Preparing Your Council, Staff, and Community for the Future
By MC Advisory
Across Canada, municipalities are facing a quiet but growing challenge: leadership and governance succession.
Retirements, elections, and organizational changes are creating a steady turnover of experienced staff and elected officials. Institutional knowledge is walking out the door. And in some communities, the loss of familiar leadership can feed public uncertainty and erode trust.
Despite this, few municipalities have formal succession plans to guide the transition from one generation of leaders to the next. When key people leave, whether from staff or council, continuity can suffer. So can confidence in local government.
Most municipal leaders understand that succession planning matters. But like many important things in local government, it’s easy to put off in favour of urgent day-to-day priorities. Budget cycles, service delivery, and community demands often crowd out conversations about what comes next.
Yet tomorrow always arrives faster than expected. And when it does, municipalities that have prepared for leadership and governance transitions will be best positioned to maintain stability, preserve public trust, and move forward with purpose.
Leadership Succession: Building Organizational Resilience
In any municipality, leadership transitions are inevitable. Elections bring new councils. Senior managers retire. Department heads move to other jurisdictions or sectors. Without a plan, these changes can disrupt operations, slow decision-making, and erode public confidence.
Leadership succession isn’t just about filling a vacancy. It’s about resilience: ensuring continuity in governance, preserving institutional knowledge, and preparing emerging leaders to step up when needed.
Consider what happens if a key department director leaves mid-project, or if a CAO retires without a clear successor. Municipal operations can stall, community relationships can fray, and council may be forced into reactive decisions. Having a thoughtful succession plan ensures that, when the unexpected happens, whether due to retirement, illness, or turnover, the municipality can maintain stability and continue serving residents.
Governance Transitions: Protecting Public Trust
Elected officials change regularly, bringing fresh perspectives and priorities. That’s healthy for democracy, but it also introduces risk. When governance transitions happen without planning, knowledge can be lost, staff may feel directionless, and residents can lose confidence in their local government’s consistency and competence.
Succession planning helps bridge those gaps. It provides a roadmap for how new councils will onboard, how they’ll be supported by staff, and how organizational culture and values will be preserved through change.
In times of governance transition, succession planning isn’t just an internal HR exercise, it’s a public trust exercise. Transparent, well-communicated plans reassure residents that their local government is stable, professional, and prepared for the future.
Planning Beyond People: Preserving Knowledge and Performance
Succession planning isn’t only for top roles. Municipalities rely on long-serving employees who hold deep operational and community knowledge, such as how infrastructure projects were phased, why certain bylaws were written, and lessons learned from past emergencies. When that knowledge walks out the door, it takes years to rebuild.
A strong succession strategy captures and transfers that institutional memory before it’s lost. It can also address team performance issues or organizational change, using a supportive, restorative lens. When done well, succession planning can overlap with restoration work, helping staff and leaders navigate periods of transition, conflict, or low morale in ways that strengthen, rather than fracture, the organization.
In short, it’s not only about replacing people. It’s about preparing the organization, both structurally and culturally, for change.
Where to Start
Succession planning doesn’t have to be complicated. It starts with three simple questions:
- Where are our potential points of failure?
- Who could step in tomorrow?
- What’s our long-term vision for leadership, governance, and service continuity?
From there, municipalities can conduct a risk analysis, identify talent and knowledge gaps, and align development plans with long-term strategy. For some, this may mean creating mentorship programs to prepare emerging leaders; for others, it may mean formalizing onboarding for new councillors or establishing clear handover processes for key positions.
For smaller municipalities with limited resources, the principles remain the same: identify critical roles, develop internal capacity, and ensure leadership and operational continuity.
Proactive Is Prepared
We live in an era of rapid change, where political shifts, climate events, economic pressures, and shifting community expectations are redefining what it means to lead in local government. Succession planning is one of the most effective ways to build resilience and maintain public trust amid these challenges.
Leadership succession ensures continuity. Governance succession preserves stability. Together, they give municipalities the confidence to move intentionally into the future with capable leaders, engaged employees, and a community that trusts its local government to serve, adapt, and steer through whatever comes next.
Michael J. Lavigne, Head of Market Development and Senior Advisor for Strategy & Transformation, has worked with some of the world’s largest brands throughout his international career. As a former CEO/COO/SVP, he brings executive-level expertise in sales, marketing, operations, and M&A across multiple industries, including SaaS, government, healthcare, hospitality, startups/scaleups and venture capital.
