Interim vs Permanent
[At time of writing i had just departed LiverWELL where i was Interim CEO for 15 weeks]
This piece is introspective AND practical
How does interim compare to doing, and leaving, a permanent role?
How to handover to an incoming CEO
What does it feel like to be briefly pivotal and then fade away?
What are the takeaways for Boards bringing in a steady-the-ship interim?
Consciously designing endpoints
There’s a clear triage as an interim with a fixed end-date. Explore what’s going on and decide:
do now, before the permanent arrives
leave for the permanent
progress, being mindful of the handover
In the first category, I fixed some HR compliance issues, confirmed annual funder contracts and ensured an end-of-lease office move was complete. In the second, there are things i simply didn’t touch, for example I simply told external partners the incoming CEO would be in touch soon.
But the third is the most interesting. There are some areas where the organisation need to do some tough strategic work - for example, a ground-up rethink of IT/digital strategy. It would not be reasonable to try to complete this during my tenure, but I could document the issue in handover, and suggest the necessary resolutions.
Freedom from long-term consequences enables short-term value
Were i to be around in March, I’d have to think about next year’s plan and budget. Which would mean that during August-December I’d need to think about priorities, funders, projects, consultation, Board engagement and so on, to enable that planning and budgeting.
How liberating to know that would be pointless! As an interim, I can sit slightly outside the annual cycle of CEO activity. The stuff that fell while i was there (Audit, Annual Report, AGM) needed my attention. But having an eye on 2026-27 was a waste of time.
This meant I could focus all of my effort on short-term needs. Had I been ongoing, the HR audits would’ve needed to stretch out across many months as I wouldn’t have had the bandwidth.
I was also able to be a pseudo-consultant to run the annual strategy day, as that’s my day job bread-and-butter, and also i had no deep history or future to consider. I could be neutral.
Being temporary is a license to be blunt
The Board-CEO and Chair-CEO relationships are critical to organisational success, and require constant nurturing from all parties. This means that sometimes issues, risks and decisions are played out with concern for this social context. Perhaps the CEO might raise one issue quietly and privately with the Chair, and not put it the same way in a Board report. Perhaps an ill-informed question from a Director might be left to go through to the keeper and addressed later, rather than challenged directly in the moment.
But I, in the nicest possible way, did not need to do that. I had no ongoing relationship to maintain. Do I want to get on with everyone, and possibly work with any of those directors again? Of course. But giving ‘frank and fearless advice’ within my 15-week tenure was necessary to serve the organisation and the incoming CEO. It would have been a dereliction of duty to hold back insights and work on them in the background - the Chair needed to know right now. And if there was a misunderstanding in the Boardroom, i spoke directly to it without overly considering the working relationship.
Every CEO should dream of following an interim
I’ve seen three kinds of CEO departures. The happy one is not so common. The usual two are the ‘unfinished business’ CEO or the ‘angry/sad’ CEO. In both of these the handover and the psychosocial orientation of the leadership team and Board to the incoming CEO will be tainted in some way:
“The Chair doesn’t listen / understand the work / manage the Board etc etc”
“The Board only care about finance / risk / reputation, they aren’t creative / helpful / optimistic / enabling”
“I’ve been working on this project for a year, you need to take it forward now.”
I had none of this. It’s too little time in the role to form any of these opinions or become deeply attached to a pet project. So the incoming CEO has the cleanest slate possible to drive their vision.
The handover
As an interim, you think about the handover from the beginning of the assignment. I thought of what i wanted when i started as a CEO at LiverWELL and in a previous role:
appreciation that everything was interconnected - it isn’t going to be neat
to get to know the staff and the work
discovering any divergence between Board/Chair, staff and CEO perspectives
a chance to make up my own mind, not to feel forced into a perspective
some idea of urgency: what is on fire, what is smouldering, what is cooking just fine
So i planned two things: manager briefings, and a CEO-to-CEO briefing
Manager Briefings
I gave each manager two templates.
Template 1: the work
When I am successful in my role, my impact for LiverWELL is:
My key contributions and successes over the past six months have been:
My key working relationships (and what makes them successful/tricky) are:
Over the next six months, my key objectives are:
The biggest challenges I experience in my role, and what could help overcome them:
Three things I would really appreciate from you over the next six months would be:
Template 2: user manual of me (from this excellent post on medium)
Conditions I like to work in
The times/Hours I like to work
The best ways to communicate with me
The ways I like to receive feedback
Things I need
Things I struggle with
Things I love
Other things to know about me
I had them complete these about two weeks before the incoming CEO started, and sent them over as a batch. The basic feedback was great - “i have a great picture now”. But they gleaned deeper insights from how everyone treated the templates differently. Some were was brief, some were expansive. Some set out facts, some posited challenges. Who clearly asked for what they needed, who didn’t?
I organised staff 1:1s for the first few days; the new CEO had a springboard from which to leap straight into relationship building, led by what the staff member thought was most important.
Why did I do it like this? First off, the staff perspective actually matters more than mine. Begin there. Secondly, the staff all know that the CEO heard them before they heard me. Foundation for empowerment. I was confident it would work because i’d had a coffee with the incoming CEO two weeks prior, and learnt a bit about their style; I matched handover to the open, thoughtful and empathetic style I’d encountered.
CEO-to-CEO Briefing
I spent ages debating the format and making false starts. I realised i was aiming for something neat and tidy - then got going when I accepted that it would be like Altman’s film Short Cuts. Because everything was separate yet intertwined, it would be a multitude of disconnected mini-stories and settings that required effort from the reader to make wholistic sense of it at the end:
Live little issues right now
Summary / Suggested priorities
Now to 1 March
March – May
May
Strategy
Planning, reporting and monitoring
Operational model
Operations
Board
Policies
Finance
People & Culture
Key funders
Fundraising
Partnerships
Government relations
Office Move
then under each category, i wrote under four subheadings,
History
Past 3 months
Current Issues
Next steps
This allowed me to be very clear on what was done and closed off, what was still live, and suggestions for what next. The length of each section varied greatly - the People and Culture section was large, after the audits i’d led, but the section on partnership was mostly “i haven’t done anything but set up a meeting for you next week'“
The preamble was very clear that these were opinions and suggestions; entirely for the CEO to determine the ways forward. Back seat drivers are a pain in the neck.
The highly observant will notice there was little about “the work” in the above list. That’s because i trusted that to come over from the staff’s briefing documents, and I knew the least in the entire organisation about liver health and hepatitis (though for any biomedical nerds out there, a deep dive into the viral mechanisms is *fascinating*)
Being ready for my work to be unwound or discarded
I’d been deferring decisions as far as possible for weeks, taking them only when forced (with typical luck, on my last day, a recruitment panel asked for me to resolve a tough decision and so my last act ended up being clear decisive advice!). But I went further with briefing all managers and Directors with a clear message - they shouldn’t hold onto any of my decisions at all; if the incoming CEO wanted to take a different course that was entirely for them to decide and my opinion should carry no weight. I worked so hard at this that one staff member even described it as ‘Homer Simpson fading into the hedge’ - which i took as an enormous compliment as that’s what i was going for!
Being ready for ‘but wait, i have a question!’
I’ve arranged with the Chair that i’ll be available for follow-up handover at the 1 and 2 week mark, for the CEO to draw down as they wish. Another springboard to help them dive in quickly.
Advice for Boards bringing in an Interim for steady transition between permanents
Find someone who wants to be helpful and humble. You want a superstar but you want them playing their acoustic pub set, not their stadium show
Ask for their honesty. This is your golden chance to discover what’s really happening inside the organisation
Encourage and enable their focus on the short-term. Direct and support them to put out fires, don’t ask them to change the batteries in the smoke alarm.
Structure the handover so it isn’t all on one day - overlap a bit
(And if you’re a small NFP - get the bank authorities sorted out early. It’s always a flippin’ nightmare.)
Last words: it’s a cauldron of emotion
My leaving card from the team was very revealing. I was moved by what they said they’d experienced, with many highlighting the clarity and care I’d brought to assist the transition. I was also very aware of the refocusing that occurred through the week; i could feel them turn their attention away from me and towards their future CEO. I heard one of them say “I’ll ask [them] next week, it can wait”.
I experienced this as both a vindication (my intent was to handover and melt away, and it was working!) and as a sadness - i was becoming irrelevant.
It is peculiar that some of the most poignant and insightful phrases come from schlocky films. In the Avengers: Age of Ultron, a character remarks “a thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts”. I will look back at the time as a valuable assignment, helping a beautiful team of committed experts work to promote better health.
