When Liv Garfield left Severn Trent in December 2025, she did so as the longest-serving female Chief Executive in FTSE 100 history, after 11 years in the role. Her successor, James Jesic, had joined the company as a graduate in 2003. The transition passed smoothly and drew little attention. For Neil Morrison, Group HR and Communications Director at Severn Trent, that quiet was the measure of success.

For many organisations, succession surfaces only when a departure looms. Severn Trent treated it as a risk to be managed over years, with the board returning to it three times a year.

Starting before the pressure
Morrison inherited a succession plan when he joined, as incoming HR Directors often do. He did not instinctively trust it. “It probably took me a year or two to figure out who people were and size them properly,” he says. “I remember having conversations asking: do we actually believe what’s written on this piece of paper?”

At that point Jesic had only recently joined the executive committee, impressively young for the role and his promotion had itself come out of a frank debate between Morrison and Garfield about who belonged where and why. That argument, about backing people before they are the obvious choice, set the tone. Morrison calls his version of it the 20 per cent rule: if an internal candidate is 80 per cent ready, they are usually the stronger bet, because an external hire’s gaps only show once they are appointed. “They’ll tell you all the things they’re amazing at,” he says, “and you don’t really find out until they’re in.”

The arrival of Christine Hodgson as Chair in 2020, gave the thinking more structure. “She had quite a mature view of what she wanted,” Morrison says, and her involvement turned informal succession talk into a full plan with board alignment. During the active search for a new Chief Executive and Chief Financial Officer, the board sometimes returned to it weekly.

Building readiness role by role
Both Jesic and Helen Miles, who became Chief Financial Officer in 2023, happened to pass through the same job, Capital and Commercial Services Director, before their appointments. The overlap was a happy coincidence. Each had been moved into the role to gain something specific they were missing, and what mattered was that underlying logic: identify what someone lacked, then find a job that supplied it.

Miles came from finance, and the role gave her operational breadth — large engineering programmes and the company’s biggest area of capital spending. Jesic came from operations, and it gave him the commercial and large-capital experience he had not yet had. His regulatory grounding came from a separate post, as Managing Director of Hafren Dyfrdwy, the group’s Welsh business, where he dealt with the regulatory cycle, the regulators themselves and a board and chair, at a smaller scale.

Neither was ever told the C-suite job was theirs, and indeed the board didn’t know it was until they went through thorough external searches. “I would never tell a potential successor it will be, say, five years,” Morrison says. “You don’t want them managing to a timeline.” Naming someone too early, he adds, can unsettle an organisation as much as naming no one. A person who believes they are Chief Executive or CFO designate, and is simply waiting, distorts the dynamics around them.

Choreographing the top team
The most distinctive part of Severn Trent’s approach was timing. By the time Garfield left, the company had already changed Chair and installed Miles as Chief Financial Officer, briefly making it the first FTSE 350 to hold its three most senior roles, Chief Executive, Chair and Chief Financial Officer, with women at the same time. That milestone drew wide, positive coverage in 2023. Jesic’s appointment drew less press attention in total, despite what there was being overwhelmingly positive.

It was intentionally lower key, says Morrison. A new Chief Executive would normally tour the press and sit for profiles, but the scrutiny around the water sector made that unappealing. There was a blunter point too: “A white male CEO perhaps doesn’t create the newsworthiness of a female or ethnically diverse CEO.”

The sequencing was also strategic. Spacing the Chair, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Executive changes across several years kept the company from unsettling shareholders, investors and regulators all at once. Morrison calls it choreography. “You have to be mindful of how you time it,” he says. “You want them spaced out. And so there are some honest conversations about that.”

Those conversations are where succession is made or undone. The HR Director holds a particular position in the triumvirate of Chief Executive, Chair and people function, trusted enough to know what each leader is thinking about timing, independent enough to broker between them. “I’m perhaps lower risk to talk to about what you might be thinking about the future than maybe your boss,” he says.

Testing the decision
When the formal appointment came, Severn Trent ran an extensive and genuine external search alongside the internal process. “You always want to assure your thinking,” Morrison says. “On such an important appointment, you need to ensure you’ve done your due diligence and properly considered the market.” It mattered for the board, which needed a decision grounded in evidence – and of course it mattered for Jesic too. “Candidates want to know they got it because they’re the best person,” Morrison says. “For James, that means he can look in the mirror in the morning and say: I was appointed because I’m good enough. Not because I was convenient, or because I was liked.”

Warren Partners examined why so many of these processes fail, in a report published in 2026; Severn Trent’s experience shows what successful succession looks like. The response, Morrison says, has been uniformly positive, from analysts, investors, regulators and staff. Whether other boards have the patience to plan as far ahead is the key question. Many, in Morrison’s view, leave it far too late. “Too often, you end up with an announcement at seven in the morning that they’re leaving, and you’re scrambling on the back foot,” he says. Severn Trent spent years making sure it would never be the one scrambling.