Why Transparent Succession Planning Is the Trust-Building Exercise Most Organizations Skip
Executive Summary: Succession planning is one of the most important, and most neglected, leadership responsibilities in organizations of every size. Despite record CEO turnover and mounting evidence that unplanned transitions destroy value, most organizations still lack a formalized succession plan. This article draws on current research alongside a first-person account from SparkEffect’s own leadership transition to make the case that effective succession isn’t just about having a plan. It’s about having the courage to make that plan transparent.
The Succession Crisis Hiding in Plain Sight
The numbers are hard to ignore. In 2024, a record 2,221 CEOs stepped down from their roles, a 16% increase over the prior year. By the first quarter of 2025, departures had accelerated another 43%. Yet only 35% of organizations have a formalized succession planning process, and 40% report having no viable internal candidate to replace their CEO should they exit tomorrow.
The financial cost is severe. Research from Harvard Business School estimates that companies scrambling to replace a CEO without a plan in place forfeit an average of $1.8 billion in shareholder value. Across the S&P 1500, poorly managed C-suite transitions may collectively destroy close to $1 trillion in market value annually.
For midsize and privately held firms, where leadership transitions are tangled up with ownership, culture, and personal identity, the stakes look different but are no less real. Only 30% of family and founder-led businesses survive a transition to second-generation leadership. Seventy percent of small businesses that go to market never successfully sell. When succession is reactive rather than intentional, organizations pay the price in stability, talent retention, and long-term viability.
Why Most Plans Fail: The Transparency Gap
The readiness data raises an obvious question: why? Most boards and leadership teams understand that succession matters. Eighty-six percent of leaders describe it as a top priority. Yet only 14% believe their organization does it well.
The gap isn’t primarily about knowledge or methodology. It’s about courage, specifically the courage to plan openly. Many organizations treat succession as a confidential exercise conducted behind closed doors: a board discussion held in executive session, a shortlist kept in a locked drawer, a timeline shared with no one beyond the incumbent. The reasoning feels obvious. Why create uncertainty or anxiety by talking about leadership change before it’s imminent?
But that instinct toward secrecy is exactly what undermines the process. When employees and stakeholders are excluded from succession conversations, the eventual transition lands as a disruption rather than a progression. Teams that haven’t had time to build relationships with incoming leaders don’t have the trust needed to follow them. Clients and partners, caught off guard, recalibrate their commitments. And the incoming leader inherits a mandate without the trust and relationships needed to execute it.
Research confirms what practice teaches: employees who see clear pathways for leadership development and advancement are far more likely to stay. Transparent succession planning reinforces a climate of trust, one where advancement is understood to be merit-based, where institutional knowledge is valued, and where the organization’s future is a shared concern rather than a guarded secret.
What Transparent Succession Actually Looks Like
There’s a real difference between having a succession plan and building a succession culture. A plan is a document. A culture is a set of behaviors, conversations, and commitments that unfold over years, visibly and by design.
At SparkEffect, we recently completed a multi-year CEO succession that shows this distinction in practice. Mike Humphries led the firm for 25 years, through the sudden loss of its founder, a strategic merger, and a global pandemic. On April 1, 2026, he transitioned the CEO role to Kim Bohr and moved into an active chairperson role on the board.
What made this transition distinctive was not its outcome but its architecture. Several principles defined the approach:
Start Before You Have To
Mike began succession planning in earnest after founder Tom Waldron died unexpectedly in 2017. That loss exposed the existential risk a sole-owner structure creates. Rather than treating the crisis as a one-time problem to solve, he used it as a starting point for building long-term resilience. His first priorities were stabilizing the business, retaining the team, and resetting the strategic plan with broad input from practice leaders. Succession wasn’t an afterthought bolted onto a growth strategy; it was woven into it from the beginning.
As Mike reflected: “Start as early as you can. Out of all the uncertainty in the world, it is tremendously comforting to know that the business is going to be in good hands if something happened. It puts something to rest that you can count on.”
Define Criteria Before You Identify Candidates
Before he ever approached a successor candidate, Mike formalized a set of characteristics and criteria he believed the role required. These went well beyond functional competencies: he was looking for entrepreneurial instinct (demonstrated by willingness to take ownership risk), operational depth, a transparent and humble leadership style, cultural alignment with the firm’s values, and shared purpose. When he identified Kim, it was because she independently met these criteria through her own career choices, including having built her own consulting practice and having previously pursued a business acquisition.
This is the opposite of the more common pattern the Conference Board identifies: boards that begin with a candidate in mind and reverse-engineer the criteria to fit. When criteria come first, the process is more defensible, more repeatable, and far less vulnerable to political dynamics.
Make the Plan Visible to the Organization
Perhaps the most counterintuitive element of SparkEffect’s approach was the decision to make the succession pathway transparent across the organization. Every member of the team knew the direction the firm was heading and who was being positioned to lead it. When the firm later merged with Torchiana to form SparkEffect, Mike explicitly laid out the succession plan for the new ownership partners as a condition of moving forward.
Kim described the impact directly: “We’ve always talked about ‘this is the road.’ Bringing people along in the process is a really valuable trust-building exercise. I’ve talked with leaders we’ve advised where there are sometimes concerns about transparency—that if we’re that transparent, everybody’s going to leave. That’s really not the case. That followership is critical, and it’s a real opportunity in the process to engage others along the way.”
Graduate the Transition, Don’t Flip a Switch
The SparkEffect transition unfolded over approximately six years, during which responsibilities shifted gradually rather than in a single handoff. Mike described a deliberate process of “pulling away”: reducing his visibility in day-to-day decisions, traveling more, and creating space for Kim to step into progressively larger leadership moments. The result was that Kim built her own followership organically rather than by decree, and the team experienced continuity rather than disruption.
This graduated approach also gave the transition room to absorb complexity that no plan could have anticipated at the outset: a global pandemic three weeks into Kim’s tenure as COO, a strategic merger that expanded the ownership group from two to five, a complete rebrand, and a multi-year cultural integration. Each of these events tested the succession pathway. And each one held, because the relationship and trust between the outgoing and incoming leaders had been built to withstand ambiguity.
The Inner Work of Letting Go
One dimension of succession that rarely appears in research papers but directly shapes outcomes is the psychological and emotional work required of the outgoing leader. Succession planning is an exercise in identity transition. The leader who has spent decades defining themselves through a role has to find a way to redefine their contribution without losing their sense of relevance.
Mike described this journey as one of gradually answering the question: “When do you say it’s time?” For him, the answer didn’t come from a single moment. It came from a sustained observation that the business was stable, the team was in the right roles, and his successor had both the capability and the credibility to lead independently. He also found ways to stay connected that mattered to him: board governance, selective client work, and community involvement. That meant the transition didn’t feel like a loss. It felt like an evolution.
For HR leaders and boards advising their CEOs through this process, this dimension matters more than most organizations acknowledge. Executive coaching, peer advisory groups, and post-transition role design aren’t luxuries. They’re the investments that make the difference between a leader who leaves gracefully and one who holds on too long or disengages too abruptly.
What This Means for Your Organization
Whether your organization is a Fortune 500 corporation or a privately held firm with a founder still at the helm, the implications are the same. A leadership transition will come. The only question is whether your organization will be ready when it does.
For HR leaders and CHROs:
- Advocate for succession planning that begins years before it is needed and includes leadership development at multiple levels, not just the CEO seat.
- Push for criteria-driven candidate evaluation. When the profile is defined before the search begins, the process is more rigorous, defensible, and less susceptible to bias.
- Champion transparency. Communicate the existence and direction of succession plans broadly enough that teams can build relationships with potential successors well in advance of a transition.
For CEOs and business owners:
- Recognize that identifying a successor is not the end of the process. It’s the beginning. The real work is creating the conditions for that person to succeed: building their relationships, expanding their authority gradually, and making space for them to lead.
- Invest in your own transition. Define what your post-CEO role looks like before you step out of the current one. Leaders who have a clear next chapter are far more likely to execute a clean handoff.
- Don’t wait for a crisis to start planning. The most effective successions begin when there is no urgency, when you have the time to be selective, intentional, and thorough.
For boards and governance leaders:
- Get to know the leadership bench personally. Research consistently shows that most directors do not understand the capabilities of executives below the CEO, and only about a quarter participate in their evaluations.
- Treat succession as a standing agenda item, not an emergency response. The boards that handle transitions best are the ones that discuss succession continuously, not only when a CEO announces their departure.
LISTEN: Hear The Full Story
This article draws on a candid conversation between Mike Humphries and Kim Bohr recorded for the Courage to Advance podcast. In the episode, “Our Story: What Transparent Succession Planning Actually Looks Like,” they share the unfiltered details of their six-year succession journey—including the moments of doubt, the merger that complicated everything, and what it really takes to let go of the role you’ve spent decades building.
The Courage to Plan Out Loud
Succession planning is often framed as a risk management exercise, and it is one. But at its best, it’s something more than that. It’s a vote of confidence in the organization’s future, an act of trust extended to the people who will carry the mission forward, and maybe above all, a statement from the outgoing leader that the work matters more than the person doing it.
The organizations that will come through the next wave of leadership transitions strongest are not the ones with the most sophisticated playbooks. They’re the ones whose leaders had the courage to plan out loud, to name the path, invite others onto it, and build the trust that makes continuity possible.
That work starts before it’s urgent. And it starts at the top.
References & Further Reading
- The Conference Board & Semler Brossy, “CEO Succession Practices in the Russell 3000 and S&P 500: 2024 Edition” (2024).
- Harvard Business Review, “The Pitfalls That Undermine CEO Succession Planning” (November 2025).
- Harvard Business School, “The High Cost of Poor Succession Planning” (2023).
- Deloitte, “The Role of the CEO in Succession Planning” and Fortune/Deloitte CEO Survey (Winter 2024).
- PwC Strategy&, “CEO Success Study” and 28th Annual Global CEO Survey (2025).
- Gallup, “Most Small-Business Owners Lack a Succession Plan” (2024).
- SIGMA Assessment Systems, “Succession Planning and Employee Retention” (2024).
- Benchmark International, “Family Business Succession Planning and Success Rates” (2024).
