A CEO leaves abruptly for personal reasons. The board pulls out its succession plan and discovers the designated heir has the wrong skills for what the company now needs. That is the scene Korn Ferry opens with, and it describes a board doing something smarter than panicking: it hires an experienced interim to run the business and take on urgent priorities while the permanent search runs its course.
We think boards should stop treating that move as an admission of defeat. The interim CEO is a legitimate strategic tool, and the research on it draws a sharp distinction that most boards ignore: interims hired for a defined job, with the authority to do it, perform, and interims hired to keep a chair warm do not. The second-best results boards fear from temporary leaders are largely the results of treating them as second-best.
The occasion is a September 2026 Korn Ferry piece, "CEO, for Now", which reports that S&P 1500 companies named 168 new CEOs in 2025, the most since 2010, and cites the National Association of Corporate Directors finding that 30% of public-company directors have no successor identified who could take over tomorrow. Korn Ferry sells interim executives, so its enthusiasm deserves a discount. Its underlying point survives the discount.
The evidence punishes placeholders, not interims
The case against interim CEOs usually rests on the observation that firms led by them underperform. That finding is real, but it is concentrated in one kind of interim. A study published by Springer in the Journal of Management & Governance found that the underperformance "occurs only following voluntary turnover interim appointments," which make up roughly a quarter of interim appointments. When boards hired interims after a forced departure, the authors observed no poor performance.
Forced departures are also where interims most often show up. In a sample of 422 interim CEO successions at US listed firms, a study on ScienceDirect found that only 6.6% followed a sudden departure due to death or medical issues, while nearly half (46.2%) followed a forced turnover. So close to half of interims arrive after a board has decided the incumbent has to go, which is exactly when a company needs someone with a mandate to change course.
Put the two studies side by side and the outcome tracks the assignment. When a CEO walks out voluntarily and the board names a caretaker to hold things steady, the company drifts. When a board removes a CEO and installs someone to fix what went wrong, the interim period carries no such penalty. What predicts performance is the job the board hands the interim, whatever the business card says.
Hire for the job in front of the company
Mike Distefano, who runs Korn Ferry's professional search and interim businesses, puts the strategic case well: "The executive who's great at hypergrowth may not be the one you want for an IPO or a bankruptcy." The traditional assumption that one leadership team should carry a company through every season was always more convenient than true. A turnaround, a sale process and a post-scandal cleanup each reward a different temperament, and a board that can hire precisely for an eighteen-month problem has an advantage over one that must find a single person for the next decade.
The supply side helps. Korn Ferry notes that roughly 4.1 million Americans turn 65 in each of this year and next, and Monte Weirman of KF Interim argues that many retiring executives deliberately choose interim work so they can apply decades of experience to a defined challenge and then leave. A seasoned operator with no ambition to entrench, and no career to protect, can make unpopular calls that a permanent CEO angling for a long tenure might defer.
None of that advantage materialises unless the board writes the mandate. A fit-for-purpose interim appointment should settle four things on day one:
- The specific problem the interim is there to solve, stated in terms the board can judge at the end.
- The strategic decisions the interim is empowered to make without waiting for the permanent hire.
- Whether the interim is a candidate for the permanent role, said plainly to the interim and to the senior team.
- The criteria the board will use to choose the eventual successor, written before anyone gets attached to a name.
The objection has the facts largely right and the conclusion wrong. A board that needs an interim has often failed at succession, and Korn Ferry itself concedes that interims are no substitute for planning. But with 30% of directors admitting they have no ready successor, the failure has already happened at a large share of companies. The live choice is between rushing a permanent hire under pressure and buying time with someone capable, and rushing is how boards end up firing a CEO a second time.
The weak-authority finding is the strongest part of the case, and it cuts against placeholders specifically. The 2026 Strategic Management Journal paper by Langan notes in its review of prior work that interims "do not wield much authority to make strategic decisions." Boards choose that arrangement. Staff discount a leader they expect to vanish soon because the board told them, by its silence, to expect exactly that.
Staff discount a leader they expect to vanish soon because the board told them, by its silence, to expect exactly that.
The bigger risk arrives with the successor
The same Strategic Management Journal study, using a matched sample of S&P 1500 CEOs from 2002 to 2017, found that a successor to an interim CEO is less likely than a successor to a permanent CEO to depart early because of poor performance. The authors attribute this mainly to directors' worry about inflicting further damage on a company that has already been through one disruption. Having endured an interim period, boards flinch from admitting the permanent hire is not working.
That is a governance failure, and a preventable one. Directors who set the successor's performance criteria before the interim period ends, and commit to them, remove the temptation to tolerate a weak hire for the sake of stability, since fatigue is a poor reason to keep a CEO.
The audition model offers the cleanest version of the strategic case. In the ScienceDirect sample, a third of interims (33.2%) were promoted to the permanent job, and those promotions produced superior long-run performance, which the authors read as better CEO-firm matches. Interims were more likely to be promoted when the board could credit strong interim results to their skill rather than luck. Distefano calls this "business dating," and the label fits: a board that watches a candidate run the actual company learns more than any interview loop can tell it.
Boards that still see the interim as a confession of failure will go on appointing caretakers with no authority, then point to the resulting underperformance as proof they were right. The research describes a tool that works when used deliberately and punishes boards that use it half-heartedly. An interim with a mandate is a hire. An interim without one is a vacancy with a salary.
