Officer Succession Planning – Is the Baton Being Passed?

Jan 29, 2019
3 min read

Updated: Sep 3, 2025

During a Board Strategic Planning session your Board President quits on the spot because she doesn’t agree with the direction the Board wishes to take. What succession plan does your Board have in place? Does the Board have an individual groomed and trained ready to fill the outgoing Presidents role?

While this scenario may sound extreme it’s exactly the situation I experienced with a Board who had asked me to facilitate their Strategic Planning session. What hadn’t been drawn out, or expressed in the pre-session planning meeting with the Board Executive, was the conflict between the President and the rest of the Board around a specific project. The Board President didn’t like that her project didn’t get any legs and quit half way through the session. It quickly become apparent that there was no succession plan in place AND no other Board Member wanted the role, not even the Vice-Pesident (then why were they the Vice-President – that’s a discussion for another time).

Lack of succession plans in not-for-profit Boards is not uncommon. A 2015 BoardSource Survey (paywall) found that only 49% of CEO’s believed their organisations had an effective Officer’s succession plan. The same CEO’s believed Board Officer succession planning was one of the most significant areas for Board development.

So, does your Board have an adequate Officer succession plan? To answer that let me pose a series of questions that you can ask yourself, or maybe even at a Board meeting.

Has your Board schedule time to discussion succession planning?
Does your Board have an annual self-assessment process that includes succession planning?
Does your Board have a suitable Board Member selection processes?
Are new Board members on-boarded, oriented, inducted and trained adequately?
Are you attracting/appointing the right people to your Board? Do they have the right skill sets required to allow for succession planning?
Are your Board Members engaged? Are they contributing? Are they aware of what’s happening in the organisation? Are they aware of the significant issues being faced by the Board and organisation? Are they actively involved in contributing to the Board and therefore contributing to the organisation moving forward? The same survey cited above found that only around 20% of CEO’s strongly agreed their Board Members were engaged – to me that is an extremely scary statistic. I'm going to say this right here - Board Members who are not engaged should be encouraged to become engaged quickly, or to move on.
Do the primary Executive roles (President, Treasurer, Secretary) have someone earmarked to succeed them? Are those earmarked aware of the plans and are they willing to take on the role if/when needed? Are those earmarked for the roles being suitably trained and/or mentored for those roles?
Does your organisations constitution have provisions that allow strategic Board succession planning?

The answers to these questions may direct you to future proofing your Board and avoiding significant disruptions to the organisation you lead. If you find your Board lacking in these areas external advise can be valuable in getting up to speed quickly.

Not addressing Board succession can lead to major disruptions to an organisation, leaving it languishing, and putting CEO under unnecessary pressures, while: