Succession planning is mostly about relationships, track record, and the judgement of people who know the business. Psychometrics will never replace any of that — and a vendor who tells you otherwise is selling you something. But there is a small, useful role for structured assessment in a succession cycle, and this is what it looks like.
Why Big Five, not DISC
DISC is a conversation tool. Big Five is an assessment tool. For succession, where the output will land in front of a remuneration committee, you want the instrument with the stronger academic lineage. Big Five has it: decades of cross-cultural validation, stable test-retest reliability, and a reference population large enough that percentile comparisons are meaningful.
That matters because you will be asked, eventually, whether the report you are citing is "real science" or a vendor model. Big Five lets you answer that question cleanly.
The five dimensions in succession language
Translated from the academic labels into the language a succession panel uses:
- Openness maps to comfort with ambiguity, willingness to challenge the status quo, and appetite for unfamiliar ideas. Matters most for roles taking the business into new territory — new markets, new products, transformation.
- Conscientiousness maps to reliability, follow-through, and the discipline to finish what has been started. Matters most for roles where the business needs to execute a known plan at scale.
- Extraversion maps to visibility, energy in public settings, and comfort leading from the front. Less predictive of leadership effectiveness than people assume, but genuinely predictive of leadership style.
- Agreeableness maps to collaborative instinct, comfort with confrontation, and willingness to make unpopular decisions. The lowest-scoring-on-agreeableness candidate is not automatically the best; the highest-scoring is often the worst.
- Neuroticism — or its inverse, emotional stability — maps to how a leader will behave when the business is under real stress. This is the dimension the board cares about most and nobody wants to name directly.
The profile-fit trap
The loudest failure mode in succession planning is deciding on a "winning profile" before you look at any actual candidates, then screening people in and out based on how closely they match it. This is both statistically weak and politically catastrophic.
Instead, use the Big Five as a supplementary reading. For each succession candidate, ask three questions:
- What does the profile suggest this person will find easy in the role?
- What does it suggest they will find hard?
- What structural support would make the hard parts less hard?
That framing turns the report into a development conversation, not a gate. It also dramatically reduces the legal-risk surface when a candidate who was not selected asks why.
The cycle we recommend
For organisations running a serious succession cycle, usually 500+ people with at least two layers of succession coverage to plan:
- Month minus-three. Board briefing. Agree that the psychometric is a supplementary input, not a decision input. Agree the format of the eventual report.
- Month minus-two. Candidates are invited to take the Big Five assessment. The invitation makes the purpose clear and explicit. No candidate is forced — opting out is recorded neutrally.
- Month minus-one. Each candidate is offered a one-to-one debrief before any succession panel sees the profile. This is non-negotiable. The candidate sees their report first, in context, and has the chance to flag anything that feels wrong.
- Panel. The succession panel reads the profile alongside track record and relationships, not instead of them. The panel chair names explicitly where a profile has influenced thinking.
- Post-panel. Each candidate is told which readiness slot they have been placed in and the specific development moves attached to that slot. The psychometric feeds the development, not just the decision.
The conversation the board needs first
Before any of this, the board needs to agree — explicitly — what counts as a selection criterion. Most boards will claim that "fit" matters but will not define it. In a succession context that is dangerous, because "fit" is where conscious and unconscious biases do most of their work.
Force the conversation: "If we were to describe the ideal profile for this role as a set of traits, which traits would they be, and why?" If the answer involves anything that is a proxy for demographic characteristics, you now know and can push back. If the answer is specific and defensible, you now have criteria you can validate against the assessment data rather than against your instincts.
A caution about forced-choice
For succession, use a forced-choice Big Five instrument, not a Likert one. The stakes make the fakeability of a Likert instrument a real problem — candidates who know they are being assessed will consciously or unconsciously shade their answers. Forced-choice reduces that effect substantially. It costs more; it is worth it.