Most organisations know who their strong people are. The harder question is what those people are being developed for.
Talent reviews give organisations a shared language around performance and potential and help identify who the organisation wants to invest in. Where many get stuck is in the next step: answering the question of potential for what. Someone may be rated highly in a nine-box or similar framework, but the rating alone does not show what kind of responsibility, scope or complexity that person could take on, or what it would take to get them there.
This is where succession planning adds focus. Talent reviews show who the organisation wants to develop, and succession planning connects that discussion to the roles the business depends on most. Not every role needs the same level of attention. The focus should be on roles where a vacancy would disrupt the business. These are often roles where skills are scarce or relationships and knowledge would be hard to replace quickly.
For each critical role, ask what it will need to deliver over the next two to three years. Which experiences and skills are critical? Which decisions sit there? Which relationships matter most? What would be hard for the business to replace if the role became vacant? A general manager with deep customer relationships in one market is a good example. The role may look manageable on paper, but what would be required for someone new to build that knowledge and trust?
Once the critical roles are clear, the talent conversation becomes more focused. The discussion does not need to give everyone the same level of attention and the deepest conversation should be around the people the organisation needs to retain or develop for future responsibility. Some will be high potentials, but others will be key people whose value sits in their current role. They may not be moving towards a bigger role but losing them would still create a real gap in the business.
From there, the conversation becomes more specific. Who could build the capabilities and experiences needed for a critical role, and on what timeline? This takes the discussion beyond who is performing well or who has potential. It requires the leadership team to be clear about what they are preparing someone for. It also makes development easier to plan, because it is linked to a future role or a clearer set of responsibilities.
It is also worth checking whether the people identified as high potential appear anywhere in the succession discussion. If they do not, ask what the organisation is developing them for. Without some view of future direction, it is hard to build a development plan that makes sense for the organisation and for the person.
Where internal pipelines are thin, talent acquisition should be part of the conversation well before a role opens. If a critical role has no realistic internal successor, the organisation needs time to plan. That might mean accelerating development, adjusting the succession timeline, or starting to build an external pipeline. Finding out after someone resigns leaves fewer options and often means hiring under pressure or leaving the role open for longer.
The development work itself is where the long game really begins. For most senior roles, readiness is built through experience over time. That may include cross-functional exposure, larger scope, leading change, building commercial judgement, or other stretch assignments linked to the future role. Training can support this development, but it rarely creates readiness on its own.
Succession planning works best when HR leads the process and the leadership team owns the outcomes. That sounds simple, but in practice, this is often where momentum is lost. The succession slate gets agreed, the development actions are written down, but then the business moves on. A year later the same names come up with the same gaps, because the experiences that were supposed to happen were pushed aside or were never clearly owned by anyone in the first place.
The organisations that build real pipelines keep the talent agenda alive between annual reviews by tracking progress and being willing to have an honest conversation when a plan is not working. That consistent follow-up over time is what makes succession planning work. It usually takes longer than organisations expect. Building the people the business will need, before it needs them, is a difficult and valuable contribution HR can make and one that is easy to defer when the day-to-day gets busy.
At Achieve CTC, we help organisations connect talent review and succession planning into work that drives real development. If you are working through any part of this, we would be glad to think it through with you.