The Succession Plan for the Top Management Team

A General Manager at an automotive company in Transylvania announced his retirement. The leadership had known for six months. It seemed like enough time. The organization was about to discover it was not. 

Recruiting an external successor took three months. Onboarding  another three. For six months, the organization operated without a real executive leader at the top. Strategic decisions were suspended or improperly delegated. The management team absorbed pressure it had not been prepared for. The business continued — but on inertia, not on direction. 

This is not an exceptional case. From my perspective, after more than 10 years of practice in executive search, it is one of the most frequent scenarios I encounter in Romanian companies. And one of the most costly — precisely because its cost does not appear in any financial report. It shows up in missed decisions, destabilized teams, and business opportunities that did not wait.  

A Single Figure That Should Trouble Any Board 

In 80% of the executive search mandates I manage, the client organization has not identified any internal successor for any role on the top management team. Not for the General Manager. Not for the CFO or COO. For no one. 

These are not small companies or early-stage businesses. I am talking about entrepreneurs with revenues in the tens or hundreds of millions of euros, with established management teams, with years of sustained growth. Companies that have built solid structures in operations, sales, and finance — and have built nothing in the area of leadership succession. 

“In 80% of the executive search mandates I manage, the organization has not identified any internal successor for any role on the top management team.” 

The explanation I hear most often is that “the right person will be found at the right time.” After so many years in this industry, I can say with certainty: this belief is one of the most expensive illusions in talent management. 

The Second Scenario: An Internal Process Without an Objective Framework 

There is a second type of situation I have repeatedly encountered  one that, paradoxically, generates even higher costs than the absence of any plan. 

An entrepreneurial retail company, faced with the need to promote a director to the top management team, ran a six-month internal evaluation and selection process. Without a structured methodological framework. Without external benchmarking. With good intentions, but without the right tools. 

A decision was made. Three months later, it was clear it had been wrong. The promoted person had the necessary functional competencies. They lacked the decision-making maturity and organizational influence capacity the role required. The distinction between operational performance and leadership potential had not been rigorously assessed. 

Nine months. A disoriented team. A person placed in a position that exceeded them. And, ultimately, the call to an external expert — exactly where the process should have started. 

The error did not belong to the people. It belonged to the process. More precisely, to the absence of an objective framework for assessing leadership potential and the lack of an external reference point against which to calibrate internal candidates. Organizations have a natural, human tendency to evaluate people through their historical performance. Leadership succession, however, requires a different angle: not who has delivered best so far, but who can lead best in a context of greater complexity. 

What Appears in No Financial Report 

The costs are not abstract. I have seen them materialize, in different forms, in different organizations: 

• Decision vacuum during the transition — on average six to nine months for top management roles, during which the strategic agenda is suspended or managed in a diffuse manner. 

• Significantly higher recruitment costs under urgency conditions, both financially and in terms of the leadership team’s bandwidth involved in the process. 

• Erosion of commitment and trust within the management team during prolonged periods of uncertainty at the leadership level. 

• Missed opportunity windows partnerships, strategic contracts, expansion projects — at moments when the organization lacks a consolidated executive leader to champion them. 

• The risk of decision-making under pressure: choosing the available candidate, not the right candidate. The distinction seems minor at the time of hiring. It becomes obvious within the first six months of the mandate. 

Succession Planning Is Not an HR Document. It Is a Strategic Conversation. 

The most common misconception I encounter is that succession planning means a list of names in an HR file. An impeccable document on paper, with no real operational value. A compliance exercise, not a tool for managing organizational risk. 

A functional succession plan answers concrete questions: 

• Which roles in the top management team, if unexpectedly vacated, would generate major risk to business continuity? 

• Are there internal candidates with genuine potential to take on these roles within 12, 24, or 36-month horizons — assessed objectively, not on the basis of subjective perception? 

• What competency, exposure, or decision-making maturity gaps do these candidates have, and what development trajectory do they require? 

• If the internal talent market cannot deliver a viable successor, how much time and what resources does an external recruitment of the necessary caliber require? 

These questions do not receive a valid answer just once. Organizations with a mature talent management culture revisit them annually, integrate them into performance review processes, and calibrate them according to the strategic evolution of the business. And they most often maintain an ongoing relationship with an executive search partner who knows both the required profiles and the relevant talent market. 

Why the Stakes Are Higher in Transylvania Than in Other Markets 

Talent exists in Transylvania. The regional market has competent managers with solid experience and exposure to international standards. The problem is not the absence of talent — it is its visibility. 

The truly valuable profiles in the top management space are not on recruitment platforms. They are at their desks, in their current roles, with no publicly declared intention to change. They are not actively looking. They need to be found  through trusted relationships, industry networks, direct and confidential outreach. And a process launched under urgency, without these pre-built relationships, invariably produces a compromise. 

Companies operating in these areas and understanding this reality do not wait for a role to become vacant before they start looking. They already have an active relationship with an executive search partner who knows the regional market, has access to passive profiles the truly valuable candidates who are not visible in the market — and can validate in advance their availability and interest in a specific opportunity. 

“Companies operating in more isolated areas of Transylvania cannot afford the luxury of searching for an executive leader only after the predecessor has left. The time window is too short. The market, too narrow.” 

Urgency Is Not a Talent Strategy 

Organizations that build succession plans do not do so because they have more time or more resources. They do so because they understand that leadership is not a resource available on demand, and that the top talent market does not operate to order. 

A proactively managed leadership transition can be a moment of consolidation and validation of organizational maturity. Managed reactively, in the absence of a plan, it becomes almost inevitably a moment of vulnerability  with costs that far exceed the fee for an executive search process. 

If you recognize your organization in any of the scenarios described or if you do not know with certainty today who would step into a key role on your top management team tomorrow  it is probably worth a conversation. Not a commercial proposal. A conversation about your organization’s talent strategy. This is exactly how I approach every mandate at Antal International: first I understand, then I build the right solution.