Finding the Gold: Why Succession Planning Season Gets People Wrong
It is not going to be long before end of year reviews and succession planning occurs. The one where businesses sit down, look at their org chart, and ask the question: who's next?
Succession planning season has a habit of turning into a talent hunt where everyone who's good at their job gets quietly filed under "future manager." It feels productive. It looks good in a board pack and it is, more often than not, a mistake.
Here's the principle I work from: no one goes to work to do a bad job. People want to do well. That's not naivety, it's twenty years of watching it play out. But wanting to do well at your job and wanting to manage other people doing theirs are two completely different ambitions and this time of year is when businesses conflate them fastest.
Alchemy, at its core, was never really about turning lead into gold. It was about understanding what something is actually made of before you try to transform it. That's the mistake most succession planning makes, it tries to turn people into managers before anyone's checked what they're made of, or whether that's the transformation they wanted at all.
The gold isn't always leadership
When we talk about "developing our people," there's an unspoken assumption baked into most succession plans: that the goal is management. So we build the plan, spot the potential, and start grooming people for the next rung up, without ever asking if that's the rung they wanted.
Moving your best technical performer into management is the most well-worn career path in business. It's also one of the most damaging, when it happens on assumption rather than desire. Someone gets a chance to step up, cover a gap, run a project, act up for a few weeks. They rise to it, because most people do when asked directly. Because a step up usually comes with more money, it's very rare anyone turns it down. But rising to a challenge once is a different thing entirely from carrying it permanently. That distinction is exactly the one succession planning tends to skip.
What over-promoting actually costs you
Push someone into a role before they're ready — or before they've actually chosen it — and the fallout isn't limited to that one person.
On the individual: They start questioning their own capability, and it usually breaks down into three gaps, skills (do they have the right training, on the systems or equipment involved), knowledge (do they understand the process and the language of the role), and experience (have they done anything like this before, or is it all new).
On the team: The dynamic shifts twice over. The people they used to work alongside now report to them, and that creates real uncertainty, will this person remember every offhand comment or gripe from before? At the same time, the new manager's old technical output disappears from the team's numbers, and everyone else is quietly expected to absorb the gap.
On the business: This is where it compounds. A manager who's out of their depth doesn't just struggle quietly, their team sees it, feels it, and the wider business notices too. And here's the part that really costs you: everyone else watching starts thinking twice about ever "stepping up" themselves. One badly-supported promotion doesn't just risk one manager. It can quietly switch off ambition across the business.
There's a Japanese art form, kintsugi, where broken pottery is repaired with gold, the crack isn't hidden, it's highlighted, and the piece ends up more valuable for having been broken and mended well. Badly-managed promotions crack people. That's not avoidable; growth rarely happens without some strain. What determines the outcome is whether the crack gets filled with gold or just left to spread. The support you put in after the stretch is what decides which one you get.
What succession planning should actually be doing
None of this means don't develop people. It means develop the right people, in the right direction, at the right pace. Three things, in order:
1. See the potential — properly. Look for leadership signals beyond technical or client-facing skill: how someone behaves with colleagues, whether others naturally turn to them, whether they take the lead unprompted. Technical excellence and leadership potential are not the same signal, and succession plans built on the former alone are guessing.
2. Empower them to consider it. Before you commit anyone to a plan, tell them plainly that you see potential in them. This does two things at once, it lets them know you're watching, and it plants the idea that this path is genuinely open to them. Crucially, it also gives you a read on whether they actually want it.
3. Give them a real, bounded opportunity. Cover for someone on leave. Run one project with visible stakes. Make the ask lower-pressure precisely because of the groundwork you've already laid and always put a timeframe on it. A trial with an exit is not the same as a promotion with no way back, and people need to know which one they're being offered.
The step most plans miss entirely
Not everyone wants to develop into something else and that's not a problem to fix.
Plenty of people find real satisfaction in doing the job they were hired to do, doing it well, and going home. Your succession plan needs both: the people actively reaching for more, and the people who are your steady, expert core. A business built entirely on climbers has no one left minding the shop.
Identifying "the gold" was never the finish line, that's just the discovery. What actually determines whether a promotion succeeds or quietly damages a team is what happens after: the support with skills, with knowledge, and most overlooked of all with mindset, as someone makes that change.
That's the part most succession plans leave out. It's also the part that decides whether this year's plan builds your business, or just moves your problems up a level. Alchemy was never about the raw material. It was about the process that reveals what was valuable all along.
