Succession Hub
1. What it is
Succession Hub identifies the roles your organization cannot afford to leave vacant and tracks who is ready to fill them. It combines critical-role identification, candidate readiness levels, leadership assessments, and development programs into one view so HR and leadership teams can close pipeline gaps before they become vacancies.
- Enablement: Succession Hub requires a license. An admin enables it from Admin → Apps → All Apps; it is off by default.
- What it is not: Succession Hub does not replace Performance Management. Reviews, goals, and competency evaluations are authored in Performance Management; Succession Hub reads the latest completed review to place people on the 9-Box Matrix, and does not own that data. Readiness levels and readiness scores are not calculated from it — HR sets them on each candidacy.
2. Standing it up
- Go to Admin → Apps → All Apps and enable Succession Hub. The app is licensed and opt-in per tenant.
- Go to Succession Hub → Settings and confirm the core modules are on. Five modules are enabled by default: Leadership Pipeline, Succession Planning, Leadership Assessment, Executive Dashboard, and Development Tracking. Two additional modules — Advanced Analytics and Transition Planning — are off and can be turned on here. Board reports need no module. Each module card on that page says what its switch turns on.
- Create at least one Critical Role under the Succession tab. A critical role defines a position the organization must have succession coverage for. Set its urgency level and, optionally, assign the current incumbent and required competencies.
- Add Succession Candidates to that role. Each candidate receives a readiness level — Ready Now, Ready in 1 Year, Ready in 2 Years, Ready in 3 Years, or Development Needed — set by HR, and a rank. A plan’s minimum is 2 successors by default; change it on each plan.
- Optionally, set up Competency Frameworks and Assessment Templates under Settings → Templates to standardize how candidates are evaluated.
- Decide who maintains succession data. By default that is admins and Succession Hub’s app administrators. To admit an HR coordinator without making them an app administrator, name them a Contributor on Succession Hub’s Admins & Contributors page (Admin → Apps); to admit whole groups, use Settings → Who can access the succession pipeline?
- Confirm it worked: the people who maintain succession data should see the Overview dashboard with critical-role counts, candidate totals, and a readiness score. Managers see Overview’s shortcuts and the Talent tab for their own reports. Employees see only their own My Profile page.
- Optionally, configure Notification Settings under Settings → Notifications. Assessment-due reminders, coverage-gap alerts, and review notifications are on by default. Choose a group for each notification type under Default Recipients to control who receives it.
Silent-until-paired: a critical role with no succession candidates produces a coverage-gap alert but contributes nothing to bench-strength metrics. The role and at least one candidate must exist together before the dashboard reflects meaningful data.
Mobile view: employees on mobile devices are automatically redirected to the mobile Succession Hub. The mobile view shows their candidacies, assessments, development programs and activities, and high-potential status. Managers and admins stay on the desktop view.
3. How it fits together
Critical Roles vs. Succession Plans. These are the two structures users most often confuse. A critical role identifies a position — its title, department, urgency, and current incumbent. A succession plan defines the planning wrapper — review cadence, timeline, minimum successors, and the list of candidates. A critical role with no plan offers Create Succession Plan on its page — or Link Plan when its successors already sit on a plan no other role claims — and the role’s successors move onto that plan. Once linked, the button reads View Succession Plan. You can also create a standalone succession plan for a role that is not yet flagged as critical.
Example: VP of Engineering (Critical Role, urgency High, incumbent: Jane Doe) → linked Succession Plan (review cadence Quarterly, minimum successors 2, timeline 1 Year) → 3 candidates ranked 1–3 with readiness levels ranging from Ready Now to Ready in 2 Years.
Readiness levels describe how soon a candidate could step into the target role. The five levels are Ready Now, Ready in 1 Year, Ready in 2 Years, Ready in 3 Years, and Development Needed. Readiness feeds the bench-strength dashboard and the succession-coverage analytics. A plan’s bench strength is Insufficient until it has at least as many active candidates as its minimum-successors requirement (default 2, set on each plan); past that, it is graded by how many of them are Ready Now or Ready in 1 Year — Adequate for 1, Strong for 2, Excellent for 3 or more. A critical role’s risk level uses its plan’s minimum too.
High-Potential Employees are tracked separately from succession candidates. A high-potential record captures an employee’s potential level — Top Talent, High Potential, or Emerging Talent — along with a retention-risk score and flight-risk flag. The same employee can appear as both a high-potential and a succession candidate. These are complementary: high-potential identification is about the person’s growth trajectory; candidacy is about their fit for a specific role.
Leadership Assessments score an employee on competencies relevant to a role or leadership track. There are 11 assessment types, including 360° Feedback, Leadership Competency, Potential Assessment, and Succession Readiness. Each type has its own competency set. Competency scores are on a 0–100 scale; the overall score is the average across all competencies rated. Assessments are considered current for 6 months.
Development Programs track leadership-development activities such as internal programs, external programs, executive coaching, mentorship, and job rotations. Participants are enrolled and tracked through completion; once they finish, they can rate the program from their own My Profile page. Programs appear on high-potential profiles so reviewers — including the person’s manager — can see what development has already been invested.
Competency Frameworks define the leadership competencies used across assessments and role requirements. The app ships with a default Standard Leadership Competencies framework (Strategic Thinking, Communication, Team Leadership, Decision Making, Change Management, Emotional Intelligence, Problem Solving, Coaching & Development). Admins can create additional frameworks — for example, a Technical Leadership framework — under Settings → Templates.
Three access tiers. Succession Hub enforces three levels of access:
- Function tier (admins, Succession Hub’s app administrators, Contributors, and any groups named under Settings → Who can access the succession pipeline?): sees all succession data across the organization. Can create, edit, and delete plans, roles, candidates, assessments, and programs.
- Manager tier (any manager who is not in the function tier): read-only access to the high-potential, assessment, and candidacy records of their own direct reports. Cannot see the Succession, Development, or Analytics tabs. No org-wide counts are shown.
- Employee tier (everyone else): sees only My Profile — their own candidacies on active plans, completed assessments, high-potential status, development programs and activities, and any role transition they are taking over.
Integrations with other apps. Succession Hub reads Performance Management live, with no sync to configure: on the 9-Box Matrix, a person’s performance placement comes from their latest completed review (or, where there is none, the most recent performance rating on their leadership assessments), and the matrix shows that review’s competency gaps against the person’s job-title requirements. Settings → Integrations shows whether Performance Management, OKR Hub, Skill Swap, and Recognition are enabled for your organization; it has no on/off switches. Only Performance Management feeds Succession Hub today — the page says the other three are not used yet.
4. Running it
Reviewing the dashboard
The Overview tab shows a summary dashboard: total critical roles, succession candidates, high-potential employees, active development programs, recent assessments, and a succession readiness score. It also lists recent activity (assessments completed, program enrollments) and open succession reviews — planned or in progress, with overdue ones marked. Critical roles needing attention — those without a Ready Now candidate — are highlighted.
Reviewing bench strength
Go to Analytics → Bench Strength. The page shows an aggregate readiness summary across all candidates, uncovered roles (high- or critical-urgency roles with fewer successors ready now or within a year than their plan’s minimum, or 2), readiness by department, and a bench-strength score. Use this before leadership reviews to identify where the pipeline is thin.
Running a talent review
Go to Talent → Talent Reviews. Search for employees and add up to 4 to a side-by-side comparison. Optionally select a target critical role to score candidates against its required competencies. The comparison view shows flight-risk status and retention-risk scores, which requires a step-up re-authentication because it is sensitive data.
Conducting a leadership assessment
Go to Development → Leadership Assessments → New Assessment. Select the employee, assessment type, and source (Internal, External, Self, Manager, or Peer). Rate each competency on a 0–100 scale. The overall score is calculated automatically as the average. Completed assessments link to the employee’s high-potential record if one exists.
Managing succession reviews
Go to Succession → Succession Reviews. Create a review with a type — Quarterly, Annual, Board Review, Ad Hoc, or Emergency — a date, and a conductor. Reviews track findings, recommendations, and action items. Use them to document the outcome of leadership-team discussions about the pipeline.
Managing transitions
Enable the Transition Planning module in Settings. Go to Succession → Transitions to create a transition record for a critical role. A transition tracks the outgoing and incoming employees, type (Planned, Emergency, Promotion, or Lateral Move), milestones, knowledge-transfer plan, and communication plan.
Using the 9-Box Matrix
Go to Analytics → 9-Box Matrix. The matrix plots candidates on a performance-vs-potential grid; performance comes from each person’s latest completed Performance Management review, or their leadership-assessment rating where there is none. Use it during talent calibration sessions to align on who is ready now, who needs development, and who is misplaced. You can filter by department or target role.
Viewing succession coverage
Go to Analytics → Coverage. The coverage view shows which critical roles have successors and which do not: Coverage % is the share of active critical roles with at least one active successor, at any readiness. The Succession Readiness Score on Overview is stricter — the share of active critical roles with at least one Ready Now successor.
Enrolling employees in development programs
Go to Development → Programs and open a program. Use Enroll to add participants. Track their status (Enrolled, Active, Completed) and record completion dates and ratings. The program’s completion rate and effectiveness rating update automatically as participants finish.
Exporting reports
The analytics and talent-pipeline pages offer CSV and PDF exports. Reports include succession-planning metrics, risk analysis, high-potential distribution by department, and development-program effectiveness.
5. Settings
Settings are at Succession Hub → Settings. Only an admin or one of Succession Hub’s app administrators can open them.
| Setting | Where | Default | What it changes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enable Succession Agent | Settings | On | Turns the AI agent on or off for this app |
| Leadership Pipeline | Settings (Modules) | On, required | The High Potentials list and the dashboard’s Leadership Pipeline card |
| Succession Planning | Settings (Modules) | On, required | Succession plans and their successor benches |
| Leadership Assessment | Settings (Modules) | On | Leadership Assessments in the Development menu |
| Executive Dashboard | Settings (Modules) | On | Shows the Executive Summary card (succession strength and leadership readiness) on Analytics → Executive Dashboard |
| Development Tracking | Settings (Modules) | On | Development Programs and Activities, and the Development Activities card on employees’ profiles |
| Advanced Analytics | Settings (Modules) | Off | Enables pipeline-health analytics and the Pipeline Health page for the people Who can see the Pipeline Health page? allows |
| Transition Planning | Settings (Modules) | Off | Succession Transitions, and the incoming employee’s transition card on their profile |
| Who can access the succession pipeline? | Settings | App Admins only | Admits specific groups to the function tier, beyond admins, app administrators, and Contributors |
| Who can see the Pipeline Health page? | Settings | App Admins only | Who besides the function tier can open Pipeline Health (Everyone, or specific groups). Needs Advanced Analytics on |
| Show succession rank on the employee’s own profile | Settings | Off | Whether a successor sees their rank on a plan on their own profile |
Settings → Integrations has no switches: it shows which related apps are enabled for your organization, and that only Performance Management feeds Succession Hub today.
Admins can also export and import the full module configuration as JSON, or reset all modules to defaults, from the main Settings page. A reset turns Advanced Analytics and Transition Planning off and every other module on; access policies and the groups chosen under Default Recipients are kept.
6. More help
- Succession Hub FAQ — specific setup and operating questions
- Ask AI — the assistant answers questions about Succession Hub from these articles. It can look up pipeline coverage, candidate readiness, and plan status.