Episode 268: Interim Leadership: What to do From the Staff and Leader Perspective
It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood, as Mister Rogers would say, on this edition of Around with Randall. We find ourselves with what I eat, maybe more anecdotally than anything else, experience more interim leadership in our nonprofit. So this could be the CEO, the executive director, the chief philanthropy officer, maybe even a leadership in a larger organization leadership major gift position.
But it's more prevalent as the tenure of many of these positions continues to diminish. Today, we want to talk about the interim status that comes with this phenomenon. And from two perspectives. What should interim leaders do, but also what should staff members do as they may have an interim leader? And in this, whether you're the one or the other, you learn from each other, hopefully about some of the expectations and things that are prevalent in these types of scenarios.
So as we usually do here at around with Randall, we'll start from the top. Work our way down into the tactical. What we're finding is that in this is a study by Campbell and Associates, Campbell and Company. Excuse me, that 52% of CDOs are only serving now 1 to 2 years, and that 75% of CDOs cite unrealistic expectations for the reasons that there's a lot of turnover.
This is what I talk about at the very end of each podcast. The whole between, nonprofit the nonprofit work fills between corporate for profit business and government. For profit doesn't want to do certain things. It doesn't make money. Government is not that efficient. But the needs within the nonprofit whole or sector are growing. And that's putting a lot of pressure on nonprofits.
And thus what we find is what we just discussed, that the tenure is dropping. CEOs in health care are down to it's, you know, the head of a hospital stand up three years or less. We know that gift officers are somewhere around 18 to 19 months. The turnover rate is prevalent. And some of that is because we hire the wrong people, but also is is that the demands of the job are increasing as the needs increase.
We need more money, we need more outcomes. We need better interaction with the community and the path to get there isn't reasonable. It's more immediate. Which brings us to the reason why interims are so possible in today's environment is that organizations are trying to figure out, well, what if maybe they made a bad hire, maybe it was a short tenure, maybe they don't know why there's a problem, that an interim provides a gap filler and allows a board, a CEO and executive team to kind of assess exactly what needs to be done.
And as a results, interims come in and we may ask the question theoretically or philosophically, what are they supposed to do? Well, what we know is, is that they're really three distinct roles that are possible. And it's not that one would only be in one of these roles. We could have interims that take up several or a couple or maybe just the one.
What are these three roles? So the first is they're a caretaker. They're there to keep things running, keep the trains on, moving on time, that we're not making massive change, that we're going to just keep everything moving forward till an organization and or the those hiring figure out what it is that they want. The second is a stabilizer, meaning that there's a problem and they're there to fix the friction.
They're there to clarify roles and to make adjustments based upon what the entity, which could be the CEO for a CPO, the board for a CEO or its director, whoever the boss or bosses are, are asking that interim to do to make sure things are stabilized. Look, we got to just clean up a little bit. That's in contrast to the third, and that's the change agent, that there are some big problems.
And this is a reset. And many times these interim leaders are being asked to come in and really change structure, process, personnel, talent. And they have the backing of the leadership, whether that's the board for the CEO, the CPO who wrote report, the CEO they have cover, they're told, go figure out what the problems are and take care of them before we bring in someone else.
In some ways, they're almost being told, you clean up the problems, you're going to be paid well for it. So when we hire a permanent, they don't have any of those dirty hands based upon the things that need to be done.
Depending on exactly which one of the three the interim is will determine kind of the goals and direction that they will go. But at the same time, I'm, I think we probably under discuss or don't bring up what an interim does to a staff. And there's some fascinating studies, both out of the nonprofit space but also out of places like Harvard Business School about and this is maybe in the more in the for profit world, but the premise is the same about what happens to a staff when you have an interim, that things like email and meetings diminish by 20% because people feel as if they can't really make decisions.
So why have the meetings? We also know that communication overall tends to diminish internally because people become apprehensive, don't know who to trust, don't who to talk to, don't know whose side someone's on. People almost become scared, anxiety ridden. As to a my next. And who do I believe and things of that nature. This all means that they become not just workers, but risk averse.
Or they're in the risk management business for their own job and their own career, or their own section of the nonprofit or whatever it might be, and that this drives less production and efficiency. So we have two positions that we have to consider. Number one is what is the interim being asked to do. And we talked about that from the caretaker.
Stabilize or change agent, but also what the staff's going through when they don't have permanent leadership and direction. And they're not quite sure what that step CPO is interim CEO. Its director is interim is trying to do. Which brings us maybe to the last thing before we start moving more into the tactical around what is it that interims can look at in terms of their success?
And I look at these in four categories, no matter which one of the three the caretaker, the stabilizer change agent, they possibly could fit in two or maybe two of the three is kind of looking at it as a kind of a scoreboard for things that an interim leader hopefully is aiming for. And number one is that there is confidence at two levels.
So this is one into the first is confidence externally that depending on how high up this particular position is in the role in the community or the role in which the organization the nonprofit plays in the community is to bring some stability, some confidence that everything's okay doesn't mean there may not be changes. It doesn't mean that there may be there may not be adjustments.
But generally everything's okay. The part B of that is the same in many ways with the team, even the change agent who may be asked to come in and make personnel changes, structural changes, process changes, they're still good people. I've never seen a situation where an interim comes in and cleans out an active part. An entire department and or a entire organization.
They may remove or dismiss or ask people to move on a bunch of people. But they're not just.
Killing everybody out the door, which means that the roles and the priorities internally are important. And so they're going to be judging, hopefully, who are the right people to fit into this. And we'll talk more about this from the tactical pieces of what a staff might think about in terms of what they should do. The third is what I would consider pipeline integrity, or maybe some improvement, is that if were nonprofits were based upon some kind of donor revenue stream, maybe you have an alternative revenue stream, like health care has reimbursement rates.
Education is tuition, but generally donors are part of this, which means we need to make sure that we're continuing a process of bringing in and making the right conversations possible. So this gets into is the data clean? Do we have the right stages? Are we moving people forward? Are we aligning people to the mission rather than just people?
We should never be dependent on a situation where it's the person who makes the gifts possible, but they never really tie themselves to the mission of what the organization is trying to accomplish. So pipeline integrity from a donor perspective, those relationships is critical. The last is, is if they're really an interim, and we're going to make that assumption that this isn't just a test case for six months to figure out what this person can do.
Trial run. So to speak, to really they got to they're coming in to make sure things are whatever it might need to be done in terms of that caretaker stabilizer or change agent. They're there also to create a handoff readiness for the next leader. And depending on what the role of that interim is, that could mean bringing and creating clear job descriptions.
That could mean clear metrics, that could mean getting rid of people who may not be really all that inclined to be at the organization. That could be realigning people. Maybe people are in the wrong positions, whatever that change to process talent, people or work to be done, what they're really trying to do is they want to walk out the door and a new person comes in the door with as much possibility as can be feasibly built.
And so this allows the organization not to stabilize, but elevate based upon what an interim might be able to do to calm things down or settle things down, or work things out in a reasonable way. This moves us into our tactical. What is it that we really should be thinking about? And I want to break this into two pieces.
The first is what should an interim do? If you're the interim, you come in and you're, what am I supposed to do here? Number two, which we'll get to in about 3 or 4 minutes, maybe five minutes, is your staff member. What should you do if you have an interim come in and you're now reporting to an interim, your supervisor boss manager's no longer there.
We'll cover both. So, let's start on the tactical, on being the interim. The first thing is, is you have to start day one with the conversation with the CEO and board to find out which one of the three they really want. And you should have probably done that before you took the job. Some people aren't built to be change agents, they're just not.
They're going to keep status quo. Some people probably are too much change agents. And if the organization just wants a caretaker with a little bit of adjust, maybe a little bit of stabilization, they come in and they want to catapult the organization or department forward, much more so than the CEO wants for department the or the board once for the organization as a whole.
So the first thing is, is the interim starting the conversation. It probably pre day one around what's inbounds and what's out of bounds. Can they do organizational change. Can they do comp change. Can they do campaign decisions. If it's philanthropy what decisions are really not going to be allowed to be made but may need to be made down the road by maybe a more permanent replacement?
Three what is a state? What needs to be stabilized immediately? Where are the pressure points? Are they key donors? Are they board expectations? Are they team conflicts? Are they, revenue problems? Are they financial problems? A great interim leader can very quickly and probably with a lot of insight from a board or the CEO. It's a department can be told.
Look, I think these two problems are three problems or one problem exists. Start there. My advice is that's where you should start. Now, that doesn't mean you don't find other things, but your real role, even if you are a change agent, is to begin with stabilization. And to stabilize. You have to figure out where the problems are and figure out where the problems are.
You have to. We'll get into this, have a lot of conversations and do a lot of listening. The other thing that probably is, I think completely under discussed most. I'm not discussed at all is defining with the board. If you're the CEO and interim CEO or CTO or department leader with the CEO or their boss asking the question, what does success look like when I'm done?
And then even more so, breaking that down into thirds, what does the success look like in the first third of this tenure? What does the success look like in the second third of this tenure? And what does this success look like in the third ten, third part of this tenure? The reason these are important is a good interim leader.
If they know what the first third metrics, goals, successes look like, they know what things need to be stabilized right away, and they know which things they can say, look, everything's fine over there. We might have to make some adjustments, but we're not going to worry about that now. And then they can begin to communicate that out. All too often we put an interim in and say, go fix the problems or go stabilize or whatever, but there's no conversation about what anybody above them thinks that above the interim thinks that might look like.
Well, what kind of leadership can you provide if you don't know what direction you're supposed to go? And so these kind of benchmarks first, third, second, third, third, third are going to allow an interim leader to figure out, hey, here's what I might be focusing on. So the first three things are first things as I talked about what are in bounds out of bounds.
What's going to be left for maybe a more permanent long term solution? What things need to be stabilized immediately? What are the goals in the in kind of, increments of thirds within timeframes or months, year, whatever it might look like. So that's the first. The second is the critical first ten days, maybe two weeks, possibly a month, depending on the size of the organization to do two things communicate out and listen in.
The first is communicating out. How will you create a communication cadence? How are you going to communicate internally with the team? Weekly, daily of staff, meetings, emails, videos? There's lots of different options, but as we'll get into in a moment, staffs get nervous with an interim. The more open communication there is, honest dialog, the better off it's going to be.
This is also true with the outside world. How do you communicate regularly with donors, with key constituents, with the board, with advocates, with volunteers? One of the keys here is is being able to set a clear line of understanding about what your role is and the fact that the organization's just fine, that we're going to continue to do great work, and that an interim is just there to help guide.
In the interim, the same mission may be executed a little differently, but the same intent that it always has. So communicate out. The second is listening in the best interim people I've ever seen do a series of one on one listening sessions, maybe a small group, and they ask questions like, what's working? What's stuck? What do you need from me?
The biggest question what do you need from me? How do I help you? What hurdles are in front of you so that you get an opportunity to figure out, hey, part of my interim status, no matter which one of the three caretaker stabilizer or change agent. These are data points based on opinion. But if you start hearing the same opinion over and over and over and it makes practical sense, that elevates it to becoming a more immediate stabilization issue.
These listening tours are key. And so being able to sit down, have a cup of coffee, don't make them formal doesn't mean you know you're laid back in a lounge chair, the professional, but they're not meant to be overly burdensome to the staff member or team. So listening in, communicating out number three is triage donors. We live in a world, as we've talked about, that 95% of the dollars come from 5% of the people.
You got to find out who those 5% are and go out and talk to them. Top 25 relationships. Top 50 relationships. Any at risk, anybody who feels like they've been left out of and this happens with donors, they're not on the board. I'm a major donor. No one told me that so-and-so was leaving, and they're not quite sure why we can't talk about it getting out in front of these people and giving them conference.
The organization's in good shape. The team's in good shape. We're moving forward in a positive way. We need you to be a part of that, because you have made it possible for us to be who we are to this point, and we see you being an incredibly important part of what our future is. Donor kind of triage. The last is the process around future donors.
Sometimes interim leaders come in and focus so much, and we mentioned this a few moments ago around the current major 25 or 50 or whatever, top 5% or 3%. But we fail to look at the pipeline and what I find is, is sometimes then all pipeline activity stops. What we know is, is a pipeline activity stops in the short term and has a long term implication on new donors coming in on larger donors being found, new relationships being discussed.
And so we need to ensure that we keep that hygiene of the pipeline clean, that needs to move forward. Are we doing our stages, next steps? Are we out seeing people?
The third large piece of this is breaking it into the thirds that I mentioned earlier. In terms of goals, what's the goal in the first, third, second, third, third, third? So we take 90 days of good or bad example the first 30 days. Maybe it's maybe you're going to be there 170 days. So it's the first 90 days is all about clarity of what decisions you can make, the listening tours and the idea of what can't we allow to fail?
What, what, what do we need to fix immediately? If it's finance, it's something over there. We gotta worry about that. If it's whatever it might be. This is about stabilizing what you currently have. Even if you're a change agent, stabilizing in the first third is critical. The second 30 days becomes about or in our 90 day example, but the second third becomes about improvement.
What limited number of improvements can we offer to make the organization function more effectively? And this is where you get maybe a staff change or a process change. The idea is, is you're not going to change everything at once. These are limited opportunities to make the process better. Third is in that last third. So in our 90 day example, the last three days, 170 days interim status is going to be the last 90 days is about building into the handoff, writing up some kind of I call it my leaving memo of where are we at?
What have we done? What are the challenges? What are the strengths from the interim perspective, to be handed off eventually to a permanent replacement and then preparing for that leader to come in and hit the ground running? All these things, you may think, well, you know, gosh, that seems kind of common sense. Too often I don't see them in writing like, hey, here's what we're gonna accomplish, put in writing goals because we think, well, the interim, we'll figure it out.
We just kind of keep everything afloat. No, the interim is there to fix an issue. There's a reason there's an interim, whatever it is. How do we do these steps? Because it's about behavioral outcomes that we're looking at for that interim about being we want them to be transparent in what they're doing. Lots of communication. They're going to be a couple things they can't talk about.
And that's also okay. But transparent is important. Uncertainty is detrimental when all things are hidden. When nobody knows what's going on, everybody gets scared. So we need to realize that these behavioral rules of communication, we don't want there to look at like this isn't an audition. It's a true interim status. Their job is to come in, fix, stabilize whatever, and move on.
And if they're auditioning, that may mean they try to do more or less than actually needs to be done. And we need to avoid major change culture. Rewrites, so to speak. This is the interim job is not to reformat the organization with the new mission. Even if they're change agent, the mission stays the same. So this brings us to this kind of conclusion of the interim perspective.
But what's not discussed is the second part, which I promised in the last part of our tactical, is what the staff goes through. This is hard on staff because they don't have a clarity of where they are going, even with a bad leader, there is clarity. Most of the time they may not like the direction, but they know where it's going.
All of a sudden there's an interim and nobody's quite sure what to do. And so there are four things I think a staff member should do if they have an interim boss, supervisor, manager or leader. The first is, is that they can't assume the interim can read their mind, know what they do? Well, they've been in the profession forever.
They understand. No, you have no idea, as a staff member, what an interim is dealing with politically or from a financial perspective, or from a board perspective, or the politics. And so if you assume they understand, then you're leaving a lot to chance, which means there are probably four things you need to think about to make sure your interim supervisor, boss, manager, or whatever knows what you do.
Number one is what are your goals? What was it was being asked of you? And then kind of one day, where are you at against those goals? Number two is what are the top opportunities in front of you. So this is about a fundraiser. What are your biggest portfolio opportunities? Where are you at in the kind of the active portfolio management process?
If you're an infrastructure, here's what we do for a process perspective. If you're in finance, here's our protocols and audits and procedures that we go through. Whatever it is you do, creating a one page, two page sheet about what the position not only is today, which is really what the goals are all about, but what opportunities lay in front of you that or for the organization that could be taken advantage of regardless of the leader, is three what are the risks?
What are the things that might cause you, the staff member, your job performance a challenge? Now if you make them all, if you make a list of 50, then you look like you're the problem. What are the 2 or 3 things that if we could find solutions that you'd like to be a part of, finding could allow us to be successful.
While many, to be successful, allow the organization to flourish. Interim leaders love finding easy solutions to simple problems. And sometimes it's our responsibility not just to complain about the problem, but to bring the solution forward, or at least an option. The fourth is what do you need in this moment? In during this interim process? Do you need a lot of assistance?
Did you get a lot of assistance? Did you get nothing but you needed it? Or are you pretty much an independent person? And here's how you can measure my activity. You want to create a one page, what I would think of as an operating dashboard about your goals, about the opportunities, about the risks and what you need. Maybe it's front or back to be able to sit down in that hopefully one on one conversation.
They want to give you an idea of where I'm at, what's expected, what I'm doing, where I see what could go and what things could be really important to me. And for the organization to be successful. All too often I see team members not do that, and interim leaders are trying to figure out too much. They're absorbing too much information.
And something like this goes, wow, this person is organized. Wow, this person knows what they're doing. Wow. I may not understand all of it, but at least there's a plan. Put that plan in a simple document that you can present.
Number two, when you have these conversations, don't inflate positive things that don't exist. I'm also not saying don't be a negative Nelly. Be honest.
Accuracy beats optimism or negativity. You're overly optimistic. Interim leader, if they have any brains, is going to say something's not right. If you're overly negative, they will quickly say, well, your problem complaining. Which brings us to how do you be accurate? What is it that the organization or in your role in the organization is working? What's not? And this is about using maybe some language like, hey, we're pretty close on this, or hey, the next action is maybe to think about this or a decision was kind of being discussed in this area.
I need help with this. In this particular endeavor, that honesty will build credibility for you with the interim leader, which may be transitioned off to other people down the road as well. See. Or third, however you want to look at it is to protect yourself and your donors, which means you need to be open and honest with them.
You may have to move to a little bit of stewardship if there's some indecision with donors, particularly those close to an ask who were tied to maybe another leader that isn't there anymore, how do we steward our donors in a way that allows them to know they're important for the organization, because that isn't dependent on any one person?
The second thing it does is, is it shows that you're getting out and seeing people. Now, if you're in finance, how do you keep the process moving? If you're an infrastructure? So data, here's the process we need to keep communicating. All these things are critically important to protect yourself. The donors, the staff, the organization. We don't become stagnant.
The last is what I just called a professional posture. You need to show up a little early. You need to stay a little late. You need to make sure your notes are clean. You need to close loops. You need to make sure there's not, you know, things that aren't done that no one knows what to do. You need to look and be organized.
If you're. And I know this sounds strange, but if your desk is a dumpster fire, first impressions matter and an interim walks in and goes, oh Lord, look at this place. You have to realize that an interim is going to make quick assessments, and it may not be totally accurate. It may not be totally right. But you know you can help yourself by being organized from showing up early, showing up to meetings early, staying late, being seen doing the good work, presenting your information, being succinct and taking care of yourself, your office, and the environment around you.
Be a catalyst for positive rather than a catalyst for negative. And in that process, what you'll find is, is that you'll gain some credibility, maybe an opportunity to grow, to get more in terms of what you want to do because they see you as someone who could actually do it. So kind of creating that dashboard about, you know, what's going on, the goals situation, what we're trying to do, we're trying to be accurate, not too optimistic, not too negative.
We're going to protect ourselves, our donors, our teams about getting the right information to the right people and moving the right things forward about organizational mission and outcome and structure. And finally, we're going to have a professional posture show up early, stay late, look like we're organized, look like we're professional. Those may seem simple, but again, I don't see them done.
If you do that. And then we have the what to do as the interim leader between the two, you can begin to see if on the staff member what the interim leader might be doing. I can lean into that. If you're the interim leader and you're looking for things, you can say, look, give me these things. You can be looking for these things in the staff.
They're actually cross connected. That's why I did the episode a little bit longer today together, because they're not isolated. Inner leaders are trying to figure out certain things to move the organization forward. Ironically, staff members are trying to figure things out a little bit smaller scale about themselves. There's the staff, the department, the organization to move things forward.
And thus they're interconnected. And interims are going to become something I think, that are more regular and that we need to be more ready to deal with. And hopefully today gives you some tactics and some thoughts about how to do that, both for the interim leader and the staff who might serve that interim leader. Don't forget to check out the blogs at Hallett philanthropy.com two per week.
Just something to think about. Reading an RSS feed. I'm really stunned by how many people have done that, to be honest with you. Comes right into your inbox every Tuesday. Thursday. It's something just to think about. And if you'd like to reach out to me it’s podcast@Hallettphilanthropy.com. I should have mentioned at the top. Today's episode came from a listener, Sam, down in Texas, asked about this because Sam has an informal leader and want to know how to deal with it.
Send me an email. I love the subject because what it does gives me an opportunity to do some digging, some research, some educational research to get you the information that you need in these podcasts. My 21st century classroom nonprofits are needed. The work you do is needed. It serves a critical mission for not only the organization for what you serve, but for the community in which you live and for the people who live in.
Some people make things happen. Some people watch things happen. Then there are those who wondered what happened. You're someone who make something happen in your organization. Hopefully somebody is someone or something that's making things happen for the people, the places and things in our community that are wondering what happened. That gap filler between free enterprise and government, what a great way to spend a life and a career making a difference in helping other people.
I hope you get a sense of that each and every day, and if you don't pull back, shut the door, put on headphones, what have you got to do and reflect upon the value you deliver every day to your nonprofit into the world of philanthropy. I'll look forward to seeing you the next time right back here on the next edition of Around with Randall.
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