Free Succession Planning Template (Excel)
The four worksheets a real succession plan needs: critical roles with cost-of-vacancy rationale, scored candidates with readiness windows, development actions with owners and deadlines, and a 9-box worksheet.
What's inside
- Critical Roles register: role, incumbent, cost-of-vacancy rationale, criticality, plan owner, next review date
- Candidates & Readiness sheet: per-role candidates scored on six example dimensions with evidence notes and dated assessments
- Development Actions tracker: gap, exposure assignment, owner, deadline, status
- 9-Box worksheet: performance and potential placements with criteria prompts
- A How-to-use sheet with the honest rules (evidence per score, dates on every action)
This template holds the same discipline the software enforces, in spreadsheet form: criteria before names, evidence next to every score, readiness windows someone would act on, and development actions that carry owners and deadlines. It is a genuinely workable way to run a first succession pass at a smaller organization.
It also decays the way every spreadsheet plan decays, which we say plainly because it is true: no audit trail, no automatic bench views, and nothing enforcing the review cadence except your calendar. When the quarterly review starts spending its first half hour reconstructing who changed what, that is the graduation moment. Until then, this file plus discipline beats software plus neglect.
No email required. If you want the update when we refresh the template, leave one; if not, take the file.
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