When a CEO leaves, most owners and boards name an interim and ask them to keep things steady until the search is done. That instruction wastes the months that decide what the next CEO walks into. An interim CEO should be handed a plan to move and a handoff to make, and judged on both.
I work as a fractional executive, and covering the gap after a leader leaves is one of the reasons the seat exists. The months under an interim are not a pause for the business. Customers keep buying or leaving, the forecast still comes due, and managers decide for themselves which projects keep moving while nobody above them knows who will be in charge next year.
Interim CEOs are leaving their seats more often
CEO exits at U.S. companies are down 19% this year by the count in Challenger, Gray & Christmas's September CEO turnover report, but interim CEOs went the other way. Through September, 102 interim CEOs had left the role, up 70% from 60 a year earlier and already past the 78 who left in all of 2025. Each of those exits closed a stretch in which a company ran under a leader who knew the job was temporary, and the next CEO started from wherever that stretch left things.
What should an interim CEO be held to?
Keeping things steady sounds safe. In practice it means the decisions the last CEO left open stay open, the plan stops while everyone waits for the new name, and the new CEO arrives to a team that has spent months learning to wait.
Give the interim three things in writing on the first day. The first is the short list of decisions that cannot wait for the permanent hire, each with the date it is due. The second is the forecast they are expected to hit while they hold the seat, built from where the business stands today and agreed by the owner or the board before they start. The third is what the handoff has to contain: the plan, the numbers and the open decisions, written so the next CEO can pick them up without a week of meetings.
That is an agreed path with a beginning and an end. Then the owner has something to check each week, and the search committee can tell a candidate what they will inherit.
Hand the seat over the way you would hand over a business
The handoff is the part most interim arrangements skip, and it is the part I care about most. At Abercrombie & Fitch I grew the Asia e-commerce business from $15M to $100M in annual run rate in eighteen months, hitting my own forecast. When the company wanted it back inside its general operations, I taught the team to run it without me and recommended that the role move to Shanghai.
A temporary leader should be measured the same way. On the first day the permanent CEO sits down, what can they pick up and run without asking anyone how it works?
This is also where an interim CEO and a fractional executive differ. An interim holds the top seat for a set stretch. A fractional executive sits in a working seat, as COO or CFO, one to two days a week, carries the plan through the gap, and can stay on after the hire to move it across. Some companies need both, and the two seats should be working from the same written plan.
When the interim is likely to get the job, treat it as their first quarter
If the board already expects to give the interim the permanent role, a written handoff to a stranger is wasted effort. Run the interim stretch as that person's first quarter as CEO instead, with the same forecast and the same weekly check you would give any new chief executive. The interim period is then an audition you can measure.
Write the interim's job down before you announce the name
If a leader has just left your company, or you can see one leaving, write one page before the interim starts: the decisions due before the new CEO arrives, the number to hold, and what the handoff must include. If nobody can fill that page, the interim has a seat and no job yet.
A new CEO also needs a forecast they can be held to, and the same logic of building a plan that outlasts the person runs through the marketing seat. How an engagement works lays out how a fractional seat is set up and handed back. If you are covering a seat right now, send me the page and I will read it with you.
John Wyatt · John Wyatt's page · All posts · RSS