Interim leadership runs on a different clock to a permanent hire. A permanent leader can spend a quarter learning the business and still be early. An interim who spends a quarter learning has spent most of the engagement.
So the handover matters more than anyone treats it. Done well, it buys back three or four weeks. Done in the usual way, which is a folder of documents and a calendar full of introductions, it buys back very little.
The five things I actually want
- The numbers as the team uses them day to day, not as the board sees them. Those are usually different, and the difference is informative.
- The three decisions currently stuck, and who they are stuck between.
- An honest account of who is leaving, or thinking about it.
- The contracts and commitments that expire inside my window.
- The thing nobody says out loud in meetings.
That last one is the most valuable and the one most handovers leave out, usually because the person doing the handover has stopped noticing it. Every organisation has a subject that gets discussed in corridors and not in rooms. An interim who does not know what it is will walk into it in week two.
Every organisation has a subject that gets discussed in corridors and not in rooms.
What I do not need
A full strategy document. A tour of the tooling. Thirty introductory meetings scheduled before I have any basis for asking useful questions. All three feel like good onboarding and all three consume the week when attention is cheapest to spend well.
I would rather have two days of reading the actual reporting and sitting in on real meetings than a week of curated context.
The mandate question
One thing to settle before the start rather than in week three. What can this seat decide alone, what needs a conversation, and what is off limits. Interim roles fail more often on unclear authority than on unclear priorities.
If the answer is that everything needs a conversation, that is worth knowing on day one, because it changes what is realistic and it changes what I should be hired to do.
And the handover out
The last two weeks are part of the engagement, not a formality after it. The point of an interim is not to keep the seat warm. It is to hand your permanent hire a situation that is better than the one you found, with the ground prepared rather than the mess redistributed.
That means writing down what was tried and rejected, not just what worked. The rejected list saves your next leader a quarter.