Succession planning for schools: 6 steps to avoid chaos and maintain continuity

You probably don’t spend much time thinking about succession planning for your school. To understand why you should, imagine that you wake up tomorrow to big news: One of your administrative colleagues has just resigned without warning.

They’ve been running your school’s big push to boost math test scores by 10%, which is key to meeting state mandates.

Ask yourself: Is this a disaster you’ll spend months scrambling to recover from? Or is their departure just a minor bump in the road?

Your answer will often depend on whether you have the right replacement candidate already in place.

Sudden vacancies aren’t the only challenge to your school’s long-term success. As a school leader today, you face talent management obstacles like an aging workforce, teacher retention and competitive hiring markets — all while navigating political uncertainty and new tech like AI.

In this landscape, taking a proactive approach to talent and leadership continuity is more valuable than ever. Here's what you should know to start succession planning for your school.

What is succession planning for schools?

Schools thrive when administrators put the right people in the right roles. Succession planning is the ongoing process of preparing future school leaders so that you can maintain a consistent level of talent, skill and vision even during leadership transitions and over an extended period of time.

This isn’t just about replacing team members as they leave. Effective succession planning involves developing talent within your organization so that they grow and stick around.

Unlike replacement planning, which focuses on filling immediate vacancies after they appear, succession planning is about developing future school leaders you can draw on when the need arises.

Doing this proactively will help your school better navigate change and maintain continuity in operations and leadership even as team members come and go.

School leadership continuity preserves institutional knowledge

Every day, roughly 10,000 baby boomers retire from the workforce. These retirements often hit leadership ranks especially hard and risk draining valuable institutional knowledge.

By investing in succession planning, you can mitigate this risk by identifying and developing potential leaders already within your institution.

Doing this will help your school preserve critical knowledge. And you’ll also give talented and driven members of your team the opportunity to make the most of their skills.

6 key steps for effective school administrator succession

As you establish your school’s succession planning process, consider these six key steps:

1. Clarify your future needs

First, define the ideal candidate for each key position on your team. What skills, knowledge and other qualities should this person have?

Once you know the specific needs for each role, you can start thinking about how to develop the right skills and competencies for future leaders inside your current team.

2. Assess current talent

Next, look at your current talent pool. Who on your team shows potential to move up?

Try using talent assessment tools like the nine-box matrix to measure team strengths and areas for improvement. Doing this will help you identify who may be ready for more responsibility now and who may need additional support or skills development.

3. Identify potential successors

Now you’re ready to nurture potential successors to leadership roles. Here, you can build on your nine-box exercise by developing readiness charts to track team members’ strengths and development needs over time.

Doing this will help make sure that potential successors are prepared to step into key roles. Readiness charts visually show you how ready a particular team member may be for promotion, so you can find growth areas and address them through targeted training and development opportunities.

4. Learn about your team’s career goals

Don’t forget that your team members each have their own career goals. You may think you’ve found your next vice principal — but have you thought that they might rather teach art for the next 20 years?

If you don’t ask, you won’t know. Taking time to explore where each team member wants to go will help you align your development work with operational realities.

This will pay off in the form of higher team retention and job satisfaction rates.

But when you do this, leave room for people to change, too. Revisit your team’s career goals on an annual basis.

A “no” to a promotion today from someone with untapped leadership potential could turn into a “yes” down the road.

5. Develop team member skills

Effective succession planning involves developing team member skills on an ongoing basis. Here you can use stretch assignments, special projects, coaching and mentoring to address potential gaps and prepare team members to take on more responsibility.

Stretch assignments and special projects help your team develop new skills and gain a wider breadth of experience. Meanwhile, coaching and mentoring will help team members navigate their career growth by offering one-on-one support.

Doing regular development activities will also give you more opportunities to assess team readiness for leadership roles. When a sudden vacancy occurs, you’ll already better understand who may be ready to step in and fill it.

6. Regularly review your succession plan

School administrator succession planning isn’t a one-and-done exercise. Keep your succession plan relevant by regularly reviewing and updating it when needed.

Typically, you should aim to do this on a roughly annual basis, every nine to 15 months or so, based on your strategic priorities or talent needs.

It’s also a good idea to do this whenever you make a significant shift in strategy or lose a critical team member. This will help you adapt to any changes in your school environment and focus on your long-term goals.

School leadership team development for millennials and Gen Z

As older school leaders retire, millennials and Gen Z will fill their shoes. Members of those generations already make up 61% of the workforce, but will only gain seniority from here.

So, as you focus on preparing future school leaders on your team, do it with an eye toward generational diversity. Consider where you may want to adapt training methods to fit changing expectations or communication styles.

And recognize that succession planning isn’t just about leadership positions. Team members who may not want or fit certain administrative roles may have an enormous amount to offer in other positions — think about where your younger people could end up and give them the support to get there.

However, don’t forget about your Gen Xers, either. Younger Gen Xers won’t reach retirement age for another two decades or so.

Do your best to make team development as inclusive as possible and you’ll help your whole team rise.

COVID-19 taught us the value of school succession planning

COVID-19 led to major turnover among educators. Between February 2020 and May 2022, roughly 300,000 teachers and other school team members left the field.

Years later, schools still haven’t recovered. This only highlights why robust school administrator succession planning is essential to helping your school operate effectively despite unanticipated challenges.

In other words, learn from COVID and you may avoid similar troubles down the road.

One key lesson was that a crisis often leads team members to reexamine their lives. Teachers and other people on your team may more often ask themselves questions like “Is it worth it?” or “Am I truly able to be my best self at work?” or “Am I making a positive impact on the lives of students?” or “Am I valued for my contributions?” 

Your ongoing succession planning efforts may make a significant difference in their answers, which makes succession planning a teacher retention strategy.

School succession planning as a talent management and teacher retention strategy

Retention doesn’t just happen. Keeping your best team members takes proactive, intentional action and effective school administration strategies to boost job satisfaction and create opportunities for growth.

Obviously, things like competitive compensation, benefits and flexible working environments matter. But equally important — and especially relevant from a succession planning perspective — are professional development (PD), mentorship programs, building a sense of empowerment and autonomy, fostering connectedness and enjoyment among staff, and, of course, succession opportunities.

People are more likely to stick around if they feel supported, valued and like they have room to grow. Research by the Work Institute suggests that you can cut turnover by 75% or more if you address the top reasons team members quit.

Giving future leaders the chance to level up is crucial. Aim to provide foundational education and mentoring for team members with potential, including ongoing training, group coaching sessions and culture leaders to help promising candidates work through developmental areas.

And if you want a brighter future, look to the present. Assess where your team is now and build from there. Conduct compensation studies, organizational structure reviews, PD plan assessments, engagement and culture surveys, stay interviews, exit interviews and focus group discussions to figure out what team members want and where you can improve.

If you take the time to do this right, you’ll gain a ton of knowledge you can use to keep your future leaders happy and eager to grow.

Additionally, focus on creating a positive team experience. This involves each team member’s perceptions, observations and interactions from pre-employment through the end of their employment life cycle.

Every experience matters, so by fostering a supportive and engaging overall culture, you can enhance team satisfaction and retention.

Effective school administrator succession planning and leadership transitions will give you a foundation for long-term success. By investing in the development of your team of educators, you can prepare a pipeline of future school leaders, maintain your culture and thrive even in the face of uncertainty.

How Wipfli can help

Ready to begin building your own succession and team development pipeline? We help school administrators nurture their teams, including implementing effective succession planning to maintain leadership continuity and bolster teacher retention. You can learn more here.