Glossary
The language of succession, defined in plain English.
- Succession planning
Succession planning is the process of identifying and developing internal people who can step into critical roles when they become vacant. Done well, it turns an unplanned departure from a crisis into a transition, because a ready successor is already known and being developed.
Modern succession planning covers more than the CEO. It maps the handful of roles where a sudden vacancy would hurt — leadership, specialist, and single-point-of-failure positions — and tracks who could fill each one, how ready they are, and what development closes the gap.
- Succession management
Succession management is what happens between the reviews. Succession planning identifies and develops successors for critical roles and has a beginning and an end; succession management is the continuous practice of keeping the resulting plans true as people are promoted, leave, develop, or change their minds.
The distinction is practical rather than academic, because the common failure is not bad planning. Most organizations that run a serious succession process end up with an accurate plan on the day it is written and a misleading one a year later. Nothing in the planning exercise itself prevents that.
- Bench strength
Bench strength is the depth of ready, internal talent an organization can call on for its critical roles. A role with two or three credible successors has a strong bench; a role with none has a gap that represents real risk.
Tracking bench strength across the org shows leaders where continuity is solid and where a single departure would leave a hole. It is one of the clearest signals of whether a succession plan is actually working.
- Readiness (Ready Now, 1 year, 2–3 years)
Readiness describes how soon a candidate could step into a target role and succeed. It is commonly expressed in windows — Ready Now, ready in roughly a year, and ready in two to three years — so a plan distinguishes people who could cover a role tomorrow from those who are promising but still developing.
Grouping candidates by readiness window turns a flat list of names into a pipeline. SuccessionStack maps each plan's bench across these three windows so HR can see, at a glance, whether cover exists today or only on the horizon.
- 9-box grid
The 9-box grid plots employees on a three-by-three matrix — typically performance on one axis and potential on the other — producing nine cells that range from low performance/low potential to high performance/high potential. It gives leaders a shared visual language for talent calibration.
The framework was popularized by McKinsey & Company in work with General Electric in the 1970s and remains a staple of talent reviews. It is most useful as a conversation starter for calibration, not as a final verdict on a person.
- Leadership dimensions
Leadership dimensions are the named competencies an organization uses to evaluate leaders consistently — for example strategic thinking, people leadership, execution, or judgment under pressure. Scoring everyone against the same dimensions makes comparisons fair and decisions defensible.
SuccessionStack scores leaders on eight leadership dimensions and lets HR adjust the weighting per role, because the mix that matters for a sales leader differs from the mix for a head of engineering. Every score and weight change is recorded in the audit log.
- High-potential (HiPo)
A high-potential — often shortened to HiPo — is an employee judged able to grow into substantially bigger or more complex roles, not just to perform well in their current one. Potential and current performance are different things: a strong performer is not automatically a high-potential, and vice versa.
Identifying HiPos helps an organization focus development investment where it will compound. It works best when the criteria are explicit and applied consistently, so the label reflects assessed capability rather than visibility or proximity to leadership.
- Talent review
A talent review is a structured session — usually run annually or twice a year — where leaders discuss their people, calibrate ratings so standards are consistent across teams, and agree on succession, development, and retention actions.
The value of a talent review is the calibration: comparing notes surfaces blind spots, challenges inflated or harsh ratings, and produces decisions the group will actually stand behind. Good preparation — current scores, bench views, and succession plans in one place — is what makes the meeting productive.
- Key-person risk
Key-person risk is the exposure created when a single individual holds critical knowledge, relationships, or responsibilities and no one else could step in quickly. The risk is invisible until that person resigns, retires, or is unavailable — at which point it becomes urgent.
Reducing key-person risk means knowing where it sits and building a bench against it. Modeling a departure before it happens — seeing which roles uncover and which plans go thin — turns an abstract worry into a specific, addressable list.
- What-if scenario (cascade analysis)
A what-if scenario asks: if this person left, what would happen? Cascade analysis follows the chain — the successor who steps up leaves their own seat open, and so on — so the full ripple of a single departure is visible rather than guessed at.
SuccessionStack models these scenarios up to three levels deep, shows which plans go thin and which roles uncover, and generates a plain-English summary of the impact. Hypothetical mode never touches the real org data.
- Succession plan
A succession plan is the working document for a single critical role: who the candidates are, how ready each one is, where the gaps lie, and what development would close them. Together, the plans across an organization form its overall succession strategy.
A plan is only useful if it stays current. Treating succession as a living view that updates as people grow and move — rather than a slide deck refreshed once a year — is what separates real readiness from a paper exercise.
- Talent pool (pipeline)
A talent pool — sometimes called a pipeline — develops a group of people against a role or family of roles, rather than naming one successor per seat. It is useful when several similar roles draw from the same kind of talent, such as a cohort of future general managers.
Pools add flexibility: instead of betting on one named successor who might leave, an organization grows a bench it can draw from for whichever role opens first.
- Org health
Org health is a roll-up view of how well-positioned an organization's leadership and talent are. It combines signals such as bench strength, the spread of leadership scores, and pipeline depth by readiness into a picture leaders can act on.
SuccessionStack surfaces org health as a composite score with the underlying charts one click away, so a board-level summary and the people behind it stay connected.
- Critical role
A critical role is one where an unplanned vacancy would cost the organization something it genuinely cares about: revenue, regulatory standing, a key relationship, or the ability to keep deciding. Criticality is about cost of vacancy, not seniority — a niche specialist can be more critical than a VP.
Identifying critical roles is the first stage of succession planning, because it sets the scope. Plans that cover every manager collapse under their own weight; plans that cover only the C-suite miss where much of the real damage happens.
- Replacement planning
Replacement planning answers one narrow question: if this person disappeared tomorrow, who covers the seat this week? It produces a list of emergency stand-ins, usually the incumbent's deputy or manager, chosen for availability rather than long-term fit.
It is the floor, not the goal. Replacement planning keeps the lights on; succession planning builds people who can actually grow into the role. Organizations need both, and confusing the two is how a company ends up believing it has a bench when it has a phone tree.
- Emergency succession
Emergency succession covers the first days and weeks after a critical role empties without warning: who steps in as interim, what authority they carry, who communicates the change, and how the permanent process starts. It is the difference between a bad week and a bad quarter.
The plan only works if it exists before it is needed. Deciding who holds signing authority during a CEO's sudden absence is a calm governance question in January and a crisis in the week it happens.
- Flight risk (retention risk)
Flight risk estimates the likelihood that a specific person leaves in the near term, based on signals like market demand for their skills, stalled scope or compensation, engagement changes, and life events. It is an input to both retention action and succession planning.
In a succession context, flight risk cuts both ways: a high-risk incumbent makes the role's bench urgent, and a high-risk successor quietly invalidates the plan that depends on them.
- Talent calibration
Talent calibration puts raters in one room to compare, challenge, and align their assessments, so that a 3 from a tough grader and a 3 from a generous one end up meaning the same thing. Without it, cross-team comparisons are noise wearing the costume of data.
Calibration is the working heart of a talent review: the disagreements it surfaces are not friction, they are the standards being negotiated into consistency.
- Individual development plan (IDP)
An individual development plan (IDP) translates assessment into action: for each scored gap between a person and a target role, it names the assignment or experience that closes the gap, who owns it, and when it completes. It is the engine that makes readiness windows more than a guess.
The strongest IDPs are built from exposure, not inputs: running a budget cycle, holding an escalation rotation, presenting to the board. Courses and coaching support the work; they do not substitute for it.
- The 5 D's of succession planning
The 5 D's are a checklist of the sudden events that can pull a key person out of a business without warning: death, disability, divorce, disagreement, and distress (some versions swap in departure or decline). The framing comes from business-ownership and financial planning, where each D can trigger a forced transfer of control, but the underlying point applies to any organization. Continuity plans should survive the ways people actually leave, not just the orderly retirements everyone plans around.
Read as risk, the 5 D's are really one question asked five ways: if this person disappeared for reasons outside anyone's control, would the organization know who steps in and whether they are ready? That is the same question a succession plan exists to answer.
- Succession
Succession, in an organizational sense, simply means one person following another into a role: a new CEO succeeding the last, a director stepping up when their manager retires. The word carries no promise that the handoff goes well. That is the job of succession planning, the deliberate work of making sure a capable, ready successor exists before the succession actually happens.
So the distinction worth keeping straight is between the event and the preparation. Succession is the moment of handover. Succession planning is everything done in the months and years beforehand to make that moment a transition instead of a scramble.
- John Maxwell's Rule of 5
The Rule of 5 comes from leadership author John Maxwell, who tells it as a parable. If you had to chop down a tree, five swings of the axe every single day would eventually bring it down. The point is that consistent, repeated action on a few high-value activities beats sporadic bursts of effort. It is a principle about compounding habits, not a succession framework.
It earns a place in a succession glossary for one reason: succession planning fails far more often from neglect than from bad strategy. The plans that survive are the ones maintained by a small set of repeated actions on a cadence, which is the Rule of 5 applied to a bench.
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