What seems like MANY years ago, while in my first corporate HR job, I was thrilled to be given the opportunity to lead the company’s succession planning process. In years past, succession planning had been a behind-the-scenes, secretive process but senior leaders were open to building a new process focused upon development. Wow – I was excited. What’s more, we created a powerful Microsoft Access tool to store the talent assessment data (albeit, I had to bring in temps to hand enter the assessment data that was collected on expensively printed surveys) and allowed us to search and track leaders across the company. We were at the fore front! I thought that I had at last seen the end of the Succession Planning Binder/s. Oh, how I was wrong.