Setup Considerations: succession scope and confidentiality

What this achieves

Succession planning records judgements about named people who usually do not know they have been named. Deciding how wide the scope is, and who can see the result, matters more than any field on the screen and is the hardest thing to walk back.

Decision 1: which positions are critical

The Critical Position flag on a position is what pulls it into succession planning. Everything downstream — the pipeline, the critical-gap list, the successor panel — is scoped by it.

Option	Description
A narrow set	Only the posts whose sudden vacancy would genuinely disrupt the business. The gap list stays short enough to act on.
A wide set	Anything senior. The gap list becomes long, the review becomes an annual chore, and nothing on it feels urgent.

The test is not seniority. It is what happens on the Monday after the person leaves. A post held by one person who is the only one who knows how something works is critical whether or not it is senior.

Example: at HC Corp UK Ltd, a payroll post held by one person with no cover is critical even though it is not the most senior role in Finance. Marking every head-of-department post critical while missing that one is the common mistake.

Decision 2: succession is recorded in two places, and they mean different things

This is the distinction to settle before anyone starts, because both surfaces call their column readiness and they are not the same measurement.

Option	Description
The successor list on a position	A person’s judgement, chosen from Ready now, Ready in 1 year, or Ready in 2+ years, with a note. It is somebody’s opinion, recorded deliberately.
The succession pipeline dashboard	A calculated readiness score and one of five categories, produced by comparing the candidate against the position’s job profile.

Neither is wrong and neither replaces the other. The calculated score knows what the job profile requires and nothing else; the recorded judgement knows everything the profile does not capture and cannot be checked by anyone.

Decide which one your succession review runs on, and say so. A review where half the room is reading a calculated score and the other half is reading a manager’s opinion produces an argument about the number rather than about the person.

Decision 3: who can see it

Both surfaces sit behind administrator-only screens. The position record and its successor panel are part of your organization structure, which only administrators reach; the succession pipeline sits inside administrator-only insights.

Talent pools state their own restriction on screen: pools are visible to administrators only.

Nothing about a nomination, a successor list, or a talent pool appears on any employee-facing screen. An employee’s own career screens show their aspirations, their readiness against roles they have been scored for, their development plan, and their conversations — not whether anyone has named them as cover for a position.

That is the product’s position, and it should be yours too. Being on a succession list is not a promise, and somebody learning about it from a screen instead of from their manager is the failure mode this design avoids.

Decision 4: whether to tell people, and what to tell them

The system will not tell them. That leaves the decision entirely with you, which means it has to actually be made rather than assumed.

Option	Description
Tell nobody	Simplest, and the default if you decide nothing. The cost is that the people you are counting on are not being developed towards anything they know about.
Tell people they are being developed	Say what the development is for without promising the role. The honest middle, and the one that makes a development plan make sense to the person working it.
Tell people they are the successor	Only sustainable where the role is genuinely coming and you are prepared for what happens if it does not.

Example: Olivia Bennett’s post at HC Corp UK Ltd has two approved successors. Telling both they are next creates two people expecting one job. Telling both they are being developed towards a role at that level is true, useful, and survives the outcome.

Decision 5: criteria-based or manual talent pools

A talent pool can be built from criteria or curated by hand.

Option	Description
Criteria	Membership is recomputed against every active employee. New matches are added and people who no longer qualify are removed. Keeps itself current; changes without anybody deciding.
Manual	Members are added one at a time with a note. Nothing changes unless somebody changes it.

A criteria pool with a minimum readiness threshold requires a target job profile, and the form says so. Beyond that, remember that recomputing removes people as well as adding them — a pool built to hold a specific group of names will not hold them if the criteria stop matching.

Use criteria where the pool is a definition. Use manual where the pool is a decision.

Decision 6: how often the review happens

A position’s succession record carries a Last review date and a Mark reviewed action, and a Risk of vacancy score you enter yourself on a scale of 0 to 100.

Both are only worth having if somebody maintains them. Set a cadence you will keep — an annual review of a narrow critical set beats a quarterly review of everything that quietly stops after the second quarter. A stale review date is at least honest about being stale, which is why it is worth stamping.

Agree what your risk numbers mean before you start entering them, because they are entered by different people and read as if they were comparable.

What is expensive to change later

Decision	Cost of changing later
Who has administrator access	High. Succession lists, talent pools, and readiness scores across the whole company come with it.
Telling somebody they are a successor	High and not reversible. It cannot be untold.
Which positions are critical	Medium. Widening the set dilutes the gap list; narrowing it drops positions out of the pipeline.
Criteria on a live talent pool	Medium. The next recompute adds and removes members without anyone deciding person by person.
The meaning of your risk-of-vacancy scale	Medium. Numbers already entered do not change, so old and new entries stop being comparable.
A recorded successor readiness judgement	Low. It is a note in a panel and can be corrected.

What happens next

Once your critical set is agreed, succession work runs on two screens: the position record where successors and vacancy risk are maintained, and the pipeline view where the critical gaps are read. What both produce is the same thing — a shortlist of roles you could not fill tomorrow — and that list is a development question first and a recruiting question only when no internal candidate is plausible.