Succession, in most family conversations, means one thing: which son, daughter or cousin eventually holds authority. It is the question that carries the emotional weight, and it absorbs most of the planning effort families make. Meanwhile the institution that manages the money — with its own executives, its own conventions and a great deal of undocumented memory — faces a succession of its own, on a timetable nobody in the family controls.
Two different successions
The scale of what is coming is not in doubt. Deloitte Private’s Family Office Insights Series, based on a global survey of 354 single-family offices, found that 41% of wealthy families expect to undergo generational succession within the next decade. What the same research makes clear is that succession planning splits into two genuinely separate categories, and both are under-prepared, in different ways. Some 41% of families currently have no plan for the succession of family leadership — the more commonly discussed dimension, concerning who within the family assumes authority. A distinct 50% of family offices also lack a succession plan for their leadership teams: the executives, CIOs, COOs and long-serving advisers who actually run the institution day to day.
These are not the same gap. A family without a leadership succession plan risks disagreement over who leads the family’s affairs. A family office without an executive succession plan risks something more immediate: the departure of a CIO or COO leaving the institution without anyone who understands how decisions were actually made, where the key relationships sit, or how the reporting and governance infrastructure was built. The first is, at heart, a family problem. The second looks a good deal like the key-person risk any operating business would recognise, and on this evidence it is the less-addressed of the two.
Why the institutional gap matters sooner
It is not hard to see why executive succession lags behind family succession. Which family member leads next touches identity, fairness and legacy in ways that hiring a new COO does not, and families are understandably drawn to the more emotionally significant question first. The operating gap this creates is, however, arguably the more dangerous one in the near term. A family can function, awkwardly, with an unresolved question about which sibling eventually takes the chair. A family office cannot function at all if the person who understood the custodial relationships and the informal decision-making conventions leaves with no documented handover and nobody developed to take the role.
Half of family offices having no plan for this kind of succession suggests the gap is closer to the norm than the exception. It is also, unlike family succession, entirely within the office’s own control to close. Closing it does not require resolving questions of family hierarchy — only the more prosaic discipline of documenting roles, cross-training, and building enough redundancy that no single person’s memory is the only record of how things work.
A confidence gap worth reading carefully
The research also points to a genuine confidence problem: 30% of family offices say they lack confidence that the next generation is prepared for succession within the office, and 28% describe the next generation as unqualified outright. Those two figures deserve some scrutiny rather than simple repetition. “Unprepared” and “unqualified” mean different things depending on what, exactly, the next generation is being prepared for. Where the expectation is that a next-generation family member should step directly into running investment strategy without having built the underlying experience, a degree of scepticism is a reasonable response to an unrealistic expectation — not necessarily a verdict on the individual.
Families are, sensibly, responding: 31% identify mentoring and training as a core priority for the next generation this year. That is a sound response, but it also implies the leadership pipeline is, for many families, still being built rather than already in place. Preparing anyone for genuine responsibility — family member or not — is not a single training programme. It is the gradual accumulation of governance exposure and decision-making experience that any institution would expect of a future leader.
The rise of the non-family executive
A further finding complicates the assumption that succession is, by default, a family matter. Currently 65% of family office leaders are family members and 35% are non-family professionals, but roughly half of respondents, 49%, expect a non-family professional to assume leadership following the next succession. That is a meaningful shift in expectation, and it changes what succession planning actually needs to cover. An office anticipating non-family leadership cannot rely on the informal transfer of knowledge that has historically passed between a founder and their chosen successor within the family. It needs documented decision rights and institutional knowledge capture robust enough that an external professional can step into the role without years of informal apprenticeship first.
This is, from a different angle, the same organisational gap discussed above. An office that has never documented how decisions get made — because everyone currently making them absorbed that knowledge informally over years inside the family — is poorly placed to hand leadership to someone who was not there for that education, family member or not. The trend toward non-family leadership makes the case for documentation more urgent.
What actually closes the gap
None of this makes family succession unimportant; it remains central to why a family office exists at all. The point is narrower: the organisational half of succession planning has received comparatively little structured attention, and the evidence suggests it carries the more immediate operational risk. Closing it does not require resolving family dynamics. It requires documenting decision rights and processes so they do not depend on one person’s memory, building genuine depth in key roles rather than single points of failure, and treating knowledge transfer between an outgoing executive and their successor as a planned process rather than something that happens, if it happens at all, informally on the way out.
A family that has resolved who leads next, without doing the equivalent work on how the institution survives that transition, has solved the more visible half of the problem and left the more consequential half untouched.
"A family can function, awkwardly, without a resolved succession. A family office cannot function at all without a documented one."