According to Protiviti’s most recent Top Risks survey, succession planning is among leaders’ top concerns. In an atmosphere of abbreviated tenures, many finance leaders are not devising succession plans — though they know that organizational change can happen overnight, for any number of reasons. Identifying successors in advance would bring high-value employees into focus for more intensive development and create opportunities to analyze these individuals’ strengths and weaknesses in greater depth.

This article explains why today’s finance leaders are compelled to adapt their succession planning approaches and offers guidance on finding/securing the ideal successor.