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January 2026 | 

Succession Planning, Reimagined

Succession Planning, Reimagined

For decades, succession planning followed a familiar script: identify high-potential leaders, groom them quietly, and prepare them to step into specific roles as they become available. That approach assumed a relatively stable business environment and predictable leadership transitions.

Today, those assumptions no longer hold. Many organizations recognize that traditional approaches to succession planning are no longer aligned with current realities. What has not followed is a viable, widely adopted alternative.

New research commissioned by Wharton Executive Education, in partnership with The Harris Poll, helps explain why this gap persists. In a global survey of more than 2,500 business leaders, 86 percent say succession planning is critical to their organization’s success, yet 70 percent say long-term succession planning feels futile in today’s fast-changing business environment. The data captures a moment of collective awareness, paired with uncertainty about what to do next.

Why Succession Planning Now Feels Futile

According to Wharton Vice Dean Patti Williams, that uncertainty reflects a convergence of forces reshaping leadership itself. “We see a couple of big trends coming together,” she says. “There’s a generational transition underway, with an avalanche of retirements. At the same time, some very senior leaders from the baby boomer generation are staying in their roles longer than expected. That combination creates tension in organizations and raises the stakes around who is ready to step up.”

Compounding the challenge is a significant gap in perception between generations. Many senior leaders believe the next generation is not prepared to take on senior roles, Williams notes, even as the definition of preparedness itself has shifted. “They may actually be more capable than current leaders think,” she says. “But the way that capability shows up is different from what many senior leaders expect.” In practice, that often reflects changes in how emerging leaders approach collaboration, flexibility, and decision making — signals that are sometimes misread as a lack of readiness rather than what may actually be an evolution in leadership norms.

The pandemic further disrupted leadership development in ways organizations are still reckoning with. COVID stripped away many informal learning moments that help emerging leaders understand how decisions are made and how authority is exercised under pressure. “A lot of the way you learn how to lead is by witnessing leadership,” Williams explains. “When you’re working from home, you see leadership only on a screen. You miss a lot of what’s happening in the environment.”

At the same time, the demands placed on leaders have expanded significantly. Organizations are navigating multiple transformations at once, from technological change to shifting workforce expectations, often under intense time pressure. “What it takes to lead today has expanded dramatically,” Williams says. “Leaders are being asked to bring greater agility, deeper technical understanding, stronger communication skills, and the ability to drive change across the organization, often all at the same time.”

From Roles to Readiness

Against that backdrop, it is not surprising that many executives feel discouraged by succession-planning efforts. Williams hears a consistent refrain in conversations with senior leaders. Succession planning requires long-term thinking, but business conditions change so quickly that plans often feel obsolete before they can be implemented. “By the time leaders are ready to act on the plan,” she says, “strategic direction has changed, priorities have shifted, and suddenly what they planned for is no longer the reality they’re living in.”

That sense of futility is often tied to how succession planning has historically been structured. When the process focuses narrowly on preparing someone to fill a specific role, it becomes vulnerable to shifts in strategy or organizational design. “If succession planning is only about filling a particular job,” Williams explains, “and six months later that role or division no longer exists, it can feel like all of that work was for nothing.”

A more resilient approach, she argues, shifts the emphasis from roles to readiness. Rather than asking who is prepared to step into a specific position, leaders need to focus on whether individuals are developing the skills and judgment required to operate at the next level. “If we think about building the capabilities leaders need in order to rise to the next stage of leadership,” Williams says, “it starts to feel much less futile.”

The Wharton Executive Education succession-planning research also highlights another persistent challenge: a lack of transparency around advancement. Many organizations hesitate to be explicit about who is being developed for future leadership roles, often out of concern that circumstances may change. Leaders worry about making promises they cannot keep or creating unhealthy competition among peers. As a result, high-potential leaders are often left guessing about where they stand.

That ambiguity comes at a cost. The data shows that unclear advancement paths are a significant driver of attrition among senior talent, and Williams sees the same pattern repeatedly in practice. “People want to know they’re valued,” she says. “They want to know their organization is investing in them, even if nothing is guaranteed.” Transparency, in her view, does not require certainty. It requires honesty about intent and a shared commitment to development. “The point isn’t a promised role,” she emphasizes. “It’s clarity about being on a path — and about what you need to work on so that when the opportunity comes, you’re prepared.”

Developing Leaders with an Enterprise View

Underlying the disconnect between recognizing the importance of succession planning while failing to work toward it is a deeper shift in how leadership itself is defined. Effective succession planning requires leaders to move beyond an operator mindset focused on delivering results in their own domain and toward a stewardship mindset that prioritizes enterprise-wide capacity and continuity. Many executives have risen by mastering a functional area, Williams notes, but that expertise does not automatically translate into an understanding of how decisions ripple across the organization.

“They don’t always speak the language of their peers in other parts of the business,” she says. “And they don’t always know how to translate the way they think about their domain into enterprise-wide trade-offs.” Developing that broader perspective is one reason organizations increasingly turn to comprehensive executive education experiences rather than narrowly focused skills programs.

Williams points to Wharton’s Executive Development Program (EDP) as an example of an environment designed to build that enterprise-wide view. “EDP is meant to help leaders understand the whole,” she says. “Participants are challenged to think like financial leaders even if they are not in finance, and like operational leaders even if they are not in operations. The goal is not to replace functional expertise, but to situate it within a broader organizational context.”

A key element of that learning environment is the chance to practice leadership and new skills in realistic but low-stakes settings. Williams describes the program’s bespoke simulation as a “living laboratory,” where participants step into unfamiliar roles, make decisions, and see the consequences — without putting a real business at risk. “You can try new behaviors and take risks,” she says, “and get feedback from teammates and coaches who are watching you in action.”

That combination of application, peer support, and coaching accelerates development in ways more traditional approaches often cannot. Coaches observe participants as they navigate complex decisions and respond under pressure, then offer targeted, real-time feedback. “The goal is learning that translates directly into action,” Williams says, “so leaders leave better equipped to make an impact.”

For leaders who know succession planning is a growing vulnerability but have not yet addressed it, Williams offers advice shaped by years of observation and a lesson she credits to William Lauder, chair of the board of the Estée Lauder Companies. “One of the most important jobs of a leader is to learn how to replicate yourself,” Williams says. “That means giving others a window into how decisions are made, which trade-offs matter, and what it actually takes to operate at the next level of responsibility.”

Succession planning, Williams believes, works best when it is woven into the fabric of leadership itself. It requires leaders to slow down enough to explain their thinking, invite others into moments of uncertainty, and create space for judgment to be developed — not after a promotion, but before it. In an era of constant disruption, that discipline may be one of the most consequential leadership choices an organization makes.