Things Leaders Do

Building Leaders From Within: How to Make Succession Planning Work Every Day, Not Once a Year

• Colby Morris

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Look around your executive team. How many of you were external hires? Every hand goes up.

Now show me how many managers you have promoted from front-line positions.

Zero. Not one. Crickets.

Host Colby Morris shares the devastating boardroom moment that exposed why one organization could not stop the turnover bleeding. When every leadership opening goes external, you are sending your team a clear message - there is no path forward for you here.

This episode transforms succession planning from a once-a-year document gathering dust into a living breathing process that builds real leadership bench strength. Discover why promoting your best performer without asking first can backfire spectacularly (the Michael Jordan Problem), Patrick Lencioni's three characteristics for identifying future leaders, and how to weave development into one-on-ones and annual reviews so it actually happens.

Learn the CFO COO conversation that reframes training investment, the three integration points that make succession planning real, and how to prevent favoritism while building genuine leadership bench strength.

Whether you're losing top talent because they see no future or struggling to fill leadership roles internally, this episode gives you the practical systems to develop your people intentionally and create clear paths forward.

  • What role do one-on-ones play in succession planning and employee development?
  • How do I know if someone wants leadership or prefers being an individual contributor?
  • What should I look for when hiring people I can develop into future leaders?
  • How do I make succession planning a living process instead of an annual document?
  • How do I build leadership bench strength without playing favorites or showing favoritism?
  • Why are all my leadership positions filled by external hires instead of internal promotions?
  • What's the difference between high performance and actual leadership potential?
  • How do I create career paths for individual contributors who don't want management?
  • How do I prevent favoritism when identifying and developing future leaders?
  • Why is consistent external hiring hurting my employee morale retention and engagement?

CONNECT WITH COLBY MORRIS

Keynote speaking executive coaching and team training

Website nxtstepadvisors.com

LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/colbymorris

ABOUT THINGS LEADERS DO

Practical people-first leadership strategies for managers who want real results. Host Colby Morris founder of NXT Step Advisors shares insights from his executive coaching practice to help you build stronger teams develop future leaders and create workplaces where people see a path forward.



SPEAKER_00:

People first leadership. Actionable strategies, real results. This is Things Leaders Do with Colby Morris.

SPEAKER_01:

I'm sitting in a boardroom with an executive team. They brought me in because their turnover numbers are through the roof, and they can't figure out why. I've spent the last two weeks interviewing their frontline managers and their employees. And I've heard the same thing over and over and over again. Why would I stay here? There's no path forward. Every management opening goes to an external hire. So I'm presenting my findings to the executive board and I ask them really a simple question. How many of you are external hires? Every single hand goes up around the table. I let him sit with that for a second. Look around the room. Look at all those hands. Then I said, Now keep your hands up, and using your fingers, show me how many managers and leaders on your team were promoted from frontline positions. The hands stay up, but nobody's putting up any fingers. They're looking at each other, looking at their hands, trying to think of someone, anyone, and coming up empty. If you don't have anyone you've promoted from a frontline position, put your hand down, I said. One by one, every single hand goes down. Then I looked at the CEO. We'll call him Daryl. I said, Daryl, would you mind looking around the room and counting up the total number of internal promotions we're looking at in here? Daryl looks around the room. No hands. No fingers. Nothing. He just says quietly, zero. So I let that sit for a moment. Then I ask them one more question. So, how exactly are your frontline employees supposed to be incentivized to do better work when they can see there's absolutely no path forward for them in here? Crickets. You can literally hear the pin drop in the room. That's the moment that everything clicked for them. Hey leaders, this is Colby Morris, and this is Things Leaders Do. Today we're talking about succession planning. Not the one and done document sitting in, you know, some drawer somewhere, but the living, breathing process that either builds your bench strength or destroys your team's morale. Let me tell you what's broken about how more most organizations approach succession planning. They treat it like a compliance checkbox. Once a year, maybe during you know strategic planning, someone says, you know, hey, we should probably update our succession plan. So they pull out a document, update a few names, follow it away, and they forget about it for another 12 months. Yeah, that's that's not succession planning. That's a fairy tale you're telling yourself so you can sleep at night. Real succession planning, it's woven into everything you do. It's part of your one-on-ones. It's integrated into your annual reviews, it's it's a factor in your hiring decisions. It's a living, breathing part of how you develop your people every single day. But here's what happens in most organizations. And tell me if I'm missing this, but in most organizations, you hire people to fill seats, not to develop future leaders. You promote people based on who's available right now, not who you've been intentionally developing. And when a leadership position opens up, you panic and look externally because you haven't built any bench strength internally, and your team sees all of this. They watch you hire externally over and over and over again. They read the writing on the wall. There's no future for me here. Now, here's one of the biggest mistakes I see leaders make with succession planning, and I call it the Michael Jordan problem. And you've probably heard me talk about this a few times. You have someone on your team who's, you know, crushing it. They're your top performer, your go-to. They exceed literally every metric. They're reliable, they're talented, they work hard, and everyone loves working with them. So naturally, you assume they want to be promoted to leadership, right? They're so good at what they do, obviously they want to lead a team. Wrong. Some people just want to be Michael Jordan. They want to be the best player on the court. They don't want to be Phil Jackson. They don't want to coach. They just want to play. Here's what happens when you promote a person into leadership without having a conversation first about it. You lose a great individual contributor, and you gain a, I don't know, mediocre maybe, or worse, a miserable manager. And why? Because you have to start holding that leader to a new set of standards that they probably weren't even trained for, they are unaccustomed to, and worse, never wanted to begin with. So they fell as a manager, and if you have to let them go, now you're out a manager, and you lost your best performer in the process. As the great philosopher Dr. Phil says, how's that working for? I've seen this play out so many times. You take your best salesperson, you make them sales manager. Suddenly, they're not selling anymore. They're managing. They're in meetings all day. They're they're dealing with performance issues, they're doing one-on-ones and annual reviews, and they hate it. Within six months, they're, you know, either struggling in the role or they leave to go somewhere else. They can just do the work they're actually good at and enjoy. You've got to have the conversation. And not just once. This needs to be an ongoing dialogue in your one-on-ones. Where do you see yourself in three to five years? Do you want to lead people or do you want to keep growing as an individual contributor? What does success look like for you? And here's the key. You've got to create paths for both. Not everyone needs to go into management to advance their career. You need senior individual contributor roles. You need ways for people to grow their influence, their compensation, and their impact without managing people. Because if the only path forward is leadership, you're going to force a lot of great individual contributors into leadership roles they never wanted. And you're going to create a lot of bad leaders in the process. So, how do you actually make succession planning a living, breathing part of your organization instead of a document that sits in a drawer? I'm going to give you three integration points to help you do that. Integration point number one is your one-on-ones. This is where succession planning actually happens. Not in the annual strategic planning retreat. Okay. It's in your weekly or your bi-weekly one-on-ones with your team. You should be having career development conversations regularly. Not once a year during review time, but you know, ongoing. Now, I have a whole series on one-on-ones, how they're done, the cadence, the questions to ask, the whole process. If you haven't listened to that series yet, go back and check it out. Because if you want to make succession planning actually work, you have to know your one-on-ones. That's where this stuff becomes real. In these conversations, you're asking things like, what skills are you working on developing? What experiences would help you grow? What areas do you want to learn more about? And here's what's critical: you're not asking these questions to just check a box. You're asking because you're genuinely invested in developing your people, whether they stay in your organization or not. People first leaders develop their people, even if it means they eventually leave for bigger opportunities somewhere else. Because when you develop people, word gets around. And suddenly you're attracting the kind of talent that wants to grow, not just collects a paycheck. There's an old story that's been told through the years. You've probably heard it, but the CFO goes to the COO and says, I want to talk about the money we're spending on training our employees. The COO answers, Well, what's the problem? The CFO says, Well, if we spend all this money on training those employees and they leave, then what? And the COO responds with, Yeah, but what if we don't train them and they stay? That's the choice you're making. Do you want untrained, undeveloped people who can't grow? Or do you want to invest in your people? And yes, sometimes they'll leave for bigger opportunities, but while they're with you, they're excellent. And the ones who stay become your leaders. All right, integration point number two is your annual reviews. Your annual review process should include a development plan. Not just here's how you perform this year, but here's where you want to go, and here's how we're going to help you get there. What skills do they need to develop? What experiences do they need to gain? What projects could they lead that would stretch them? Who could they shadow or learn from? And then, this is where most organizations fall apart. You actually follow through on that development plan. It's a novel concept. You don't just write it down and forget about it. You reference it in your one-on-ones. You create opportunities that align with it. You hold yourself accountable for developing your people. Let me give you an example of what this looks like in practice. Let's say you have an employee named Jennifer. And Jennifer wants to move into a leadership role eventually. During her annual review, you identify that she needs to develop her skills in leading, I don't know, cross-functional projects. So you make it part of her development plan that she'll lead three cross-functional projects over the next year. Project one comes up. Maybe it's you know a product launch, and that involves marketing, sales, operations. Well, Jennifer leads it. So in your next one-on-one, you talk about how it went, what she learned, what she'd do differently next time. And right there, okay, in that one-on-one, you update her development plan. You document that she completed project one. You know the skills that you know she demonstrated and the areas where she's still growing. You don't wait until the end of the year to record it. This is a living, breathing document. And hey, so so is Jennifer. She's growing, she's learning, and your plan needs to reflect that in real time. So project two happens. You do the same process. One-on-one conversation, update the plan. Project three, same thing. By the time the next annual review comes around, you're not trying to remember what happened nine months ago. You have a documented track record of her development. You can see her growth trajectory. She can see it too. She's not wondering if anyone notices her development because you've been acknowledging and documenting it all along. All right, integration point number three, your hiring decisions. Here's a question most leaders never ask themselves when they're hiring. Am I hiring someone I can develop into a future leader or am I just filling a seat? If you're only thinking about the immediate needs of the role, you're not thinking about succession planning. You need to be hiring people who have the potential to grow beyond their current role. Patrick Lincioni talks about this in his book, The Ideal Team Player. He identifies three characteristics that the ideal team players have. They're humble, they're hungry, and they're smart. Not IQ smart, but like people smart, emotionally intelligent. Those three characteristics, that's what you should be looking for when you're hiring people you want to develop into future leaders. Humble people can receive feedback and admit when they're wrong. Hungry people want to grow and improve. And smart people can navigate relationships and build trust with others. You can, you know, teach someone technical skills. You can train them on your processes and your systems. But humble, hungry, and smart, those are the foundation. If someone has those three things, you can develop them. If they don't, well, you're going to struggle no matter how technically skilled they are. Now, does that mean you only hire people who want to go into leadership? No. Remember the Michael Jordan problem? But it does mean you're hiring people who want to grow, develop, and increase their impact, whether that's as an individual contributor or as a future leader. Here's the difference. You want people who are hungry to get better at what they do. Who want to learn, who are curious, who see feedback as an opportunity, not as a threat, who want to take on challenges that stretch them. Those people, they're going to develop. Some of them will develop into leaders. Some of them will develop into your most valuable senior individual contributors, but they're all going to grow. And the growth is what builds your bench strength. The people you don't want, those are the ones who just clock in. They do the minimum, they clock out. The ones who see their job as just a paycheck. The ones who aren't interested in getting better. Those people aren't going to develop no matter how much you invest in them. And they're definitely not building your bench strength for the future. Alright. Now let's talk about the elephant in the room. How do you build bench strength without playing favorites? Because here's what happens in a lot of organizations. A leader identifies their, you know, chosen ones, the people they're grooming for leadership. And everyone else on the team can see it. The chosen ones get the good projects, the development opportunities, the FaceTime with the executives, and everyone else gets the leftovers. That's favoritism. And it destroys team morale faster than almost anything else. So how do you prevent it? Well, here's three things that'll help. First, establish minimum standards and competencies for leadership roles. What does someone actually need to demonstrate to be considered for leadership position? Make it transparent. Make it objective. Make it measurable. Maybe it's a degree. Maybe it's certification. Maybe it's years of experience. Not I think they'd be good at this. And not they remind me of myself when I was coming up. But specific competencies and demonstrated abilities. Can they influence without authority? Have they successfully led you know projects cross-functionally? Do they give and receive feedback well? Can they develop others? Have they demonstrated they can handle conflict productively? Make the criteria clear and make it visible to everyone on your team. Second, get input from other leaders. You shouldn't be making succession decisions in a vacuum. Your perspective is limited by your own biases, your own blind spots, and yes, your own favorites. Get input from the other leaders you've worked with and who've worked with your team members. What do they see? What patterns have they observed? Who demonstrates leadership potential in ways that you may not have even noticed? Cross-leader validation helps catch favoritism before it becomes a problem. And third, you need to know your people. You need to know them well enough to spot the difference between high performance and leadership potential. This is where people leadership really matters. When you actually know your peoples and their strengths, their growth areas or motivations, you can make better decisions about who's ready for leadership and who just happens to be really good at their current job. Sometimes your favorite person to work with isn't actually the right person for the leadership role. And sometimes the person that challenged you the most would actually be a great leader. You've got to separate your personal preference from objective leadership potential. Let me go back to that executive board meeting for a minute. Because what happened in that room is happening in organizations everywhere. When you consistently hire externally for leadership positions instead of promoting from within, you're sending a very clear message to your team. We don't believe any of you are good enough. Now, I'm not saying you should never hire externally. Sometimes you need outside perspective. Sometimes you need expertise that you don't have on your internal team. Sometimes you're growing so fast you just generally don't have enough internal candidates ready. But if every single leadership opening goes to an external hire, well, that's that's not a talent problem. That's a development problem. And it means one of two things, or maybe both. First, you're hiring the wrong people to begin with. If nobody on your team is ever ready for promotion, you're not hiring people with growth potential. You're hiring people to fill seats. Or second, you're not developing your people. And that's a reflection of your leadership. People first leaders develop their people intentionally. They create opportunities for growth. They they give stretch assignments, they provide coaching and feedback, they invest in their team's development even when it's inconvenient. Here's what I told that executive board. Your frontline employees are leaving because they can see the pattern. They know that no matter how hard they work, no matter how much they grow, the next management position is going to someone from outside. So why would they stay? Why would they invest their time and energy developing themselves when the reward for excellence is watching someone else get you want to fix your turnover problem? Start promoting from within. Start developing your people intentionally, start treating succession planning like a you know, like the critical business process it is, and not like a document you update once a year. Alright. Here's your assignment for this week. I want you to do two things. First, I want you to look at your last five leadership hires or promotions. How many were internal? How many were external? If they're all external, you've got a development problem, not a top. Second, have career development conversations with each person on your team in your next one-on-one. Not like a where do you want to be in five years? In some vague interview question way, but like real conversations. Do you want to lead people someday? Or do you want to keep growing as an individual contributor? What skills do you want to develop this year? What experiences would help you grow? How can I support your development? And then, this is the critical part. Actually do something with that information. Don't just have the conversation and move on. Make development a regular part of your one-on-ones. Create opportunities aligned with their goals. Hold yourself accountable for developing your people. Because succession planning isn't something you do once a year. It's something you do every single week in how you lead, develop, and you invest in your team. Look, here's the truth. If you're not intentionally building leadership bench strength, you're setting yourself up for crisis management when someone leaves. And if you're consistently hiring externally instead of promoting from within, you're telling your team there's no future for them in your organization. And they're hearing you loud and clear. People first leaders develop their people, whether they stay or go. They create paths for both the leaders and individual contributors to grow. They make succession planning a living process, not a document in a drawer. And they understand something critical. Your job as a leader isn't just to get work done today, it's to develop the leaders who will get the work done tomorrow. If your organization needs help building a real succession planning process, not a document, but a living breathing system that develops your people and builds bench strength, I'd love to help. I've been working with leaders and teams for years on this. I can also help with keynote speaking, executive coaching, leadership training, and I try to help you create people first cultures that develop talent intentionally. You can connect with me on LinkedIn, which is where most of you do, or at my website at Next Stepadvisors.com. There's no E in next, next Stepadvisors.com. Hey, and if this episode hit home for you, would you do me a favor? Subscribe to the show, leave a review, you know, share it with another leader who needs to hear it. That's how we make a bigger impact on workplace culture together. Remember, keep developing your people, even if they eventually leave, creating clear paths forward instead of dead ends, and make succession planning a daily practice instead of an annual document. And you know why? Because those are the things that leaders do.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you for listening to Things Leaders Do. If you're looking for more tips on how to be a better leader, be sure to subscribe to the podcast and listen to next week's episode. Until next time, keep working on being a better leader by doing the things that leaders do.