Where Leadership Risk Actually Lives

Ask an executive team to name their critical roles, and you will have a list by the end of the week. That part is quick. The real work is making sure that list is right.

Most start the same way. Someone pulls up the org chart and draws a line a few levels down. Everything above the line goes on the list; everything below it does not. It feels thorough, because it produces a clean document with names and titles filled into boxes. That line measures hierarchy. It says nothing about what happens if the role sits vacant or gets filled by the wrong person.

Talent Strategy Group's 2025 critical-roles survey found that nearly half of large organizations treated a hard-to-fill role as automatically critical, and a third used seniority level as the test. A role is usually hard to fill for a reason, and senior titles usually do carry real weight. I understand why leaders rely on that logic. It is fast, and it feels objective.

It is also frequently wrong. A role can be difficult to fill because the labor market is thin in that specialty, which has nothing to do with what happens to the business if the seat sits empty. A role can carry a modest title, sit two levels below the org chart's cutoff line, and still be the single point on which a plant's safety record depends.

I call these roles Impact Positions, one part of the IP3 Talent Model™. Read the full IP3 model to see how it all fits together.

I say this to every executive team I work with: remove the names from the boxes first. Evaluate the role before you evaluate the person sitting in it. Most teams skip the decision underneath that phrase: which roles should even be considered before anyone decides who belongs on the list?

Setting the Starting Scope

When I built this process across a 13-plant manufacturing organization, the first decision was to leave the executive team out of it entirely. They already get evaluated every day by the CEO, the chairman, the board. Adding a parallel process for them would have been redundant, and it would have put senior peers in the position of rating each other, which helps no one. The starting group was anyone reporting to a vice president or above who was not an executive officer, and then their direct reports below that.

That starting line was blunt. Drawing the boundary at "direct report to a VP or above" includes most of the roles that carry real authority. That boundary misses, for example, a plant-level safety manager, who often reports several layers below a vice president. Some of the highest-risk roles in that organization sat at that same level.

The scope has to expand further at the plant level. In a multi-site operation, a plant manager runs their facility with a level of standing authority that a corporate director hardly ever has. There is no committee in the room when a line goes down at two in the morning. The plant manager makes that call alone, the way a ship's captain is the only person on the bridge when conditions turn. You see that authority only when something goes wrong on that person's watch.

Once a role like that is in scope, the same logic runs down through its direct reports. A plant manager's technical lead, safety lead, or maintenance lead carries some of that same risk, because a gap in any of those positions becomes the plant manager's problem within a single shift.

Six Criteria for Identifying Risk

One way I get a leadership team unstuck when they are still thinking in titles is to start from the company's stated values instead of the org chart. Try this test: pick one of the company's values, for example, safety. Ask who is responsible for it every day, running the audits, keeping the training calendar current, holding the authority to stop a line.

If the team can name that person right away, you have likely already found an impact position, whether or not you ever called it that. If nobody can answer quickly, that hesitation is the exposure. Either nobody is actually accountable for that value day to day, or the person doing that work has never been recognized as filling the role, which means there is no plan for what happens when they leave.

I worked through that logic across 13 plants, then checked it against the research on role criticality. Here are the six most useful criteria:

1. Decision authority. Does the role make decisions that affect safety, capital, customers, labor relations, or the organization's ability to keep operating?
2. Operational dependency. Would work slow down or stall if the person in this role left tomorrow?
3. Safety, regulatory, or compliance responsibility. Does poor judgment here create consequences the organization cannot easily contain?
4. Concentration of knowledge, relationships, or trust. Does the role hold expertise, certifications, or customer and partner relationships that live in one person and nowhere else?
5. Replacement and ramp-up difficulty. Could the organization find and prepare a successor quickly, or would even a strong hire need significant time before becoming genuinely effective?
6. Location, team, or account dependency. Would replacing this person mean starting over on a specific location, team, or relationship that took years to build?

All six describe what happens if the role sits vacant or gets filled by the wrong person.

I tested these criteria in manufacturing, but they apply across industries. A hospital's on-call medical director, a law firm's partner who holds the one relationship a major client actually trusts, and a services firm's engineer who is the only person who understands a client's legacy system all fit the same pattern.

Run a role through that list, and more than one criterion usually applies. Take a process engineer who understands why a specific production line behaves the way it does, quirks and all, after years on that equipment. That role meets the operational dependency criterion, because output slows the day they leave. It meets the concentration criterion, because nobody wrote that understanding down. It also meets replacement and ramp-up criterion, because a strong outside hire would need a year on the floor before their judgment could be trusted the same way. That one role meets three of the six criteria, even though the title has never appeared on an executive succession chart.

Difficulty filling a role reflects labor-market conditions, and those conditions say nothing about what the business actually loses if the seat sits empty. A plant-level safety manager can carry more enterprise risk than a corporate director, regardless of which role is harder to fill, and a long external search time does not automatically make a role an Impact Position. The risk is a box nobody thought to draw, sitting two levels below where anyone was looking.

Why This Has to Happen First

Skip this exposure work, and everything built on top of it inherits the mistake. You can run a disciplined review of performance and potential, on schedule, with good evidence, and still be blindsided. I call moments like that torque moments: points where the organization is already under pressure, such as an outage, a systems cutover, or a plant startup, and a leadership gap makes that pressure worse. Nobody wants to discover a gap in the map during one of these moments.

Building this map is management's job. The board's role is to know whether management has done it, and whether the map reaches past the roles two rungs from the top.

Putting This Into Practice

Using your own org chart, draw the starting line. Then work the six criteria against every role you include, one at a time, without using names until the roles themselves are settled.

When I ran this exercise, it did not come back the way anyone expected. The list was longer in places nobody had flagged, and shorter in places everyone assumed were untouchable. That is what the exercise is supposed to do.

Leadership risk sits in the box nobody thought to draw, two levels down from where the org chart points.