Issue 3: What Does Your Leadership Bench Look Like?

Why leadership strength isn’t just about who’s around the boardroom table today — but who could step up tomorrow.

⏱ 5-minute read

---

The Boardroom Question

If one of your senior leaders left tomorrow, who could step into their role?

For many organisations, the answer is less straightforward than they would like.

Businesses invest considerable time in building strong leadership teams. But focusing solely on the people currently occupying senior positions can overlook an equally important question: what does the next layer of leadership look like?

A strong leadership bench provides organisations with options. It creates resilience, supports succession and enables businesses to respond more confidently when opportunities or unexpected changes arise.

The strength of your organisation tomorrow may depend just as much on the people waiting in the wings as those leading it today.

Leadership Strength Is About Depth

In sport, the strongest teams don’t simply have an excellent starting line-up. They have strength on the bench.

Business is no different.

An organisation may have an exceptional CEO, CFO, Publisher or Managing Director. But if there is nobody capable of stepping up when one of those individuals moves on, leadership strength can quickly become leadership vulnerability.

This doesn’t mean every senior position needs an obvious successor sitting immediately beneath it.

It does mean boards should understand where potential exists within the organisation — and where it doesn’t.

The Risk of the Indispensable Leader

Every organisation has people who appear indispensable.

They hold years of knowledge, have strong internal and external relationships and understand how the organisation really works.

Their experience is enormously valuable.

But from a succession perspective, being completely dependent on one individual also represents a risk.

Boards should therefore be asking:

• Where is critical knowledge concentrated?
• Which roles would be hardest to replace?
• Who could assume additional responsibility in an emergency?
• Which individuals have the potential to progress over the next two to five years?
• Where do we have no obvious internal successor?

These aren’t simply HR questions.

They’re questions about business continuity and organisational resilience.

Potential Isn’t the Same as Readiness

Identifying talented people is only the beginning.

Someone may have enormous potential without yet being ready to take on an executive role.

Perhaps they need broader commercial experience.

Perhaps they’ve never led a large team.

Perhaps they need greater exposure to the board, investors or external stakeholders.

Or perhaps they have deep functional expertise but haven’t yet demonstrated the ability to think across the wider business.

Strong succession planning identifies those gaps early enough to do something about them.

Stretch assignments, mentoring, cross-functional projects, international experience and exposure to strategic decision-making can all help develop future leaders before they’re needed.

The objective isn’t simply to identify a successor.

It’s to create one.

Developing future talent takes time. The CIPD highlights the importance of identifying and developing people for business-critical roles, including using practical experience, job moves and secondments to prepare potential successors.

Don’t Assume Everyone Wants the Next Job

There’s another important consideration.

The person a board regards as the obvious successor may not actually want the role.

Career ambitions change. Some people want greater responsibility; others value specialist expertise, flexibility or a different direction entirely.

Succession plans based on assumptions can therefore create a false sense of security.

Regular career conversations with high-potential employees are essential.

Understanding where people want to go is just as important as deciding where the organisation would like them to go.

Publishing: Developing Tomorrow’s Leaders

Publishing businesses often contain extraordinary depth of specialist knowledge.

Editorial, rights, sales, marketing, production, digital and finance teams can include individuals who have spent years developing expertise and relationships.

The challenge is identifying which of those specialists could become tomorrow’s broader business leaders.

A brilliant editor doesn’t automatically become a brilliant Publisher.

A successful Sales Director doesn’t necessarily want to become Managing Director.

Future leaders may need exposure beyond their traditional functions before they’re ready to take on wider responsibility.

For publishing boards, the question isn’t simply:

Who are our best people?

It’s:

Who could lead this business in five years — and what experience do they need between now and then?

Financial Services: Building Leadership Resilience

In Financial Services, succession planning carries additional significance.

Leadership roles often require a combination of technical expertise, regulatory understanding, commercial judgement and the ability to operate confidently with boards, regulators and other stakeholders.

Developing that breadth takes time.

Waiting until a senior leader announces their departure to begin thinking about succession can therefore leave organisations with limited options.

Building a strong internal leadership bench allows businesses to develop future leaders deliberately rather than reactively.

It can also provide valuable continuity during periods of regulatory, operational or organisational change.

Internal Talent Is Only Half the Picture

A strong leadership bench shouldn’t exist in isolation from the external market.

Internal succession planning tells you who you have.

External market intelligence tells you who else is out there.

Both matter.

Boards that understand the external talent landscape can benchmark their emerging leaders against comparable executives elsewhere in their sector.

That can reveal whether internal candidates are genuinely ready, where capability gaps exist and which skills competitors are prioritising.

It can also challenge assumptions.

Sometimes the strongest future leader is already inside the organisation.

Sometimes bringing in external experience, fresh thinking or different capabilities is exactly what the business needs.

The important thing is to understand both options before a vacancy arises.

Build the Bench Before You Need It

Succession planning works best when there isn’t an immediate vacancy to fill.

Without the pressure of an urgent appointment, boards can take a longer-term view.

They can identify critical roles, assess internal talent, develop high-potential individuals and understand the external market.

This transforms succession from an emergency response into an ongoing leadership strategy.

Executive search and market mapping can play an important role here — not necessarily because an organisation is looking to recruit today, but because understanding the talent available tomorrow creates better strategic choices.

Five Questions for Your Next Leadership Meeting

Consider asking:

1. Which senior roles would create the greatest disruption if they became vacant tomorrow?
2. Do we have credible internal successors for those roles?
3. What development would those individuals need before they were genuinely ready?
4. Do we know whether they actually want those positions?
5. How do our internal candidates compare with the strongest talent in the external market?

If those questions are difficult to answer, your leadership bench may deserve more attention.

Key Takeaways

• Leadership resilience depends on depth, not simply the strength of today’s executive team.
• Critical roles without credible successors represent a business risk.
• High potential and immediate readiness are not the same thing.
• Future leaders need deliberate development and exposure before vacancies arise.
• Succession plans should reflect employees’ own ambitions rather than assumptions.
• External market intelligence provides an important benchmark for internal talent.
• The best time to strengthen your leadership bench is before you need to use it.

The Boardroom Question

If you looked beyond your executive team today, how confident would you be about the leaders waiting in the wings?

At Mosaic Executive Search, we work with organisations across Publishing and Financial Services to understand both their internal leadership requirements and the external talent market.

Through executive search and market mapping, we can help organisations identify where leadership talent sits, benchmark internal capability and prepare for future succession requirements — before a critical vacancy arises.

Further Reading

Boardroom Insights | Issue 01
Is Your Leadership Team Future Ready?

Boardroom Insights | Issue 02
The Hidden Cost of Leadership Vacancies

Coming Next | Issue 04
External Hire or Internal Promotion?