I encountered that at Spacewell during a period when the organisation was waiting for a new CMO to arrive. The business could not simply suspend the quarter until permanent leadership was in place, and Q4 still carried the same commercial expectations it had before the leadership gap emerged. Marketing therefore needed enough direction to keep supporting the business without pretending that an interim period was the right moment to redesign everything from first principles. The immediate challenge was to understand what already existed, which priorities were genuinely commercial, and where lack of ownership was beginning to put the quarter at risk.
Leadership gaps often expose how much of a company's operating model lives inside individuals rather than inside the organisation itself. A senior leader may carry the logic connecting strategy, budget, pipeline, campaigns, product priorities and executive expectations without that logic ever being made fully explicit. As long as the leader remains in place, the organisation can function because questions are resolved through experience and accumulated context. Once that person leaves, teams discover that they inherited the activities but not necessarily the reasoning that held them together.
That creates an important distinction between a plan and a collection of ongoing work. Campaigns may already be scheduled, agencies may have briefs, budgets may have been allocated and dashboards may continue producing numbers. None of that guarantees that people understand which work matters most when circumstances change or resources become constrained. A plan is useful because it provides a basis for choosing between competing demands, not because it records everything the organisation once intended to do.
During a transition, those choices become harder because people are understandably reluctant to make decisions that might belong to the incoming leader. Teams keep existing initiatives running, postpone decisions that feel too strategic and avoid commitments that could later be reversed. That caution can look responsible from inside each function, but collectively it creates commercial drift. The business continues moving while fewer people are willing to decide where it should move next.
Pipeline makes that drift visible quite quickly. Sales does not stop needing demand because Marketing is between leaders, and opportunities already in the funnel still need support as they move towards quarter-end. If Marketing responds by protecting every previously agreed activity equally, resources can remain tied to programmes whose commercial relevance has changed while urgent opportunities receive insufficient attention. Continuity therefore requires more judgement than simply keeping the calendar intact.
The temptation in an interim situation is to compensate by producing a new strategy. That can be attractive because uncertainty creates a natural desire for a clean answer, particularly when the organisation is asking who is in charge and what happens next. Yet a temporary leader rarely has enough context, mandate or time to replace the strategic direction responsibly. The more valuable contribution is often to make the current commercial reality visible, stabilise the priorities that cannot wait and leave the incoming leader with a business that is easier to understand rather than one that has been reorganised around another temporary interpretation.
That approach requires separating decisions that are genuinely urgent from decisions that merely feel uncomfortable to leave unresolved. A quarter may need clear campaign priorities, spending choices, pipeline support and ownership of specific deliverables. A broader repositioning, organisational redesign or fundamental change in go-to-market may be better handled once permanent leadership is present and has had the opportunity to build its own understanding. Commercial continuity depends on knowing which decisions belong to the current operating horizon and which should remain open.
Clarity about the current horizon also changes how teams experience the transition. In the absence of leadership, people often fill gaps independently, which can lead to Marketing, Sales and Product making perfectly reasonable decisions from different starting assumptions. One team protects existing commitments, another concentrates on immediate revenue, while a third starts preparing for a future direction it believes will soon become important. Without a shared view of what the business is trying to protect during the transition, local judgement gradually produces divergent priorities.
A temporary operating rhythm can provide enough structure to prevent that divergence without creating unnecessary bureaucracy. Regular visibility into pipeline, campaign activity, spending, upcoming decisions and unresolved dependencies gives the organisation a common picture of what needs attention. The value lies less in the meeting itself than in making explicit where ownership has become unclear. Once those gaps are visible, leadership can assign temporary responsibility instead of allowing important decisions to sit between functions.
Ownership deserves particular attention because organisations often assume that responsibility transfers automatically when someone leaves. In reality, strategic ownership, budget authority, people leadership and day-to-day decision-making can move to different individuals, sometimes without anyone explicitly defining the boundaries. The resulting ambiguity creates delays because people repeatedly seek approval from colleagues who are themselves uncertain about their mandate. Commercial momentum slows not because people lack willingness, but because the organisation has not decided who is entitled to decide.
Spacewell reinforced for me that preserving momentum during a leadership transition is not the same as maintaining activity. Some work may need to stop because it no longer contributes enough to the commercial priorities that still matter. Other work may need additional support because the risk of losing momentum is greater than previously understood. Interim leadership creates value when it can make those choices from the evidence available, rather than treating continuity as an obligation to preserve everything.
There is also a strong temptation to judge a transition by how smoothly it appears from the outside. Few escalations, unchanged campaign schedules and stable reporting can create reassurance that the organisation is coping well. The more useful test is whether important commercial decisions are still being made at the speed required by the business. A quiet organisation can be drifting just as easily as a visibly disrupted one if difficult choices are being deferred until the new leader arrives.
Preparing for that arrival should therefore be part of the interim mandate. A new executive is much more useful when the first weeks are spent making informed choices rather than reconstructing months of fragmented context. That requires a clear account of current priorities, pipeline health, active commitments, unresolved issues, team capacity and decisions that have deliberately been left open. Good continuity gives the incoming leader room to lead instead of forcing them to begin as an archaeologist.
This becomes especially important in businesses already dealing with broader change. A leadership transition may coincide with new ownership, restructuring, product changes or pressure on growth, which means the organisation is already carrying more uncertainty than usual. Every unresolved commercial question then competes for the attention of the incoming leader. The more disciplined the interim period, the easier it becomes to distinguish structural issues from temporary noise.
Senior teams can reduce this risk long before a leadership gap appears by making more of the commercial logic explicit. Priorities should be understandable beyond the person who created them, decision rights should be visible enough to survive temporary absence, and the relationship between activity and commercial objectives should not depend entirely on personal memory. Those disciplines make the organisation stronger even when no transition is planned because they reduce dependence on individuals as the only source of coherence.
The central challenge is therefore not how to replace a missing leader temporarily. It is how to keep the commercial system capable of making sensible decisions while leadership responsibility is in motion. Targets do not wait for organisational certainty, and customers rarely care whether an internal role is currently vacant. The business still needs to decide what matters, what can wait and who owns the choices that cannot be postponed.
A leadership gap becomes commercially dangerous when the organisation keeps executing without enough shared direction to know whether that execution still adds up. The objective during a transition should not be to imitate permanent leadership or preserve every existing initiative. It should be to keep the business commercially coherent long enough for permanent leadership to take over with momentum still intact.
