Succession Planning - More Than A Bench Full of Potential

Are you winning with your succession planning? How do you know if your succession strategy is hitting the mark? Like any great game, the rules of success depend on the kind of team you are – and the one you want to become. 

At Spotify, we’ve torn up the old playbook and ditched the list. Instead of a once-a-year, check-the-box exercise of identifying critical roles and successors, we treat succession planning as a continuous game of strategy and skill-building. We don’t just draft potential stars; we actively train, challenge, and move our people across the organisation to get them game-ready.

Eyes on the Prize: Defining Success

To know if you’re winning, you need to know what winning looks like. Winning with our succession planning isn’t about having a bench full of potential – it’s about taking deliberate action throughout the year to close succession gaps, build deep insights on our talent and expose them to new challenges. 

For us, the end game is clear: a broad, diverse, and high-quality talent bench that’s ready to rock in business-critical roles. Winning is also when our business leaders have full confidence in the strength of our talent bench – knowing that it’s robust, strategic, and ready to tackle future challenges and opportunities head-on.

But let’s be real – that’s a championship-level goal. So how do we make it happen? 

Playing to Win: The Succession Strategy

One of our game-changing moves this past year was bringing our lead recruiters into the HRBP succession planning huddle. Add to that our Scout tool, which now provides full visibility and transparency of all our successors to HRBPs and lead recruiters. This tight collaboration has amplified our talent insights, expanded and widened our bench, and deepened succession conversations with business leaders.

We also made sure our strategic workforce plans and succession planning are in sync, like a well-coached team. This keeps our business strategies and future critical capabilities front and center when determining which roles and talent are truly game-changers to build future ready leadership and organisation.

In addition we hosted several Talent Sharing and Matchmaking Sessions, making sure our successors aren’t just names on a list but actively developing in real-world scenarios. By focusing on fueling movement, exposure, and growth, we don’t just prepare leaders – we create future game-changers. 

In fact, all of the plays we made last year helped us to significantly expand our successor pool and close succession gaps.

Keeping Score: Measuring the Wins

What’s a game without a scoreboard? To keep ourselves accountable, we track a few key metrics and their progress year over year: 

• Number of new successors identified
• Successors coming from outside the department of the critical role
• Gender and ethnicity representation and progress
• Progress on closing succession gaps
• Increase in successor readiness levels
• Number of successors appearing on multiple plans
• Internal moves, progression, and attrition of successors
• Successors stepping into critical roles

And because having a strong succession plan is critical for business continuity, our Board of Directors is our ultimate accountability partner. Every year, we present an annual summary of wins and opportunities, and their engagement and passion for our people drive us to keep pushing forward.

Are We Winning?

So, the big question: are we winning with our succession planning?

We’ve had major wins this past year, but just like in any championship, as you raise the bar, new challenges emerge. That’s the game. And at Spotify, we’ll never stop tweaking, refining, and improving our play. Because that’s how you stay ahead.

Game on!