An interim appointment is not a pause button

By Rebecca Perrone, MAICD, Managing Director, Brooker Consulting

23 September 2026

From the Search Room

Most Boards treat an interim CEO appointment as a pause button, something to hold the organisation steady while the “real” decision gets made later, on a calmer timetable.

We know it isn’t a pause button. It’s a decision that changes the search that follows, whether the Board intends it to or not, and it’s happening far more often than it used to. Interim appointments now account for nearly one in three CEO successions, up from one in five a decade ago, according to a 2026 Harvard Business Review analysis of more than 400 S&P 1500 interim appointments, a trend Challenger, Gray & Christmas data has separately confirmed. This is no longer an edge case boards stumble into. It’s becoming a default.

What actually happens

A CEO departs suddenly due to resignation, termination, health, or other unforeseen circumstances. The Board needs stability fast, so someone steps in – an internal executive or a contracted interim, asked to “hold things together” while a proper search is run. The interim brief rarely gets the same governance discipline as a permanent one. No agreed mandate. No fixed timeframe. No clear line on what happens at the end of it. It’s treated as a placeholder, not an appointment.

That informality shows up in the research. Boards that appoint interim CEOs tend to have shorter director tenure and fewer directorships than boards that go straight to a permanent successor, which researchers use as a proxy for weaker succession planning. Depending on the study, somewhere between one in five and one in three interim CEOs eventually get the permanent job. The rest either return to their previous role or leave the organisation. That’s not a placeholder outcome. It’s a real fork in the road, and it is managed as though it isn’t one.

A fair defence

The logic is sound in the moment. Urgency is real, the organisation needs continuity, an internal candidate already knows the business, and a formal search takes months, which the Board feels it does not have. Buying time to think properly is a legitimate reason to appoint an interim.

Where it stops working

Two failure modes show up, and I’ve watched both play out.

The first is an internal interim who starts making real decisions and settles into the role. An informal expectation builds, inside the business and sometimes on the Board, that they’ll get the permanent job. Here’s the part that surprised me when I went looking for the research: a 2026 Strategic Management Journal study found boards are notably more hesitant to remove a permanent successor early for poor performance than when that successor followed an interim CEO. Having already been through one leadership change, directors seem reluctant to admit a second one was also wrong. So the Board ends up carrying an underperforming appointment longer than it would have otherwise, purely because of the sequence it came from.

The second is an external interim engaged with a vague scope who drifts into the job properly. Twelve months in, they’re functioning as the CEO in every respect except the title, and the Board has lost the urgency to run the formal search because things are working well enough for now. The cost of that drift is measurable. A matched-pairs study in the same Harvard Business Review analysis found companies that appointed an interim CEO earned around $300 million less over three years than comparable companies that appointed a permanent successor straight away, with return on assets falling two to three percent in the period that followed. A ninety-day bridge quietly becomes an eighteen-month unresolved governance question, and it costs the organisation while it does.

What the strong Boards do differently

At the moment of appointing an interim, they decide, and say out loud to the interim on day one, whether that person is eligible for the permanent role or not. Not at the end of the interim period, when the answer is loaded with everyone’s accumulated goodwill or resentment, but at the start, when it’s still just information.

They also set a fixed date for the permanent search to launch, independent of how the interim period is going. “External search begins within sixty days regardless of performance” removes the single biggest reason formal searches get quietly deferred: things are fine, so why disrupt it. Additionally, they write the interim brief with the same mandate discipline they’d apply to a permanent one, because an organisation doesn’t stop needing clear direction just because the title in front of it says interim.

One move worth trying

On the day you appoint an interim, put one sentence in writing and share it with them directly. This is a defined-term role, and the process for the permanent decision runs independently of your performance. It removes an ambiguity that otherwise corrodes trust in both directions, theirs and the Board’s.

A closing thought

Interim leadership has grown into one of the busiest categories in executive search, and the data the sector publishes on itself is almost entirely about speed and supply: how fast a candidate can start, how quickly the paperwork moves, how many assignments get completed. Almost none of it touches what happens to a Board’s governance once that placement is made. That’s the gap this piece sits in.

An interim appointment feels like it buys time. It only does if the Board uses that time deliberately, rather than letting the interim period quietly answer the question the Board was actually supposed to decide.

Brooker Consulting works with Boards on CEO appointments, including interim and interim-to-permanent transitions.

If this piece was useful, I would welcome a conversation.

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