The announcement came suddenly on Thursday. A Fortune 500 technology client needed an interim CFO immediately. Its previous executive had departed unexpectedly, leaving a $2.3 billion merger and reorganization in limbo. By Monday, Denise, the number two finance executive, occupied the interim CFO post. She faced 10,000 skeptical employees and a board expecting miracles.
Interim leadership has exploded: The number of Fortune 1000 companies that have used an interim CXO has increased 117% since 2022. Yet most leaders enter these roles unprepared for the unique demands that await.
Not only do these leaders suffer, companies do as well. When leadership transitions fail, organizations face a 20% higher likelihood of losing direct reports, experience 20% lower employee engagement, and incur replacement costs up to 10 times the executive’s salary. I’ve helped several interim executives land the job: here’s what worked.
In this piece, paid subscribers will learn:
- Five tried and true strategies interim executives can use to land the job
- The questions they should ask to assess their performance
- Common pitfalls to avoid
1. From Methodical Relationship Building to Accelerated Trust
Unlike executives afforded the luxurious nine months before performance expectations kick in, interim leaders face immediate scrutiny. Organizations typically place them during crises that don’t afford more reasonable onboarding runways. If externally hired, their high fees create financial pressure for quick returns.
It can take months to build relationships, and understand where the problems in an organization lie. I worked with an interim COO at a manufacturing company who cracked this code. The COO and a small team conducted 20-minute interview sessions with 70% of the 350 stakeholders over a two week period to map the real power structure of the organization. This allowed him to identify needed wins neglected by the prior COO within 18 days.
The learning: don’t assume people with big titles have the deepest and most impactful influence. Here are some questions to surface needed relational information quickly and accelerate trust building:
• Who are the three most influential people beyond the org chart?
• What’s the one thing everyone complains about, but no one fixes?
• Which relationships will make or break my first initiative?
• What unspoken rules govern how decisions really get made?
2. From Holistic Solutions to Getting Traction with Visible Wins
Instead of focusing on holistic solutions that include too much at once, getting traction in a few critical areas through visible and well-timed wins can take you to the finish line of landing the big role. These wins must coincide with high visibility, broadly supported parallel initiatives, and experience minimal disruption.
As an example, an interim CHRO I worked with in a rapidly growing global Fortune 500 retailer was appointed to stop a talent hemorrhage in a flagship brand. The loss of recently hired talent was causing confusion, communication problems, and erroneous product assortments being sent to stores. Sales were suffering and internal teams started blaming each other for the errors. There were several areas across the company that needed to be addressed, but the CHRO honed in on what was underneath her control: onboarding new talent.
The existing onboarding program for employees was expensive, lengthy, and outdated. However, a full redesign of the program would have taken eight months and rolling out the program would have taken another year. Instead, the CHRO and her new team laser focused on redesigning a module for field and merchandising employees: the employees who could make the most impact in fixing the organization’s problems.
The team transformed the 21-day onboarding program, which had a 23% dropout rate, into an efficient 10-day program with an 8% drop rate. The program also trained new hires in the field more efficiently on how to communicate with product decision-makers in merchandising.
The result: better product assortment and sales for the brand, more collaborative relationships across merchandising and field organizations, and an improvement of 15% retention in the onboarding program. All of this was done within the interim CHRO’s tenure, over the period of a month without disruptions, and was universally celebrated as an all around win.
Well-timed wins to focus on can be easily identified with some simple questions:
• What’s causing the most visible pain across departments?
• Which broken process would everyone celebrate fixing?
• What improvement would make my biggest skeptic an ally?
• Where can I demonstrate competence without threatening existing structures?
3. From Moving Quickly to Progressive Decision-Making
I often observe new leaders put immense pressure on themselves to achieve something quickly, as a means of demonstrating their worth. Many times this leads to catastrophic overaction.
An interim CTO inherited a cybersecurity software product failure crisis that resulted in a public customer backlash and a steady quarterly profit loss of 45%. Instead of a five-alarm fire reaction, he chose a graduated approach. His 30-day plan included an initial round of tactical fixes, while continuing to gather intelligence and keeping open lines of communication with both customer and investment communities.
By day 60, armed with data and buy-in, he unveiled a short-term strategy to fix the points of failure using customer feedback to improve security and user intuitiveness. For those existing customers that participated and were pleased with the new software’s performance, discounts and incentives were provided through a new program. Overall, the CTO mitigated an initial potential profit loss of 34% and increased sales steadily 20% per quarter thereafter. Both metrics fed into a longer-term strategy that was being developed in parallel.
Hitting pause on moving hastily allows you to step back and ask what decisions can be made incrementally for progressive success? Questions that can help are:
• What decisions are easily reversible if wrong?
• Which stakeholders must I consult before irreversible changes are made?
• How can I test hypotheses on small scales first?
• What data moves me from tactical to strategic decisions?
4. From Steward to Serious Candidate
Interim executives are often perceived as more stewards of the status quo, seat warmers, until the permanent executive arrives. To avoid this pitfall, I recommend taking two precautions.
Buffer risk by coalition building: Denise’s tech company merger carried enormous risks stemming from clashing cultures. Rather than freezing at the face of this risk, she identified 12 “culture carriers,” advocates from both organizations, forming an integration advisory committee, who became the company’s informal culture coalition. The merger, projected for 22 months, was completed in 18 and considered widely as a success.
Role clarity negotiation focusing on management success: Because interim executives are automatically given shorter-term objectives as a “test-drive” strategy before being offered the permanent spot, I advise interim leaders to ask for more.
By actively working with sponsors to clarify the longer-term expectations of the job, interim leaders can make headway on demonstrating their managerial skills and ability to deliver on longer-term goals.
One interim CFO I advised drafted her own “ideal CFO description” of the role and what would be required of her so she could clarify what impact she could make if she were operating as the full-time, permanent CFO. She reviewed the description with her board sponsor and documented weekly progress reports with this criteria after their meetings. This created transparency about both short- and long-term operational plans and their intended strategic outcomes. This systematic communication transformed perceptions of her as a placeholder executive to a proven C-suite ready leader within three to four months. By month six, she had landed the job.
Demonstrate your abilities by asking the following:
• What evidence can demonstrate my ability to perform in a longer-term capacity?
• How do I maintain momentum while navigating the potential Caretaker perception?
• What three initiatives warrant acceleration versus transformation?
• What’s my exit strategy if the role doesn’t convert?
5. From Shifting Assumptions to Reputation Intelligence
Two to three months in, stakeholder misperceptions crystallize but haven’t hardened. This critical window is the perfect opportunity for course correction—yet most operate blind to one’s internal reputation.
Dr. Chen’s cautionary tale illustrates this perfectly. As acting head of medicine within a highly esteemed healthcare institute, she delivered strong financial results with her CEO’s support yet remained oblivious to her profound unpopularity amongst peers and her teams. When a permanent appointment seemed imminent, 40% of medical staff departed within six months.
A 360-feedback check would have revealed trust scores 70% below average at a time when she had a chance to turn it around. Unfortunately, this feedback was obtained in exit interviews as most knew of the strong relationship between Dr. Chen and the CEO. It took several months before Dr. Chen began to intellectually process the disparity between what the exit data showed and her CEO’s exuberant support of her. Sadly, because the transition was not well supported through proper vetting and personal development, it simply became too late for the board to regain confidence in Dr. Chen as a full time candidate.
Unlike external recruitment’s gradual relationship-building, interim leaders are left in limbo. They aren’t given proper evaluations but people form impressions of them anyway. Companies should treat interim appointments like external searches from day one: establish formal evaluation criteria, capture feedback systematically, and reset relationship expectations immediately.
I advise leaders to get ahead of such challenges by negotiating support: 360 leadership evaluations with recommendations and follow up, 1:1 executive transition and team coaching that surfaces differing needs, values, and personalities.
Get ahead of potential reputation challenges by shifting assumptions to intelligence through these questions:
• How might peers perceive me differently as their leader?
• What concerns are discussed privately but not raised directly?
• Which actions have been misinterpreted, under which context(s) and how?
• Who provides genuinely candid feedback?
• When and how should I seek feedback?
Interim does not always mean temporary if you possess a serious drive and desire to land the permanent role. If mastered, these five strategies can transform interim appointments into securing your role in the C-suite. And the rewards—both personal and organizational—can prove remarkable.
