Why Everyone on Your Succession Plan Needs a Different Kind of Development
Key Takeaways
Most organisations already have a real range of development on offer: a leadership programme or two, coaching, mentoring, content-based and experiential options. Despite that range, the picking and mixing from it is often not personalised enough.
A skill gap, an experience gap, a confidence gap, and a visibility gap are four different problems, and closing them properly depends on an in-depth diagnostic of what each person actually needs.
63% of employees say they'd be more likely to stay if their employer provided better learning opportunities [1].
An experience gap has nothing to do with a missing skill. It's about never having faced the kind of genuinely developmental challenge the next role demands, leading a change, running a turnaround, or delivering a strategic project are just a few examples.
A confidence gap is rarely about competence at all. It's often a new identity someone hasn't fully grown into yet, and sustained one-to-one coaching helps far more than another course.
The gap most programmes are worst at closing is visibility. No course fixes a senior team simply never having seen someone operate under pressure.
The fix isn't a bigger development budget or more options on the menu. It's grounding each person's mix in a real diagnostic of what's actually missing.
Look at any succession plan and you'll usually find the same thing: a list of names, a readiness rating next to each, and a genuine menu of development already on offer, a leadership programme or two, coaching, mentoring, some content-based, some experiential. People pick and mix across that menu, and the picking is where it goes wrong. Two people can both be rated ‘ready in 12 months’ for entirely different reasons, and still end up choosing from the same handful of options, because nobody has actually diagnosed what's different about their two situations.
This matters more than it looks like it should. 63% of employees say they would be more likely to stay at their organisation if it provided better learning opportunities [1]. That number assumes the learning on offer actually addresses what someone needs. When it doesn't, the retention benefit doesn't materialise, whatever the training budget says on paper.
The Skill Gap Everyone Assumes, and Rarely Actually Has
The easiest gap to design for is also the rarest one in practice. Most people who make it onto a succession plan already have the core technical or functional skill their next role requires; they wouldn't have been flagged otherwise. Sending someone in this position to another skills course fills a slot in the training calendar without touching what's actually holding them back.
A genuine skill gap does exist sometimes, most often around a specific capability the current role never required: financial literacy for a first move into P&L ownership, or stakeholder management at a level of seniority someone hasn't operated at before. Where the gap really is a skill gap, structured learning, a targeted course, a qualification, a mentor with the specific expertise, is the right tool. The mistake is assuming that's the gap by default.
The Experience Gap: Missing Exposure to the Right Kind of Challenge
This gap is broader than a missing skill, and easy to overlook precisely because the person in front of you looks entirely capable. They can have every technical skill the next role needs and still have never faced the kind of genuinely developmental challenge that role will throw at them. Leading a change, running a turnaround, delivering a one-off strategic project, these are just a few examples from a much wider range of experiences that stretch someone in a fundamentally different way, not just more of the same capability applied harder. Change asks for sustained communication and buy-in from people who didn't choose it. A turnaround asks for something closer to the opposite, fast, directive decisions with incomplete information. A strategic project usually means building relationships across a wide, unfamiliar range of stakeholders. Someone who has only ever led from stability can be excellent at their job and still struggle badly the first time they're asked to do any of these, because the underlying leadership demand is genuinely different, not just the context.
This is exactly the gap the 9 Key Experiences framework is designed to diagnose and close deliberately, rather than leaving it to whatever a person happens to have been exposed to by chance. Esendia's 4 Career Stages model would typically describe someone with a real skill but a genuine experience gap as sitting in the Stretch stage: performing well, on a clear growth trajectory, but still needing broader exposure before they're actually ready to move. The nearest equivalent in a traditional 9-Box Grid would usually sit in the top-right box, often labelled something like ‘star performer’ or ‘future leader’, high performance and high potential both. The label itself, in either framework, doesn't say which specific kind of challenge is still missing. That's a separate question, and it's the one worth actually answering.
The Confidence Gap: A New Self-Image, Not a Missing Skill
Moving into a more senior role is rarely just a bigger version of the same job. It often asks someone to let go of what actually made them successful so far, being the person with the technical answer, being the one who does the work rather than the one who creates the conditions for others to do it, and to grow into an identity and a way of leading that hasn't been tested yet. That shift can surface long-held self-doubt, or an outdated view of what good leadership looks like, that quietly no longer serves the person or the role ahead of them. Sometimes it's simpler than that: a genuine gap in self-awareness about how they actually come across, which nobody has ever named directly.
A course does very little for this, and neither does another stretch assignment on its own. What tends to help is sustained one-to-one coaching: space to examine the identity someone is being asked to grow into, surface blind spots a busy working relationship never has time to name, and work through the self-doubt or outdated assumptions that are actually in the way. This is a slower, more personal kind of development than a training calendar usually allows for, and it's often the one piece missing when someone with clear ability still doesn't quite step into a bigger role the way everyone expected.
The Gap No Course Can Fix: Not Being Seen
The fourth gap is the one most development budgets never touch, because it isn't really a development problem at all. Someone can have the skill, the experience, and the self-belief, and still not get the role, because the people who decide have never seen them operate under real complexity. A course cannot manufacture that exposure. A special project can, provided it's assigned with clear intent, carries genuine senior sponsorship, and is followed by structured reflection rather than left to speak for itself.
This is the gap where format matters most and gets chosen worst. Organisations that default to formal training for every succession-plan name are, for a meaningful share of that list, spending money on exactly the wrong kind of development.
Same Menu, Different Order: Why the Format Has to Match the Gap
None of this requires inventing new development formats. Coaching, stretch assignments, formal courses, mentoring, and cross-functional exposure already exist in most organisations' toolkits, and most people already pick and mix across them to some degree. The failure isn't a lack of options. It's that the picking isn't personalised, because it isn't grounded in an in-depth diagnostic of what this particular person actually needs, so the mix ends up shaped by what's familiar and available rather than by the specific gap in front of you.
At Takeda UK & Ireland, once an individual assessment had identified each emerging leader's specific development areas, the response was built around stretch assignments, structured reflection, and mentoring, not a standard leadership course, because a generic programme wouldn't have targeted what each person's own assessment had actually found. Built the other way round, starting from a generic training needs analysis rather than an individual diagnostic phase, the same investment would likely have produced attendance without the specific behaviour change the organisation actually needed.
Gap type | What it looks like | What actually closes it |
Skill | A genuinely new technical or functional capability the role requires | Targeted structured learning: a course, a qualification, an expert mentor |
Experience | Never having faced a specific type of challenge, such as leading change, a turnaround, or a strategic project | Deliberate exposure through the 9 Key Experiences, matched to the type of challenge, not just any stretch role |
Confidence | A new identity and mindset not yet grown into, self-doubt, or a gap in self-awareness | Sustained one-to-one coaching to work through identity, blind spots, and outdated assumptions |
Visibility | Senior decision makers have never seen the person operate under real complexity | Sponsored special projects with structured reflection built in |
“They really work in partnership with you.” Louisa Hogarty, Group HR Director, Noble Foods, whose Future Leaders Programme cohort saw a 56% promotion rate into senior roles and 100% retention eighteen months after completion.
What This Changes About How You Read Your Own Succession Plan
The next time a name comes up for development spend, the useful question isn't which programme to enrol them in. It's which of these gaps is actually theirs, and whether the format on offer is built for that gap or just the one everyone else on the list happens to be getting. Our Developing Leaders, Securing Succession sets out how to make that call for each person on your plan, not just the list as a whole.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you tell whether someone has a skill gap or an experience gap?
Look at what they've actually faced, not just what they can do. A skill gap shows up as a missing specific capability, like financial literacy. An experience gap shows up even when every underlying skill is there, because the person has simply never had to lead through a change programme, a turnaround, or a wide-stakeholder strategic project before.
Can one person have more than one of these gaps at once?
Yes, and it's common. A confidence gap and a visibility gap often travel together, since someone still working through self-doubt is also less likely to have put themselves forward for the kind of exposure that would have been seen by senior decision makers.
Is a stretch assignment always the right answer for an experience gap?
Only if it's matched to the specific type of challenge missing, and followed by proper reflection with a sponsor or coach. A stretch assignment handed out without that structure risks adding activity without actually closing the gap it was meant for.
Does this mean formal training is a waste of budget?
No, it means formal training is the right tool for a specific gap, not a default for every name on the succession plan. Used against a genuine skill gap, it's exactly the right investment.
References
[1] Paychex and Future Workplace (2022) Employees Are 63% More Likely to Stay with Employers Who Provide Better Learning Opportunities. Available at: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/employees-are-63-more-likely-to-stay-with-employers-who-provide-better-learning-opportunities-301653935.html
