Succession Planning and Leadership Pipeline

Succession Planning and Leadership Pipeline is a five-day senior talent course delivered by Mars Training Centre in London, Vienna, Dubai, Doha, and Tokyo — designed for heads of talent, succession leads, and senior HR leaders responsible for ensuring the organisation has the leaders it will need in three, five, and ten years.

Succession planning has historically been a once-a-year board ritual: a list of names against boxes, reviewed politely, filed quietly, and rarely acted on. The organisations that have moved beyond that model treat succession as a living, evidence-led discipline that shapes development decisions, internal moves, and external hires. They also know that pipeline strength is built years before the seat becomes vacant.

Across five focused days, you will work through the design and operation of a credible succession and leadership-pipeline system: from defining critical roles, through identifying and assessing high-potential talent, to development planning, calibration, and board-level reporting. The programme is delivered by senior practitioners who have run talent and succession functions through CEO transitions and large-scale leadership change.

What You Will Learn

• Design a succession-planning framework that the executive committee will trust.
• Define and prioritise the critical roles that the organisation must succeed.
• Distinguish high performance from high potential using validated approaches.
• Apply structured assessment methods to identify successors.
• Build leadership-pipeline architecture across multiple levels of the organisation.
• Design development experiences that accelerate readiness for the next role.
• Calibrate talent reviews to produce fair, defensible decisions.
• Report succession and pipeline outcomes to the board and remuneration committee.
• Plan and manage senior-leader transitions with rigour.

How You Will Benefit

You will leave with a clear, defensible succession and pipeline playbook for your organisation, and a Mars Certificate of Completion.

Your organisation will gain a talent leader who can build a deeper leadership bench, reduce reliance on external hires for critical roles, and give the board real confidence in the leadership pipeline.

Who This Programme Is For

This programme is designed for:

• Heads of Talent and Heads of Succession
• HR Directors with talent in scope
• Heads of Leadership Development
• Senior Talent Management leaders
• Organisation Development leaders working on senior talent
• Senior HR Business Partners advising on succession
• Senior public-sector HR executives

The seniority floor is head of department and above. The programme is delivered in person over five consecutive days, and delegates receive a Mars Certificate of Completion.