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I wouldn’t say it’s just one principle—maybe more of a set—but if I had to choose, I’d frame it around integrity as a guiding concept. Leadership requires you to be a bit of a chameleon. You have to adapt to different situations and people.
That doesn’t mean changing who you are, but rather staying true to yourself while delivering that authenticity in a way that resonates with those around you. It’s about understanding what people need from you and responding accordingly.
In interim roles, trust is absolutely paramount. You need trust to do the job effectively, but in most roles, trust develops over time. In interim leadership, you don’t have that luxury—you have to hit the ground running. That’s where integrity plays a big role. Having a clear internal compass, a ‘North Star,’ helps me ensure I can be what someone needs in the moment while staying true to my values.
The real win comes when you’ve made yourself approachable, encouraged open conversations, and people respond by reaching out of their own volition—that’s when the initial barriers of trust start to fade.
I think product and technology work best with a collaborative approach—whether that’s under one leadership or through strong leaders who work seamlessly together. There’s a lot of talk about product and tech needing to be in conflict to achieve the best outcomes, but I completely disagree. Just as I don’t subscribe to the “disagree and commit” mantra, I’ve rarely seen it foster genuine engagement. To me, it’s an empty phrase often used when collaboration isn’t happening, as a way to push things through instead of addressing the real issue.
Unified leadership across product and tech helps remove unnecessary politics. Of course, if politics is the agenda, that’s a different challenge! But ultimately, these functions need to work in unison—they’re so intertwined in the digital world that it’s hard to separate them. Leadership in this space is about bringing voices together, debating scenarios, and aligning on a common vision.
On the practical side, there are advantages to establishing integrated accountability structures, revenue streams, cost management and setting a singular strategy—one that better supports decisions on both product and tech investments and refactoring. This also fosters more coherent communication outwards to the rest of the organisation. Bringing these functions together has clear benefits—they don’t always have to be fully merged to work well, but there’s a real advantage in treating them as a single, integrated entity.
Any company can benefit from an interim leader, as a fresh perspective is always valuable. But for it to work, the company must be open to it. When they embrace it, making impact can be relatively easy; when they don’t, navigating internal resistance can be a challenge.
One of the first things an interim leader needs to assess is the political landscape. You’re being brought in for a reason, and that often comes with political ramifications. Identifying and addressing these early on is critical to removing them as obstacles.
As for critical moments, many companies try to do too much at once or fail to stay ahead of the curve. They keep moving forward but without really addressing where they stand in the market, their competitive edge, or how to create new revenue streams. The timing for interim support varies depending on the company’s situation.
Is it always a mistake not to bring in an interim leader? Not necessarily—problems can sometimes be solved from within. But that fresh perspective, as said, can be incredibly valuable. The right interim leader can introduce different business models, challenge internal structures, or apply insights from adjacent markets. That kind of cross-pollination is what makes interim leadership so powerful.
Often, by the time a company even considers bringing in an interim leader, things have already started to spiral. Accountability may have eroded, control has slipped, and that’s when the real crisis hits. Ultimately, any company at any stage can benefit from an interim leader—it all depends on what problem they’re trying to solve.
Sometimes, small, simple changes can have the biggest impact. For example, introducing RPA can be a game-changer for process efficiency. Now, with AI, it’s even more powerful. But many companies haven’t even heard of it. They’re looking for tech solutions, asking their teams to build something from scratch, when in reality, there are existing tools that could save them time and energy.
When it comes to bigger efforts, the key inflection point is always about unpacking the core problem. That might mean reinforcing a company’s position, identifying a new customer segment, shifting strategy towards that segment, setting a platform vision, or looking at new revenue streams. As an interim, you apply a range of solutions depending on the situation.
For me, the biggest impact comes from empowering the team. It’s about understanding the people already in place and ensuring they feel enabled to continue driving success. As an interim, you’re not there to carry the torch all the way to the end—you need the team to do that. Success isn’t just about whether revenue increased by a certain percentage; it’s about whether the people you supported were able to bring the vision to life.
That, to me, is the most rewarding outcome—hearing from teams I’ve worked with, seeing how they’ve progressed, and understanding what’s happened with their roles, their organisation, and their results. That’s the crux of interim leadership. It’s not about taking credit for delivering X amount of revenue; it’s about setting everything in motion so the team can achieve that success themselves.
As an interim, you’re always going to be met with some level of suspicion. Whenever you step into a new culture, there’s often a question of why you’re there. At the same time, you can’t walk in with your own expectations and assume the organisation will change to fit them. You have to acknowledge certain realities, even if they go against your personal beliefs or values—for example if it’s a top-down culture, against a bottom-up approach, or how agile they truly are. Sometimes, you have to put aside your own views on what a culture should be in order to drive meaningful transformation.
The best approach is to assess the situation objectively—understand the cultural dynamics and make them crystal clear to everyone involved. It’s about ensuring that the organisation understands the “rules of the game” when it comes to its own culture.
When dealing with cultural resistance, it’s rarely a company-wide issue. More often, it comes down to individual obstructions—sometimes at the C-level, but usually a specific person or group that is blocking progress. As an external leader, you have to address those challenges head-on, either by having difficult conversations with those individuals or with the leaders who oversee them. You’re not there to play politics or manoeuvre around people to keep everyone happy—you’re there to deliver results and remove barriers as quickly as possible.
One of the toughest challenges for new interim leaders is having direct, honest conversations with senior leadership. Sometimes, that means telling the CEO, You need to change. If you don’t, nothing else in this organisation will move forward. Having the confidence to deliver that message is crucial.
Beyond addressing blockers, transformation also requires tapping into people’s intrinsic motivations. Resistance is inevitable—especially when people feel attached to a project they’ve been working on for a long time, only for you to come in and point out its flaws. The key is to engage people in a way that excites them about the change. Is innovation what motivates them? Can you frame this initiative as an opportunity for innovation? Or is it about giving them more responsibility? Can you transition them into a role that provides more ownership?
Ultimately, the more people you bring on board, the greater the success of the transformation. Because transformation isn’t a one-time project—it’s an ongoing process. That means identifying and rallying change-makers early, while also understanding there will be more resistant individuals who will need some extra effort to get on board. Whether through personal motivation or strategic alignment, winning over those people is critical to ensuring the transformation is sustainable long after you’re gone.
The biggest misunderstanding is that transformation can work within a limited remit. It simply doesn’t work with restricted authority. If you’re bringing in an interim leader to drive transformation, they need the full mandate to deliver it. If certain areas are off-limits or the focus is too narrow, the process will struggle. You can’t transform just one department and expect the entire organisation to follow suit.
It’s about identifying key connectors across different parts of the business and finding ways to deliver value from an end-to-end perspective. That’s what moves an organisation forward. But there’s no fixed end state—the goal is to create an environment where transformation happens continually and organically. Ideally, you install a mindset and way of working where people naturally pause to reflect: Does this still make sense? Should we be doing this differently? If you reach a point where the majority are doing this, then you’ve truly succeeded.
Leaders can’t just pay lip service to transformation. The word itself has become almost meaningless because it covers so many different elements within an organisation. What matters is alignment. The CEO and leadership team must be fully behind it with a unified voice. If even one person isn’t on board, that resistance will start small but can grow into a major obstacle. And you never know how much influence that individual has until it starts undermining progress.
Another thing organisations need to improve is how they treat failures. We always celebrate the big wins, and many companies say they embrace failure, but few genuinely celebrate the lessons from things that didn’t work. That’s a crucial part of creating a culture that evolves on its own. If you don’t understand where you went wrong as well as where you got it right, how do you move forward? You can’t. If chasing the same customer over and over was a successful long-term strategy, companies would all be stuck with a single product forever. That’s not how growth works.
As an interim, the role is to lay the foundation and map out the best initial steps. Depending on the company’s landscape, that might be a clear, straightforward path—or it might be full of obstacles that need to be broken down before any real progress can happen. But for me, that’s the joy of interim work. Every role presents new challenges, new terrain, and new learning opportunities.
Anyone going through transformation needs to understand that an interim leader is someone who has already been through multiple cycles of change themselves. They’ve gone through their own process of renovation, which gives them a deep understanding of what it truly takes to lead transformation successfully.
I can’t say there was one key piece of advice anyone gave me—I didn’t plan this career path, I just fell into it. But I think the most important thing to understand about interim leadership is that it’s not about picking the best projects, working on what you enjoy, and having loads of downtime. There’s a reality check needed.
Being an interim means you’re always hustling—for yourself, for your clients, for your network, and for the teams you’re working with. You’re constantly thinking, How do I get this massive, clunky ship into port in a way that allows them to reload—with the right team, the right products, or the right strategy?
Don’t go into interim leadership thinking it’ll be an easy ride. Go into it because you want to challenge yourself, because you’re willing to throw yourself in at the deep end without always knowing the answers and figure your way out. It’s not just about navigating political complexities—it’s business complexity, customer complexity, all thrown in at once, and people will have very high expectations of you.
And you won’t always succeed. Some companies will just be too difficult—maybe because they’re too misaligned with your own values and beliefs. You have to recognise that, but also find ways to keep pushing your mandates forward, keep yourself motivated, and important to understand is you don’t have a permanent team around you – nobody to pick up the slack on your duvet day!
That said, interim leadership can be incredibly rewarding. You gain so much experience, range, and knowledge that you can apply anywhere. People don’t always realise how much cross-pollination is possible—I’ve taken a digital twin from the electric car battery industry and applied it to sports. You start to see how ideas transfer across industries, and that becomes part of who you are. If that excites you, then interim can be a great path.
