Succession Stories: How to Identify the Best Leaders for a Changing World

Global shifts are rapidly changing the nature of modern leadership. As geopolitical crises, tariff uncertainty, and AI-driven technology transformations demonstrate how quickly established systems can be dismantled and make organizational futures near impossible to predict, boards and CEOs are asking an urgent question:

When we don’t know what tomorrow holds, how can we identify and prepare the right leaders for the future?

Russell Reynolds Associates research shows that leadership succession plans are already falling short. Boards continue to underestimate the effort, costs, and risks that accompany successful succession planning, resulting in less than half of directors believing their CEO succession plans will succeed. Meanwhile, CEO tenures are hitting record lows amid evolving role demands. Organizations are also on the brink of a looming succession crisis in the levels below, with 71% of next generation leaders expressing interest in leaving their employers. Paired with changing employee value propositions and automation-driven collapsing of the traditional career ladder, it’s clear that organizations need to act now to fortify their leadership pipelines.

The stakes are high—but not insurmountable. To truly understand who will succeed in the future, organizations need succession plans that:

• Identify leaders who can both adeptly navigate change and keep their organization steady through the day-to-day
• Get beyond executive personas to understand leaders’ convictions, holistic thinking, coachability, and clarity of purpose behind their aspirations
• Surface whether their leadership teams are committed to evolving the organization, driving transformation, scaling digital fluency, and developing yet-to-be-defined future expertise
• Develop adaptable, cross-functional next generation leaders across every function

So how do we identify and develop leaders that fit this bill? By measuring an executive’s potential—and their ability to fully unlock it.

What is potential realization? A new, future-focused aspect of our leadership assessment and development approach

To help organizations recognize the best predictors of leadership success within our changing business context, we created Leadership Portrait.

This model measures an executive’s readiness to meet immediate challenges, as well as their potential to continue learning and growing in the face of change. This is measured via one’s growth factors—their systems thinking, curiosity and adaptability, drive and resilience, and social intelligence. But these factors, while quite important, only tell half the story. The model also measures a leader’s ability to fully realize their potential by examining their self-knowledge, values and aspirations, and clarity around wider purpose and legacy.

Understood together, these components reveal whether a leader has the ability, desire, and versatility to keep evolving as the landscape transforms around them.

The RRA Leadership Portrait

Traditional thinking treats potential as static; a quality you either have or you don’t. Our research with thousands of executives reveals something more nuanced: potential isn't fixed—it’s dynamic.

The key shift to understand? Making it to the top job is not the realization of potential. As the world grows more complicated, roles will continually change, and the bar will continually reset. As such, potential realization is an ongoing journey that even the most senior executives must contend with as the context and challenges around them change.

Applied to succession planning, Leadership Portrait provides structure for deeper, rigorous conversations around inherent leadership elements that were previously difficult to quantify—giving boards a more robust way to broaden the lens on who has the potential to succeed in the future, while also understanding which leaders have the skills and competencies their organization needs today.

Leadership Portrait can be leveraged to consistently measure entire leadership teams, allowing CEOs and boards to identify talent that will evolve with the organization and creating specific development paths for high potential executives.

Leadership Portrait in action: Finding and developing hidden gems in the executive succession pipeline

Moments of Truth: Digging deeper to get succession right

Organizations spending billions on leadership succession often miss this crucial insight: you aren’t just trying to understand who can lead today; you need to know who can continually flex and grow in a landscape of perpetual change.

To identify and develop these future-fit leaders, organizations need succession pipelines that surface executives with the capacity for intellectual agility and emotional growth. These leaders display constant curiosity about the implications of major world changes, bring maturity and courage to their responses, and adapt their organization’s strategy without disrupting the core mission or straying from their personal values.

While these elements may not be obvious in a passing interaction or a 30-minute Zoom, they are crucial to thriving in an unknown future—one that requires leaders who are deeply connected to the “why” behind their actions and decisions; who take an honest, insightful approach to their own growth path; and who understand the legacy and impact their leadership will leave behind.

Authors

David Lange leads Russell Reynolds Associates’ Global Development capability. He is based in Chicago.
Erin Zolna leads Russell Reynolds Associates’ Global Assessment capability. She is based in New York.

Contributors

Avani Arora is a senior member of Russell Reynolds Associates’ Strategy & Excellence team. She is based in Chicago.
Joey Berk is a member of Russell Reynolds Associates’ Assessment & Development capability. He is based in Chicago.
Tobias Bothe-Hutschenreuter is a member of Russell Reynolds Associates’ Assessment & Development capability. He is based in Frankfurt.
Leah Christianson is a member of Russell Reynolds Associates’ Center for Leadership Insight. She is based in San Francisco.
Gabrielle Lieberman is a senior member of Russell Reynolds Associates’ Center for Leadership Insight. She is based in Chicago.
Peter Pickus leads Russell Reynolds Associates’ Assessment & Development Knowledge team. He is based in North Carolina.
Scott Smith is a member of Russell Reynolds Associates’ Assessment & Development capability. He is based in Dallas.
Aimee Williamson is a senior member of Russell Reynolds Associates’ Assessment & Development capability. She is based in Sydney.