The Skills Your Succession Plan Can't Afford to Ignore

Most executive succession plans are very good at identifying who is next in line. They are less good at answering a harder question: What exactly does that person need to learn before they are ready?

The tactical skills are usually easy enough to identify: how to manage a P&L, how to run the operation, how to sell the service, how to manage the accounts. The harder skills are the ones that make an executive exceptional: how do you nurture a client without over-pursuing them? How do you know when to push and when to wait? How do you represent the brand in a room full of important people? How do you have executive presence? How do you know what not to say?

These skills can feel mysterious because they are rarely written down. They are absorbed through proximity, observation, and experience, but that doesn't mean they have to remain mysterious. And if you truly want to set your successors up for success, then they need to be brought to the foreground.

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Divide Once: Name the Intangibles

One of the most useful exercises a leadership team can do is to stop talking about "soft skills" as one giant, fuzzy category and actually break them apart. Get the senior team in a room with a whiteboard and ask: What are the intangible skills that make the exceptional executives in this room exceptional?

Put every answer on its own Post-it note. Maybe it's executive presence, maybe it's judgment, client stewardship, or knowing how to disagree without creating friction. Maybe it's reading a room or knowing when to push for the sale, and when to wait.

Once you get everything out and onto Post-its, then comes the harder part: prioritise. Look at the entire collection and identify the top ten skills that matter most for the next generation of leaders in your succession pipeline. The rest aren't necessarily unimportant; they simply don't make the cut for this particular purpose.

Divide Twice: Indicate a Learning Path

Now take those ten soft skills and divide them again. On the left side, cluster all the skills that can be learned through modeling. On the right side, cluster the skills that require designed instruction. By separating these two groups, you take a first step in orchestrating them coming to life.

We often assume that if a senior executive demonstrates something consistently, a younger executive will naturally pick it up, but this is not necessarily the case. Modeling behaviors need to be called out because they require intentionality from both the demonstrator and the absorber.

If the skill can be modeled, you need to create proximity. Put emerging leaders in the room and let them watch. Let them observe how senior people handle difficult clients, navigate disagreement, make decisions, and represent the organisation. But don't leave the transfer entirely to chance. Senior leaders should become conscious of what they are modeling and create opportunities for younger leaders to observe those behaviors repeatedly.

Then, for skills that require instruction, take the time to develop proper instructional design, including a project plan and an actual curriculum. Answer the critical questions of effective learning. Who will teach it? What content or intellectual property will you use? When will it happen? Where will it happen? What does "good" look like?

Build a Feedback Loop

Then comes the part succession plans often overlook: tracking whether the skills are actually developing. You can't identify ten critical capabilities, expose someone to them once, and declare the work finished.

As a team, decide how often you'll check in. How will you support the steps forward and steps backward that are the natural part of development? Will these skills become part of performance evaluations? Will there be formal assessments? Will senior leaders provide observations and feedback? The point is to turn something vague into something visible enough to nurture over time.

A well-rounded leader is a beautiful thing to behold. It is a gift to every client and colleague. When succession planning includes not just what the next generation needs to know, but how they need to think, communicate, judge, and lead, you're doing more than preparing someone for a job. You're preparing them to carry forward what makes your organisation exceptional.

This was also published on Juliet Funt's LinkedIn.