture. “Succession planning is a subset of talent management,” says Simon Mitchell, a director of the HR consultancy DDI. “Planning how to fill the big roles is part of it but by no means all of it.”

Keep it going. “It can’t just be an annual one-off event where people sit at the table then say ‘there, it’s done for the year’,” says Neil Wilson, the managing director of Badenoch & Clark, a recruitment agency. “It has to be an ongoing process.” “You can’t assume that people are always up for what it is going to take for them to move into a more senior role”, says Lesley Uren, the chief executive of Jackson Samuel, a talent management consultancy.

Whose job is mission-critical? “Assess the extent to which a job role contributes to the organisation’s ability to keep going and how difficult it would be to replace someone,” Uren says. For example, relatively junior but highly specialised staff in R&D roles who provide unique skills that create the company’s competitive advantage might be more difficult to replace than a senior finance officer.

Prepare a pool of talent. Identify a group of talented potential leaders, then work on developing their strengths and experience so that you are not relying on one person to fill a particular role. This also offers protection against the risk that a designated successor is poached by a rival just as you need him or her.

Be open-minded. “Saying that as MD my job is to identify my successor [is too limited],” Wilson says. “Yes, I need to do that, but I need to do much more as well. I need to look at how the job might change, how it might be split into two jobs, how it might need people to run things on a country or regional basis.” Part of this is seeing top brass leaving as an opportunity as well as a threat. “Losing great people is never a positive, but it’s certainly an opportunity.”

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