Bench Strength

What bench strength is

Bench strength (قوة الصف الثاني القيادي) is the depth of an organisation’s internal supply of people who are ready, or close to ready, to fill its critical roles if they fall vacant. It is usually assessed role by role, according to how ready the successors nominated for each role are, and not by the number of promising employees in the organisation as a whole.

Bench strength is a state measured at a given moment. It is not a procedure the organisation carries out, and it is not a decision anyone takes. The definition describes that state; it does not claim that an organisation with a strong bench performs better than others.

Which sources did we use for the definition?

We consulted sources on succession and on bench strength, and what we report from each one is what we saw in it and nothing more.

• CIPD. The factsheet “Succession planning”, dated 5 December 2025 as shown on it. We summarise its content in our own words. It does not use the phrase “bench strength” and does not define readiness bands. It states that succession includes identifying people with the potential to fill roles as successors in the short or long term, that the organisation needs clarity and consistency about what “potential” means, and that the group being developed is larger than the number of roles it covers.
• SAP learning material. The page “Understanding Bench Strength” in the succession management learning path for SuccessFactors. It describes the tool, not the discipline: strength is calculated for each position from the highest readiness level among the people nominated to succeed to it, and is shown as a colour indicator on the succession chart.
• Church. The article “Succession Planning 2.0: building bench through better execution” in Strategic HR Review, volume 13, issue 6, 2014, pages 233 to 242.
• Yost, Patton and Ward. The article “Building a Bench: Planning for Leadership Succession” in The Department Chair, volume 28, issue 4, 2018, pages 12 to 14.

The Crossref records of the two articles establish that they exist and what they are titled, not what they say, and we read the text of neither. The ratio formulas and numeric thresholds in common circulation come from commercial summaries and from the sites of HR system vendors that came up in a web search. Those summaries differ from one another, and we do not treat them as a reference. The ISO 30414 standard for human capital reporting was returned by the same search alongside succession indicators; we did not open its text, and we build nothing on it.

How is readiness usually rated?

The summaries in circulation divide readiness into bands, most commonly “ready now”, “ready within about a year” and “ready later”, with the periods varying from one source to another. We set no particular period. Each organisation defines its own bands and writes them down before it measures anything.

Readiness is an estimate, not a measurement. The person who places a candidate at “ready now” is a manager exercising judgement, and we suggest grounding that judgement in written evidence, so that candidates are not all lifted to a band higher than the evidence supports.

The same summaries are credited with several ways of presenting the result:

• Per role. The rating of a role is the highest readiness band among its candidates, which is what the SAP material describes for its tool. A role whose only candidate is “ready within a year” is rated at that band.
• Share of roles covered. The number of critical roles with at least one candidate who is ready now, divided by the number of critical roles.
• Successors per role. The total number of people ready now, divided by the number of roles. The summaries disagree on the figure they regard as healthy, so we quote none of them. We found no reference that settles a sound figure, and an organisation sets its target from the facts of its own roles, not from a borrowed number.

The three formulas answer different questions, and they should not be merged into a single figure without stating which formula was used. A comparison between two organisations, or between two years, is valid only when the bands and the roles counted are the same.

How does bench strength differ from nearby concepts?

• Succession planning. It is a process that identifies the critical roles, prepares ready replacements for them and rates each replacement’s readiness in bands, and its steps are set out under Succession Planning. Bench strength can be gauged at the end of that process: how many replacements there are, and how ready they are.
• Critical role. It is a role whose vacancy has a large effect on the organisation and which is hard to fill quickly; the test for criticality is explained in Critical Role. Critical roles form the denominator against which bench strength is measured, so no strength can be measured until the roles to be counted have been agreed.
• Talent pool. It is a base of potential candidates that the organisation returns to when a vacancy opens, including current employees who are candidates for other roles, and the groups that make up such a base are listed in Talent Pool. A bench, by contrast, is tied to specific critical roles and to a readiness band for each candidate.
• High potential employee. It is a person whom the organisation judges capable of succeeding in a larger role, a term defined under High Potential Employee (HiPo). Potential is judged for the person, whereas readiness is judged against a particular role.
• Display grid. It is a tool that places employees in boxes formed where performance crosses potential, and readers who want its detail can turn to 9 Box Grid. Its job is limited to displaying people, whereas bench strength concerns roles.
• Review session. It is a periodic session at which employees’ performance and potential are discussed, and one of its tasks is updating the names of candidates to succeed to critical roles, as described in Talent Review. Names are debated in the session, while bench strength is taken from the table once the discussion is over.

A hypothetical example: 8 critical roles

Suppose a hypothetical organisation has identified 8 critical roles and nominated internal successors for them. The number of successors who are ready now for each role is as follows: the first role 2, the second 1, the third 0, the fourth 1, the fifth 0, the sixth 3, the seventh 1 and the eighth 0. In total, 2 + 1 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 3 + 1 + 0 = 8 nominations.

Successors per role are therefore 8 ÷ 8 = 1, a figure that looks balanced. The roles with at least one person ready now, however, are the first, second, fourth, sixth and seventh, which is 5 of 8, or 5 ÷ 8 = 62.5%. There are 3 roles with nobody ready now, or 3 ÷ 8 = 37.5%. The figure of 1 concealed that one role holds 3 successors while 3 roles have no ready successor at all.

Now suppose that the third and eighth roles each have one successor who is “ready within a year”, and that the fifth has no candidate at all. The bands then become: ready now, 5 roles (62.5%); ready within a year, 2 roles (25%); no candidate, 1 role (12.5%). Together, 62.5 + 25 + 12.5 = 100%.

If the candidate for the second role is the same person as the candidate for the fourth, the distinct people who are ready now number 7, not 8, and their ratio to the roles is 7 ÷ 8 = 0.875, because one person cannot hold two roles at once. A high ratio can therefore hide one person nominated for more than one role, and the figures are no substitute for the names behind them. The numbers are hypothetical, given for illustration, and represent no organisation and no study.

How does HR use a bench strength measure?

HR can record the readiness for each critical role in a single table with written bands, and present it to managers at the periodic review meeting. The table brings together each candidate’s name, readiness band, what the candidate still lacks, and the date on which the candidate’s position will be looked at again. The SAP material says that strength is shown on the succession chart as a colour indicator, which describes one particular tool and not something every organisation must do.

Read row by row, the table lists the gaps: a role with no candidate, a role whose only candidate is not ready, or one person nominated for many roles. What is done about each gap, whether training, an assignment or advertising a vacancy, remains the managers’ decision, and HR contributes the data and the structure of the discussion.

A readiness rating also ages. Someone who was ready can leave, their own role can change, or the position itself can change, so it is advisable to review the bands on dates announced in advance.

How is a bench strength measure misused?

• Turning it into a promise. Telling someone that they are “ready” may be heard as a commitment to promote them, while the table is an internal planning tool.
• Counting every promising employee as a successor. Bench strength concerns specific roles, and a successor with no matching role does not enter the count.
• Chasing the numbers. The count of people who are ready now may be raised by changing the bands rather than through training, and the role stays uncovered.
• Ignoring roles below leadership. A critical role can be a single technical post, a point the Succession Planning glossary term also makes, and successors to such posts enter the same calculation.

What do the sources permit us to conclude about bench strength?

The sources we consulted do not establish that bench strength raises performance or protects an organisation from disruption, nor that an organisation with a higher ratio succeeds more than others. We did not read the text of the two articles recorded in Crossref, and in the sources we reviewed we found no Saudi study we can rely on about measuring bench strength in Saudi organisations. We therefore attribute no effect and no figure to any source.

In our view, the formula is better treated as a way of naming the gaps in a succession plan and setting their priority, and judged by what then happens in the organisation: whether the roles with no successor have become fewer, and whether the readiness bands proved accurate when a role actually fell vacant. What is decided after that depends on the nature of the work and the size of the organisation.

This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.