Succession Planning vs. Replacement Planning: What's the Real Difference?
When "High Potential" Just Means Someone the CEO Likes
Most succession plans aren't building future leaders. They're recording opinions and calling it strategy.
What actually happens in the room when your leadership team decides who's "ready" for more?
Is anyone checking whether that decision is based on real evidence, or just on who happened to have a good year and a loud advocate?
For most organizations, succession planning isn't really succession planning. It's a grid that gets filled in once a year, based on impressions formed in hallway conversations and performance reviews that may or may not reflect what's actually true about someone's future. Everyone leaves the meeting feeling like real strategic work happened, even when almost nothing about anyone's actual development changes as a result.
Michael Timms has spent years building succession frameworks that hold up under scrutiny, and his central claim is a hard one to sit with. Almost nobody is actually doing succession planning. Most companies are doing replacement planning, and calling it something bigger than it is.
(00:00) The Author Marshall Goldsmith Called "The Ultimate Guide"
Michael Timms is the bestselling author of How Leaders Can Inspire Accountability, a book built around a simple but uncomfortable idea. The leaders who get the best results aren't the ones demanding accountability from their teams. They're the ones willing to own their own part of the problem first.
That idea became the foundation for his TEDx talk on claiming your leadership power. When Michael was preparing to speak, the conference organizer gave him one piece of advice: don't use the word accountability; people will fall asleep. He was right that most leaders hear that word and assume it means cracking down on employees, but Michael's talk argues the opposite.
His earlier book, Succession Planning That Works, applied that same philosophy to a different problem. Through his company, Avail Leadership, Michael has since built succession frameworks with more than 20 organizations, and he says he's learned something new almost every single time.
(06:11) Two Different Things Wearing the Same Name
Before you can fix a broken succession plan, Michael says you have to admit it's not actually a succession plan at all. Most HR teams use two very different terms interchangeably, and that confusion is where the trouble starts.
Replacement planning and succession planning get used interchangeably in most HR conversations, but Michael draws a hard line between them.
Replacement planning answers one narrow question: who fills this seat if the person in it leaves next month. It's a list. It's reactive. It exists for an emergency, not a future.
Succession planning is supposed to be something else entirely. It's meant to identify who has real room to grow, and then actually invest in getting them there.
Most companies think they're doing the second one. Michael's read on the industry says otherwise.
(08:13) A Framework Older Than Almost Everyone Using It
That confusion doesn't happen by accident. Michael walked through exactly how most organizations end up there, and it usually follows the same three steps.
Step one: an executive team realizes they don't have a real succession plan, and HR gets tasked with building one fast.
Step two: instead of bringing in outside expertise, someone on the team searches "succession planning" and finds the nine box, a grid developed by a consulting firm back in the 1970s.
Step three: the nine box gets adopted as the plan, largely unchanged from its original form, and stays in place for years without anyone questioning whether it still holds up.
The result of that pattern shows up in the numbers. Somewhere between 2 and 3 percent of executives report being satisfied with their organization's succession plan, even the ones who technically have one in place.
(13:25) Where the Nine Box Starts to Break Down
If that few executives trust the tool, Michael argues it's worth asking why it's still the default. In his view, the nine box doesn't just fall short. It actively works against the goals it's supposed to serve.
It asks managers and executives to predict someone's future potential, an assumption Michael calls both arrogant and offensive on its face
It creates room for whoever has the most influence in the meeting to quietly steer outcomes toward their own people
It reinforces the idea that leadership has special insight into who someone will become, when what's actually happening is closer to a guess dressed up as data
Michael even brought his own mother into the argument, pointing out that even she, ten years ago, wouldn't have been able to accurately predict where he'd end up today. If someone who's known you your entire life can't make that call with confidence, a manager working off quarterly check-ins has even less standing to try.
(18:52) "Just Be These Twelve Things"
That same flawed logic shows up again once talent reviews move from predicting potential to defining what good leadership even looks like. Most companies build their leadership competency models the exact same broken way, and Michael has a comparison that makes the problem hard to unsee.
Imagine your spouse handing you a list of 12 "husband competencies" or "wife competencies" and telling you that's the bar you need to clear to be considered good at the role.
That's what most leadership competency models actually look like once you read them closely.
Built from a quick search and a dozen favorite traits pulled together, they end up describing a flawless person nobody could ever fully become, rather than an actual leader someone could realistically grow into. It's a standard so unreasonable, Michael argues, that no reasonable person would agree to it if they saw it clearly for what it was.
(20:14) Why the Room Itself Is the Problem
So if the grid is broken and the competency lists are unrealistic, where does an organization actually start over? Michael says the fix isn't a better chart. It's a different room entirely.
The problem: most talent conversations start in the same broken place, a room full of executives debating a chart and assigning labels based on impressions rather than evidence.
What he suggests instead: a completely different starting point, built around a single question asked across small groups at every level of the company, that has nothing to do with labels or charts at all.
What that question actually is, and what happens once people start answering it honestly, is where this part of the conversation gets genuinely interesting.
So Where Do You Actually Start?
None of this is really about the nine box. It's about what happens when organizations reach for a shortcut instead of doing the harder work of actually knowing their people.
What Michael is describing is a different way of thinking about the whole exercise. Not a better tool for labeling people, but a completely different starting point for understanding them, one that treats development as the actual goal instead of an afterthought to a replacement list.
If your organization is still relying on impressions formed in a single meeting once a year, the people who deserved real investment may have already been overlooked, and the people getting fast tracked may not be who you think.
The full conversation gets into exactly what that single question is, how it turns into a working competency model your organization can actually trust, why company size changes this approach more than most HR teams realize, and the one mistake Michael sees almost every succession plan make before a single name ever gets discussed.
Connect with Michael Timms: LinkedIn | YouTube | Website | TED Talk
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