How to Develop Future Leaders Before You Need Them

A key leader resigns on Friday

On Monday morning, someone else needs to lead the team. That's when organizations discover whether they had a succession plan — or simply a list of people they hoped might be ready someday.

Leadership readiness doesn't happen when a vacancy occurs. It develops through years of experience, increasing responsibility, feedback, exposure, relationships, successes, mistakes, and opportunities to lead before the title arrives.

Yet many organizations still approach leadership development reactively. Someone gets promoted, and then the development begins. Someone announces retirement, and suddenly the search for a successor starts. A high-potential employee is identified, but nobody changes what that employee is actually doing.

Artificial intelligence can make parts of leadership development easier. It can help create development plans, identify potential experience gaps, generate coaching questions, and suggest assignments. But AI cannot give someone three years of leadership experience in three weeks.

Every organization eventually promotes someone. The only question is whether they were prepared.

Why this matters now

Leadership transitions aren't always predictable. Retirement may provide advance notice. Resignations often don't. Illness, organizational change, growth, acquisitions, promotions, and unexpected departures can create leadership needs very quickly.

Research from DDI's Global Leadership Forecast 2025 found that only 20% of organizations reported having a strong leadership pipeline, down from 33% just a few years earlier. DDI also found that organizations were struggling to develop leaders quickly enough to meet future business needs. https://www.ddiworld.com/global-leadership-forecast-2025

That's the pipeline problem in practical terms. Organizations don't necessarily lack talented people. They often lack enough people who have been deliberately prepared for greater responsibility before that responsibility arrives.

The time to prepare your next operations leader isn't when the operations leader resigns. The time to prepare your next CEO isn't six months before retirement. And the time to find out whether a promising manager can lead across functions isn't after you've promoted them into a job requiring exactly that capability. Development needs to begin earlier.

Building readiness on purpose

Leadership development becomes much more useful when it starts with a specific question: what will this person need to be able to do that they haven't had to do yet? That shifts development away from generic training and toward readiness.

Suppose you have a strong department manager who could potentially become a division leader within three years. The next position may require the person to lead other managers, manage a larger budget, think across functions, make decisions with incomplete information, influence executives, manage significant customer relationships, develop other leaders, communicate strategy, handle greater ambiguity, and represent the organization externally.

Now compare those requirements with the person's current experience. That's where development planning should begin.

Development that actually works

A useful development assignment contains four things. Real responsibility — the employee needs to own something that matters. A defined stretch — the assignment should require a capability the person needs for the future, not simply more of the work they already do well.

A leader who gives honest feedback — someone needs to observe, coach, question, and occasionally say, “here's what you could have handled differently.” And a review date — development shouldn't disappear into someone's annual goals. Set a date to ask: what happened? What did you learn? What changed? What do you need next?

Everything else — courses, books, assessments, conferences, webinars — is supplementary. Useful, certainly. But leadership readiness is primarily developed through leadership experience.

Give people the job before you give them the job

Not literally. But give potential successors pieces of the future role while there is still someone available to support them.

If someone may eventually manage an important customer relationship, bring them into that relationship now. If they'll need to understand finance, involve them in budgeting. If they'll need executive presence, have them present to executives. If they'll eventually lead managers, give them responsibility for developing another leader. If they'll need cross-functional influence, put them in charge of a cross-functional initiative. If they'll need to make difficult decisions, don't protect them from every difficult decision.

This serves two purposes. It develops the person. And it generates evidence about whether your assumptions regarding their potential were correct. Sometimes the employee exceeds expectations. Sometimes a development experience reveals a significant gap. Both outcomes are valuable before the promotion.

Don't develop everyone the same way

Generic leadership programs have value, particularly for establishing common management practices and language. But succession development needs to become more individual.

One potential successor may need broader business exposure. Another may need to learn delegation. Another may need financial experience. Another may need to become more comfortable challenging senior leaders. Another may need to develop people rather than personally solving every problem. And another may discover through the process that they don't actually want the larger role.

A development plan should connect three things: future role, current readiness, and experience needed. That makes development part of succession planning instead of a separate HR activity.

Using AI to structure development plans

This is an area where AI can be genuinely useful. Once leaders have determined what a future role requires and what a potential successor needs to develop, AI can help turn that information into a structured plan.

For example: “Create a 12-month development framework for a manager who may eventually lead a business unit. The person is strong operationally but needs greater experience with financial decision-making, cross-functional leadership, executive communication, and developing other managers. Include stretch assignments, coaching questions, measurable milestones, and quarterly reviews.”

You might also ask: “What experiences would demonstrate whether this person can influence without formal authority?” Or: “Give me five stretch assignments that could build strategic thinking without requiring a promotion.” Or: “What evidence should we look for over the next six months to determine whether this manager is becoming more ready for broader responsibility?”

These are strong uses of AI because the technology is helping structure development, not decide someone's future.

AI doesn't know the person

AI can create a beautiful development plan. It doesn't necessarily know whether it's the right development plan.

It doesn't know that the employee already led a similar project five years ago. It doesn't know that the employee becomes overwhelmed when given too many simultaneous priorities. It doesn't know that the person's manager isn't particularly good at giving feedback. It doesn't know that the employee wants broader responsibility but doesn't want to relocate. It doesn't know which executives would make good mentors. And it doesn't know whether the proposed stretch assignment is politically or operationally realistic inside your organization.

AI generates possibilities from the information available to it. Leaders turn those possibilities into development.

Organizations also need to protect employee confidentiality when using AI. Follow organizational policies regarding approved tools and what employee, performance, assessment, or other sensitive information may be entered into them.

Don't let AI turn development into a checklist

AI makes it easy to produce very impressive development plans. Six competencies. Twelve activities. Quarterly milestones. Reading lists. Courses. Coaching questions. Performance measures. It looks comprehensive. And nobody has time to do it.

A development plan isn't better because it's longer. For many future leaders, one meaningful assignment accompanied by good feedback may accomplish more than ten development activities completed superficially.

Ask: what is the one experience this person most needs next? Then make that experience happen.

The relationships no tool can create

Leadership development is deeply relational. Future leaders need people who will tell them the truth, advocate for them, challenge them, open doors, provide perspective, let them make mistakes, explain organizational history, introduce them to important relationships, give them opportunities, and trust them with meaningful responsibility.

AI can suggest that someone needs a mentor. It cannot become the senior executive who says, “come with me to this meeting — I want you to see how this works.” It can recommend executive exposure. It cannot introduce the employee to the board. It can generate coaching questions. It cannot replace the credibility of a respected leader saying, “you handled that well; here's the part you missed.”

Those interactions transfer more than knowledge. They transfer judgment, context, confidence, relationships, and organizational understanding. That's why developing future leaders cannot become an automated process.

The incumbent has a role too

One of the most valuable development resources is often the person currently holding the critical position. Don't wait until the final weeks before retirement or departure to begin knowledge transfer.

Ask incumbents to help potential successors understand: what decisions are hardest? What relationships matter most? What mistakes did you make early in the role? What do you know now that you wish you had known when you started? What parts of the job aren't obvious from the job description? What situations require judgment rather than procedure? Who needs to trust the person in this role? What problems tend to arrive without warning?

This is how organizations transfer judgment, not simply information. AI can help structure those conversations. Only the incumbent can provide the answers.

Development also helps you test your succession plan

A name on a succession chart is a hypothesis. Development helps test it. If someone is identified as a possible successor, give them increasingly meaningful opportunities and observe what happens.

Can they learn quickly? Do they seek feedback? Can they lead people who think differently from them? Can they move beyond their technical expertise? Do they remain effective when circumstances become uncertain? Can they make difficult decisions? Do other people trust them? Do they develop people around them?

And importantly: do they still want the future role once they understand what it actually involves? Succession planning becomes much stronger when readiness is based upon demonstrated experience rather than executive intuition alone.

What to do next

You don't need to redesign your entire leadership-development system. Start with your most critical positions.

Identify one or two potential successors — if you don't have anyone, record the gap rather than forcing a name onto the plan. Define what the future role will require, thinking beyond the current job description: what will success require three to five years from now?

Identify the biggest readiness gap. Don't create a giant development list; determine what experience would make the greatest difference. Create a real assignment that stretches the capability you're trying to develop. Assign a leader and a review date — someone should provide feedback and be accountable for checking progress.

Then repeat the process. Development should move as readiness grows.

Readiness is built before the vacancy

The best succession plans create something incredibly valuable: options. If a leader leaves, the organization doesn't begin asking who might possibly do the job. It already knows. One person may be ready now. Another may need another year. A third may be developing for something larger in the future.

There may still be positions where external recruiting is necessary. That's fine. Succession planning isn't about guaranteeing that every position will always be filled internally. It's about preventing important leadership transitions from becoming organizational emergencies.

And that requires starting long before anyone announces they're leaving. Because readiness takes time. The vacancy may not.

Source

DDI — Global Leadership Forecast 2025: research examining leadership pipelines, leadership development, retention, and organizations' ability to prepare leaders for future business needs. https://www.ddiworld.com/global-leadership-forecast-2025