The Succession Planning Conversation Most CEOs Avoid
July 8, 2026
Most succession plans do not fail because of bad planning. They fail because the conversation was avoided for too long.
In Nigerian businesses, this conversation is particularly charged. Succession touches on family dynamics in family businesses, on the fears of existing leaders about their own relevance, and on a general discomfort with planning for departure. The result: most boards and leadership teams agree that succession planning is important, and most have not done it.
Here is what failure looks like in practice.
The three most common failure modes
Critical roles with no depth behind them. When a key person leaves, the organisation scrambles. Knowledge that lived in one person's head is gone. The replacement hire takes six months to find. The new person then takes another six to twelve months to be genuinely effective. That is an 18-month gap in the capability of a critical function.
Succession plans that exist on paper but not in practice. Many companies have succession plans that name internal candidates as "ready now" or "ready in 1-2 years." But those candidates have not been told. They have not been given the developmental experiences or stretch assignments that would make them genuinely ready. The plan is a document, not a programme.
Overreliance on a single leader. This is the CEO risk, but it is not only the CEO. It is the CFO who is the only person who understands the cash flow model. It is the head of sales whose relationships are the relationships. It is the technical lead whose architecture knowledge is undocumented. Single points of failure exist at every level of most organisations.
What actually works
A succession plan that holds has three components.
First, identify the roles that are critical to your continuity: the ones where losing the person creates a genuine business crisis, not just a headache. This is usually a smaller list than executives expect.
Second, for each critical role, identify two to three internal candidates who could develop into the role over the next two to four years. Not people who are ready today: people with the raw capability and the right trajectory.
Third, build specific development plans for those candidates: the projects, the exposure, the coaching, and the knowledge transfer that will move them from potential to ready. This is the part that almost always gets skipped.
The succession conversation is not comfortable. It requires leaders to think about their own departure, to be honest about their team's gaps, and to invest time in developing people who may end up leaving anyway.
But the alternative, no plan, no depth, no continuity, is a risk that compounds every year.
If your organisation has roles where you would struggle to answer the question "who takes over if this person is not here tomorrow," that is the place to start.