We have spent years building leadership pipelines for a version of work that no longer exists.
Disruption has changed the nature of work itself. Leaders are making calls before the data settles, holding teams together through artificial intelligence-induced anxiety, market shifts and restructures, all while carrying the exhaustion underneath it all. Yet, succession planning has not kept pace.
In too many organizations, we tend to notice the same people. The one who sounds heroic in the review. The one who speaks first in the group discussion. The one whose name keeps coming up because they have been close to the right projects and sponsors and always seem to be in the right rooms.
Some of them are talented. Of course they are. But visibility is not the same as readiness. Confidence is not adaptability. And sounding like a leader in a calm conversation tells you very little about how they will lead when the business starts moving under their feet.
The issue today is that we continue to use calm-world signals to make disruption-world decisions. We see confidence, polish, sponsorship and visibility, feel reassured by them and call it aptitude. Then the pressure lands. The new leader gets pulled sideways. And we find out whether that person can really lead.
What would happen if we stopped asking, “Can this person step up?” and instead asked, “Can they step up when the job keeps changing, and people need direction before anyone has a perfect answer?”
The high-potential list may be looking for the wrong thing
In many organizations, the high-potential list has become less a view of future leadership potential and more a record of who the business already knows how to value.
That matters, because legacy systems were built to recognize that familiar kind of leader, which, to the workforce, feels reassuring, safe and decisive. But when leadership becomes too concentrated on that person, teams scan less widely, test fewer assumptions and wait for the person at the front to interpret, decide and rescue.
That is the hidden cost of hero leadership—not a lack of talent. Many hero leaders have plenty of it. And if your succession process was built only to spot these heroes, it may miss the people ideally suited to guide the business through what comes next.
Guide leaders—who help people find clarity, exercise judgement and keep moving amid uncertainty—create certainty in a different way. They do not need to reach the answer first. They help people make sense of what is changing, decide what matters now for themselves and keep moving while the picture is still incomplete. That kind of agility under pressure and diffused agency matters now more than ever.
Redefining what ‘ready’ means
Most succession planning still starts with the role, but the role profile rarely captures the conditions the leader is walking into. You know the situation: the intense noise from teams tired of disruption; all layered on top of the strategy that made sense six weeks ago and now needs to be pulled apart.
So, when we say someone is ready, we need to be more precise. Ready for the title? Ready for the job description? Ready for the version of the role we wish still existed? Or ready for the real version they will have to lead through on a rough Tuesday when the team is flat, and nobody has a clear answer?
We need to be more honest about the word “ready.” Too often, ready means familiar: someone who has performed well, knows how to navigate the organization and has the backing of a senior sponsor. Useful? Yes. Enough? Not anymore. Readiness means being able to lead in the conditions the next role is likely to throw at them. Promotable means someone has earned consideration. Too often, we blur the two.
We promote people because they succeeded in a system that rewards confidence, control and visibility. Then we place them into roles where the real work is judgment, adaptability, sense-making and the ability to create agency in others.
The problem is, those words are easy to nod at, but hard to see. So, make them concrete:
- Judgment looks like a defensible call made before the data was complete.
- Adaptability looks like someone changing their approach when the plan breaks down without waiting to be told.
- Sense-making looks like a messy situation turned into something the team can act on.
Creating agency looks like people leaving the room more able to decide for themselves, not more dependent on the leader. If you cannot point to a moment like one of these, you have a description of readiness, not evidence of it.
The strongest successors may not be in the obvious places
This is where traditional pipelines get expensive.
If the next generation of leaders needs to navigate ambiguity, influence across boundaries and lead without leaning too heavily on authority, some of your strongest successors may not be sitting in the usual feeder roles.
They may be in project, client-facing, technical or operational roles—places where people have had to influence without much formal power. These folks are adaptable because their processes are already messy, build trust sideways (rather than just upward), and read their clients, the risk, the politics and the room without anyone handing them a clean brief. If you want to spot this in a talent review, look for the person others turn to when the brief is unclear, not the one who speaks first when it is. That is useful evidence, possibly more useful than another polished talent review.
Traditional succession planning also tends to favor careers that make immediate sense to the system. But disruption makes neatness less reliable. The better question is: What has this person learned because their path was not straightforward?
The answer to that question is where overlooked potential often sits. But spotting the people who have already learned how to lead without ideal conditions is only half the work. The other half is not dragging them into the same old acceleration process and hoping speed will do what evidence did not.
Building readiness, not just exposure
When the bench looks thin, the instinct is to move people faster, to add stretch and visibility. Sometimes that helps. Sometimes it just breaks the bench quicker.
If we want high-potential talent to be ready for a different kind of leadership, we must stop treating exposure as development. Exposure may show us what someone can handle. It does not automatically build the behaviors they need next.
That takes practice:
- Practice making decisions with incomplete information.
- Practice holding a room without taking over the room.
- Practice creating direction without pretending the answer is cleaner than it is.
- Practice letting other people think, instead of becoming the person everyone waits for.
This is the part many accelerated pathways miss. They increase the pressure but not always the preparation, giving people visibility before they have had enough safe, deliberate practice in the moments that will define readiness.
And that matters, because the next role will not test whether someone can survive being busy. It will test whether they can help others keep moving when the work is messy, and the room is looking for something steadier than another confident performance.
What should talent leaders do now?
This does not need another framework. It needs better evidence and braver conversations.
Look at the high-potential list. What kind of leader is it built to recognize? If the same type of profile keeps appearing, that may not be proof of talent. It may be proof of repetition. Pull last year’s list and mark how many people share the same background, the same feeder roles, the same sponsors. The pattern will show you who your system repeatedly selects and which signals it is rewarding.
Separate performance, promotability and readiness. Performance shows what someone has delivered. Promotability shows how the organization currently sees the person. Readiness shows whether they can lead in the conditions the next role will bring. In your next talent review, force the three apart. Ask for evidence of each, separately. Most people will have plenty for the first two and almost nothing for the third. That gap is the conversation worth having.
Look at behavior under pressure. The useful evidence is in the messy moments. How did the person respond when the plan changed? Who came with them? Did they create enough clarity for people to move, or just rush toward the first available answer? A calm track record only tells you someone is good when things are calm. Readiness shows up in the moment the ground moves, so that is the moment to look for.
Widen the routes in. If all your successors come through the same roles, with the same sponsors and speaking the same leadership language, you do not have a pipeline of leaders that will help your organization navigate current and future disruption.
Make development specific. Some people need commercial exposure. Some need to build connection. Some need to slow their thinking down. Some need to stop rescuing everyone in the room. A generic pathway will not do that work. For each name on your list, write the one thing that would most change how they lead. A blank space there is the real development gap.
The boardroom question
If disruption is now part of the operating environment, succession planning cannot rely on stable role profiles, familiar leadership shapes and annual reviews that mostly look to the past.
Talent leaders need pipelines that move as the business moves. They need to spot potential in less obvious places and build readiness around behavior, not just career history. And they need to challenge the assumption behind many succession decisions: If the future needs guide leaders, why are we still promoting so many heroes?
