A retrospective on interim leadership.

The below reproduces a series of ten posts on interim management, first aired between 4 June and 24 July 2026. They appear here in order, lightly edited from the originals.

Introduction — what interim leadership really is (and what it isn’t)4 June 2026

I’ve walked into organizations in crisis, in transition, and in denial. Interim leadership is where the real work happens.

In four months, an interim leader is supposed to diagnose, stabilize, build trust, deliver, and exit cleanly. Without the politics. Without the need to be liked long-term. Without one eye on the next performance review.

That’s a completely different game from a permanent role, and it requires a completely different playbook. Over the next few weeks, I’m sharing mine — for interim leaders who want to do it well, for companies who want to get more from their interim hires, and for anyone curious about what this model of leadership actually looks like from the inside.

Topics coming up:

• Why fit matters more for an interim than for any permanent hire
• What to do in your first two weeks, and what to absolutely not do
• How to care about your team’s development
• The art of the handover
• And a few things nobody talks about

One — the three types of interim assignment, and why mixing them up is where things go wrong11 June 2026

Ask ten interim leaders what they do, and you’ll get ten different answers.

Sometimes success means holding things steady while the organization finds its next permanent hire. Sometimes you are brought in to deliver something specific in a defined timeframe, then leave. Sometimes you step into an existing role while someone is away, with a clear return date on the calendar.

It’s worth understanding the differences between the briefs, because they shape everything: how you onboard, how you make decisions, how you measure your own success.

• Bridge interim. The organization has a gap to fill while it searches. The timeline is open-ended, and sometimes you even take part in the hiring process. Your job is to keep things moving, maintain team momentum despite the uncertainty, and set the incoming hire up for a fast start. A good bridge interim leaves the door wide open. A bad one makes the transition about themselves.
• Mandate interim. You are there for something specific: a restructure, a system implementation, a market entry. There is a clear brief, a definition of done, and a deadline. You are less a caretaker and more an executive brought in to lead a significant transformation within a fixed window. Speed matters. So does knowing when your job is actually finished.
• Cover interim. Someone is coming back, and that changes the role in ways people underestimate. Teams often go into a quiet holding pattern — not because they doubt you, but because they know the ending. Your job is to lead fully in the meantime, while building something the returning person can genuinely take back over. They may have a different style from yours, and that is fine. What matters is that nothing important got dropped, and that they walk back in to a team that has been well looked after.

Knowing which of these you are walking into is the first question worth getting right. The second is making sure the organization knows it too.

Two — the success of an interim assignment is decided before day one18 June 2026

One critical part of a successful interim assignment is a strong alignment on the brief.

Organizations tend to look for an interim when something is already urgent. There is a gap, a deadline, a problem that needed solving yesterday. That urgency is understandable, but it is not a reason to rush the signature and hope things get clearer afterwards, because they won’t. Spend the time on both questions: what are the exact expectations and success factors for the person you hire, and do they have the skills the organization is lacking.

A permanent hire can have development areas. You factor them in, you build a plan, you give it time. An interim has no such runway. You are there for the immediate need, and you need to be the right fit for that need on day one. Close enough is not good enough. This is why the scoping conversation, the one that happens before you say yes, is the most important conversation of the assignment.

Here is what I always want to understand before I take a role:

• What does success look like in 30 to 60 days? If the answer is vague, that is a signal worth paying attention to.
• Who are the key stakeholders, and are they aligned on why I am here? Misalignment at the top has a way of landing on the interim’s desk.
• Can I make a difference here, given the experience I bring? Knowing where your value is sharpest matters.
• Is this the right fit for me, right now? Not every mandate suits every interim leader. Check that logistics, pace and timelines work — in particular where there are timezone differences.

If the answers are unclear, incomplete, or inconsistent across the people you speak to, ask for a clarification round before you start. It is a much easier choice to make then than three weeks in.

The scoping conversation is the foundation of the whole assignment. Don’t treat it as an administrative phase.

Three — the outsider advantage: why not being political is your superpower25 June 2026

The most valuable thing an interim leader brings isn’t expertise. It’s the fact that they don’t work there yet. Humbling, but true.

Permanent leaders stop seeing what’s broken, because systems normalize themselves to the people inside them. That is the interim’s real advantage. Coming in, you are in hyper-vigilance mode. You notice the dynamic when a certain topic comes up. The decision nobody is making. The person who always qualifies what they say before they say it.

You can form a view and say it out loud, because you have no history to protect and no reputation to manage over five years. Personally, I value the license for immediate candor and the accelerated get-to-know-you phase it buys.

But this position only works if you are honest about what it is. You are not a permanent member of the team. You don’t have the same stakes. Earn the trust fast. Use it well.

An interim hire is either a placeholder or a catalyst. The choice is mostly yours.

Four — how to nail your first two weeks2 July 2026

The first two weeks of an interim assignment are not about making an impression. They are about getting up to speed fast enough to be useful. Here is how I approach it.

Week one: catch the ball. Meet everyone you need to meet. Get fully across the brief, the context, the history. Take over your weekly cadence and show up to everything on your perimeter — people need to see that someone is at the wheel. What you do not do in week one is offer opinions or recommendations. You form opinions fast, of course, but you do not have the full picture yet, and the cost of getting it wrong early is higher than the cost of waiting a few more days to get it right.

Week two: calibrate. Start forming views and share them carefully with your key stakeholders, framed as observations rather than conclusions. You are checking your read, not announcing your plan. Begin to separate what is urgent from what only looks urgent. Some things need to move fast. Others need more context before you touch them. Knowing the difference is part of the job.

What not to do in either week. Do not restructure, reorganize or make significant decisions before you have the full picture. Do not position yourself against whoever came before you, even when people invite the comparison. Do not promise things you cannot deliver.

Your main stakeholder will be asking for opinions and recommendations — what you see, what you are working on, what you need. You are there to bring leverage and reduce noise, so be ready to deliver crisp briefings on priorities, people and processes.

Five — how to diagnose fast without breaking things9 July 2026

You walk in on day three and spot something that needs fixing. Everyone else has stopped seeing it, because they have been living with it for two years.

The temptation is to move fast; speed feels like an advantage. It usually is not. Speed without understanding is how you lose trust in week three: you fix something quickly, and it breaks something else you did not know was connected to it. Now people are more cautious, not less.

Here is what I do differently.

Start with the system, not the symptom. When someone tells you something is broken, resist the urge to fix it immediately. Ask instead: who would be affected if we changed it, and why change now? Most organizations have a reason for the way things work, even if the reason is no longer valid. Understand the reason before you touch the thing.

Make your thinking visible. When you form a view, share it out loud before you act, to test the hypothesis: “I notice X, which suggests Y. Does that sound about right?” Most of the time, someone in the room will tell you what you are missing, or why your read is wrong. Both are better than finding out three weeks later.

Know what you can move on now. Some things are low-risk fixes that matter immediately: data pulled from several sources for a recurring report, a manual process that costs your main stakeholder four hours every Monday and could be automated in forty minutes, the one meeting with a looming deadline where you are catching the ball. In doubt, ask: do I have enough context to move on this, or do I need dependencies cleared first? Move on those. Wait on everything else.

The best interim leaders move at different speeds depending on what they are moving.

Six — you’re interim, they’re not: on people’s careers when you’re just passing through15 July 2026

Most interim leaders skip the people conversation because they think it is not their job. They get their people through the transition, then pass them to the next leader. It is exactly your job. A performing team sets the organization up for success far more than perfect processes do.

• Your people will remember how you treated them. Long after you have left, they will remember whether you invested in them or just got the job done. Whether you had the hard conversations about their development or avoided them. Whether you saw them as people or as resources to deploy. That becomes part of their story at the organization, and it shapes how they show up for the next leader.
• You can do a lot in a short time. You do not need a year to have a real impact on someone’s development. A structured conversation about where they want to go, what is holding them back, what support they need — that takes an hour. Coaching someone through a hard project, giving honest feedback, advocating for them in the rooms they are not in — that takes intention, not years.
• Default to clarity, not protection. If someone is not performing, say so. If they have potential beyond their current role, tell them. If there is a skill they need to build, be honest about it. Staying silent is not kindness; it is a way of avoiding the hard conversation, and the next leader inherits the consequences.
• Handover matters. When you leave, make sure the next person knows who has potential, who needs support, who is struggling. Put each performance review in writing so nobody misses a cycle in the gap between your exit and their arrival.

You are interim. They’re not — and what you do in the role matters to the people you lead.

Seven — managing up when you’re temporary17 July 2026

Your main stakeholder did not hire you to be managed. They hired you to manage. Even so, the relationship you build upward is one of the things that decides whether the assignment succeeds or quietly unravels.

As an interim you do not have the tenure to absorb ambiguity over time. You do not have the history that earns permanent leaders the benefit of the doubt. And you cannot let misalignment sit for a few weeks until it resolves itself. So you have to be more deliberate about it than most.

Agree the rhythm early. A weekly update, format to be worked out. Not a status report — a working session: what is moving, what is blocked, what needs a decision from them. You are there to reduce their cognitive load, not add to it.

Name misalignment when you see it. If two stakeholders are pulling in different directions and it keeps landing on your desk, say so. Do not absorb the tension and manage around it. Surface it cleanly, without drama, and ask for clarity.

Know which decisions are yours and which are not. One of the fastest ways to lose senior trust is to make a call that was not yours to make. When in doubt, flag before you act.

Be useful, not decorative. Your stakeholder does not need a running commentary on what you are observing. They need clarity, pace, and the occasional uncomfortable truth delivered without ceremony.

The interim who manages up well is the one who gets called again.

Eight — when to push, when to execute: knowing your mandate cold22 July 2026

Not every interim mandate is the same, and knowing which one you are in changes everything about how you operate.

In a bridge interim, your job is largely to execute: keep things moving, maintain momentum, hand over cleanly. This is not the assignment where you redesign the operating model.

In a mandate interim, you were hired precisely to push. You have a brief, a deadline, and implicit permission to move fast and make decisions. Waiting for consensus is how mandate interims fail.

In a cover interim, you read the room. Some things can wait for the returning person. Others cannot, and trying to hold everything until they are back is its own form of mismanagement.

The mistake most interim leaders make is applying the same operating mode regardless of context. Pushing hard in a bridge interim creates noise and resistance. Executing passively in a mandate interim wastes the window you were given.

Before you default to either, ask: what did they actually hire me to do? The answer is usually in the brief. If it isn’t, that is your first conversation to have.

Nine — the handover: how to exit an interim assignment well24 July 2026

Most interim leaders spend ninety percent of their energy on the entry. The exit gets two weeks and a handover document nobody reads. How you leave is part of the assignment. A clean exit protects the work you did, the team you led, and your own reputation. A rushed one quietly unravels all three.

Start earlier than you think. The moment you know your end date, start documenting. Not a forty-page report — a clear, honest picture of where things stand: what is done, what is in progress, what is fragile, what needs a decision in the first thirty days.

Be honest about the state of play. The handover is not a highlight reel. If something is held together with tape, say so. The incoming leader will find out anyway; better it comes from you.

Hand over the people, not just the work. Share what you know about the team — who is performing, who needs support, who has potential that has not been fully used. Include a written summary of where each person sits in their performance cycle, so nobody falls through the gap between your exit and their arrival.

Give them room. Your successor will do things differently, and that is fine. Your job is to give them the clearest possible starting point, not to constrain how they run from there.

A good interim does not just deliver the mandate. They make sure it sticks after they leave.