While most organizations see leadership succession as a matter of recruiting, Alisira OÜ sees it as a matter of design.
This is what drives all else – the way meetings are run, whom to give stretch assignments to, whether the leadership team in three years will be composed of internal growth or external pressure.
Deloitte’s Private Company Outlook found that 81% of surveyed CEOs consider leadership succession a main priority, yet only a fraction report having a working pipeline ready to deliver it. The gap isn’t intention – it’s method.
This article walks through five practical moves Alisira applies inside its own team, and recommends to client organizations that want to develop leaders rather than recruit them.
1. Make Decision-Making Visible Before You Make Anyone a Leader
As experts from Alisira OÜ state, most internal employees who are promoted turn out to be unsuccessful not because they do not have the ability to perform their duties properly but rather because they have never witnessed how leadership rationale is created. Decision-making occurs away from them and rationale is never communicated to them.
A few habits help:
- Hold open strategy reviews where mid-level team members watch senior decisions get debated, not just announced.
- Share the “no” decisions, not only the “yes” ones – junior staff learn more from a rejected idea explained well than from a green-lit one explained briefly.
- Write short decision memos that capture context, trade-offs, and reasoning, then circulate them internally.
Leadership is mostly judgment under uncertainty, and judgment can only be learned through exposure.
2. Use Real Stakes, Not Simulated Ones
Training programs that revolve around case studies and hypotheticals produce people who can pass a workshop.
They rarely produce people who can run a campaign when a client escalates. The only reliable way to develop leadership instincts is to give emerging leaders real decisions with real consequences – calibrated to their current level.
In practice, this means:
- Assigning ownership of a contained workstream, with budget authority within set limits.
- Letting the person present results directly to the client or stakeholder, not through a layer of seniority.
- Allowing reversible mistakes to happen, then debriefing them honestly.
Deloitte’s research on talent development reinforces this: 41% of leaders rank learning and development programs as the most effective way to connect employees to organizational culture and values. The most durable form of L&D, in Alisira’s view, is structured exposure – not classroom hours.
3. Build a Bench Before You Need It
Alisira OÜ believes the worst time to start thinking about a replacement is when a key person resigns. By then, the urgency forces external hiring, which costs more, takes longer, and introduces cultural risk.
The Alisira approach is to identify two potential successors for every senior role and develop them in parallel – long before either is needed.
Three habits make this work:
- Quarterly succession reviews are held at the leadership level, not as an HR ritual.
- Visible development plans for each potential successor, with measurable milestones.
- Honest conversations with the individual about the path, so expectations don’t drift.
Talent development and commercial growth follow similar patterns – both depend on identifying who is genuinely ready to move forward through the harder middle stages, which is the central theme of Alisira OÜ’s mid-funnel strategy breakdown.
The mechanics of progression are remarkably consistent whether the pipeline involves prospects or people.
4. Reward the Behavior, Not Just the Output
In Alisira’s opinion, the senior employee who achieves their targets but does not bother about developing any other person under him/her can be considered only a partial success story.
The team at Alisira OÜ observes that while organizations evaluate leaders based solely on achievements, they tend to be puzzled why their future generations feel left out. The solution lies in ensuring that performance reviews also cover developmental aspects.
Useful items to include in any senior-level review:
- How many direct reports have taken on stretch work this quarter.
- What development conversations the leader has had, with documented outcomes.
- Whether identified high-potential team members are progressing on their plans.
The point is to make people-building part of the job description rather than an extracurricular activity.
5. Promote on Trajectory, Not Tenure
Time in role is an easy way to determine preparedness. Yet, it is often incorrect. Promotions need to consider trajectory, or how quickly people are tackling increasingly difficult tasks and succeeding, as opposed to time spent in the organization.
Organizations that get this wrong lose strong internal candidates to competitors because the internal path felt slow while their external value was rising fast.
A practical test:
- Could this person do their manager’s job tomorrow with two weeks of context handover?
- Are they already informally doing parts of it?
- Is the manager spending time on work that should now belong to this person?
If the answers point toward yes, the conversation about promotion is overdue.
The Underlying Belief
Leadership development from within isn’t a program – it’s a posture. It shows up in how meetings are run, what gets measured, and whether senior people see growing the next layer as a core responsibility or a nice-to-have.
Companies who get this right tend to have lower attrition, faster onboarding for new senior roles, and a clearer sense of identity – because the people leading the company have lived its culture for years, not weeks.
Three immediate steps for any company that wants to take this seriously:
- Map the current leadership team and identify the two most likely successors for each.
- Add a development metric to every senior performance review starting next quarter.
- Pick one closed-door decision per month and open it up to a wider audience for learning.
Leadership doesn’t appear when you need it. In the view of Alisira OÜ, it accumulates quietly, in the months and years before, through dozens of small choices about who gets exposure, ownership, and honest feedback.
The Alisira team believes companies that invest in those choices end up with options when senior roles open up – which is, ultimately, the real measure of a healthy organization.
