Sometimes that moment is obvious. A president, provost, vice president, or other senior leader leaves unexpectedly, and the institution needs someone who can step in immediately. But many leadership transitions begin much earlier and are much less clear. A function may be losing momentum. Important decisions may repeatedly be deferred. A leader may be struggling to meet the demands of a changing role. Other members of the leadership team may be absorbing work that cannot sustainably remain on their shoulders.

In those situations, the question is not simply whether a vacancy exists. It is whether the institution currently has the leadership capacity it needs.

That distinction matters because interim leadership is still too often treated as a temporary fix: someone to occupy a role, keep the work moving, and avoid making too many changes until the “real” leader arrives. There are circumstances where maintaining stability is exactly what an institution needs. But when an interim appointment is approached only as a holding pattern, institutions can miss one of the most useful periods they have for understanding what the organization needs next.

A well-designed interim period can create continuity while also giving an institution something harder to come by in the middle of normal operations: perspective.

The cost of waiting

Higher education rightly values deliberation. Leadership decisions have consequences for people, culture, finances, strategy, and institutional trust, and they should not be made casually. But deliberation can become delay.

When performance is not where it needs to be, institutional leaders frequently face a difficult calculation. Is the situation likely to improve with more time, clearer expectations, additional support, or coaching? Or has waiting itself begun to create a greater institutional cost?

There is no universal timetable for answering that question. A more useful way to think about it is to examine what is happening while the institution waits.

What important work is being postponed? What decisions are other leaders compensating for? What is the effect on the team? Have expectations been clear, and has meaningful improvement followed? Most importantly, what evidence suggests the situation will be materially different six months from now?

At some point, waiting becomes a leadership decision in its own right.

That does not mean the answer is always to bring in an external interim. Institutions should first understand what capability the moment requires and whether that capability already exists internally.

Look at the bench, but look honestly

Internal interim appointments can be tremendously effective. An established leader brings institutional knowledge, trusted relationships, familiarity with the culture, and an understanding of how work actually gets done. When the primary need is continuity, an internal leader may be exactly the right choice.

The more difficult question is whether someone who can cover the role is the same as someone who can provide the leadership the institution needs during the transition.

If the function requires significant change, if existing leaders are already operating at capacity, if unresolved issues need an objective assessment, or if the institution is reconsidering the structure of the role itself, an external interim can provide something fundamentally different.

Outside leaders arrive without the same assumptions about why things are done the way they are. Experienced interim executives have often entered multiple institutions during periods of transition, which can give them a useful ability to distinguish between the problems created by a particular circumstance and those rooted more deeply in structure, process, talent, or decision-making.

There is another consideration as well. When potential internal candidates may ultimately compete for the permanent position, asking one of them to serve as interim can alter relationships within the team and complicate the eventual search. In some cases, bringing in an external leader creates the neutral space the institution needs to make the permanent decision well.

The question should therefore be less about internal versus external leadership in the abstract and more about fit: What does this particular moment require?

An interim should do more than maintain

Once an interim leader is appointed, the mandate matters enormously.

Telling an interim simply to “keep things moving” sounds prudent. Sometimes it is. But an overly restrictive mandate can leave the institution exactly where it started several months later, except that it is now beginning a permanent search with the same unresolved questions.

I think about a productive interim assignment as having three responsibilities: preserve, diagnose, and advance.

Preserve what matters. The first obligation is continuity. Students, faculty, staff, donors, partners, boards, and communities should not experience unnecessary disruption simply because a leadership transition is underway. Important relationships, commitments, operations, and institutional priorities still require attention.

Diagnose what the transition reveals. Leadership changes often expose issues that were easier to overlook during ordinary operations. Is the organizational structure still appropriate? Does the team have the capabilities it needs? Are decision rights clear? Are processes working as intended? Has the position gradually accumulated responsibilities that no longer belong together?

An interim leader is particularly well positioned to ask those questions because the goal is not to defend the old structure or campaign for the permanent job. The interim period can become a deliberate opportunity to understand what the institution is actually asking the next leader to inherit.

Advance the work that cannot wait. A transition should not mean putting an entire portfolio on pause. Institutions may be confronting a budget challenge, an enrollment issue, an accreditation requirement, a technology implementation, a major fundraising initiative, or another priority that will not wait politely for a search process to conclude.

A capable interim should have enough authority to move essential work forward while exercising judgment about which decisions should properly be left to the permanent leader.

That balance is critical. Interim leadership should not be passive, but it should not become an attempt to redesign the institution according to one temporary leader’s preferences either. The objective is to leave the organization better prepared for the person who follows.

Use the transition to rethink the role

One of the greatest benefits of an interim period may be that it gives an institution time to resist an understandable instinct: immediately replacing the person who just left with someone who looks essentially the same on paper.

Organizations change faster than job descriptions do.

A leadership position designed five or ten years ago may now require different capabilities. The surrounding team may have changed. Institutional strategy may have shifted. New financial, technological, regulatory, demographic, or cultural pressures may have altered the work considerably.

Yet when a senior leader leaves, institutions often begin by pulling out the existing position description and launching a search.

An interim period creates an opportunity to ask a better question: If we were designing this role for the institution we need to become, rather than the institution we used to be, what would it look like?

Sometimes the answer confirms that the existing structure is right. Sometimes the institution discovers that responsibilities should be redistributed, a function needs to be reorganized, or the permanent leader requires a different set of experiences than the predecessor did.

That learning has value. A search undertaken after several months of informed observation can be very different from a search launched in the first days after a departure.

A transition can strengthen institutional resilience

Leadership departures are inevitable. The measure of a resilient institution is not whether it can prevent them. It is whether it can absorb them without allowing critical work, decision-making, and organizational confidence to deteriorate.

A strong internal bench is one important part of that resilience. So is knowing when the bench should be supplemented.

Institutions build resilience when they can recognize that a leadership gap has emerged, respond before the consequences compound, preserve what must continue, and use the transition to understand what needs to change.

Seen in that context, interim leadership is not simply a solution to an empty seat. It is one of the tools institutions can use to create leadership capacity precisely when that capacity is under the greatest pressure.

The return on an interim assignment therefore should not be measured only in whether someone successfully occupied the position until the search was finished. The better measure is what has changed by the time that person leaves.

Is the team stronger? Are priorities clearer? Have difficult issues been surfaced or addressed? Has important work continued to move forward? Does the institution understand the permanent role more clearly? Will the next leader inherit a better starting point than the interim did?

If the answer to those questions is yes, the interim period was not time between leaders. It was part of the leadership strategy.