The data says the opposite.
Nicolas T. Deuschel, Robert Langan, and Christoph Mât have a sharp piece in the May to June 2026 Harvard Business Review showing that interim appointments are now nearly one in three CEO successions, up from one in five a decade ago. Companies that go that route lose on average $300 million more over three years than peers who appoint permanent successors. Return on assets typically drops two to three percentage points, comparable to the hit most companies took in the first year of COVID-19. The authors lay out four interim archetypes (fixer, steward, stabilizer, caretaker), four key questions boards should ask once the seat is empty, and a clear case for treating interim succession as a discipline rather than a stopgap. Worth your time if you sit on a board or work near one.
Their core insight lands. The interim period is not a pause. It is a leadership vacuum, and vacuums cost real money in stalled decisions, executive flight, analyst downgrades, and earnings manipulation by interims angling for the permanent role.
I want to add one thing.
The HBR piece treats the interim appointment as the decision point. Pick the right archetype, set the mandate, manage the tryout question, and the damage can be limited. That framing concedes too much. The real decision point is the board meeting eighteen months earlier, when the question of CEO readiness should have been on the agenda and was not. By the time the seat is empty, the board has already made the choice that produces the destruction the authors document.
My recent research on Canadian federal organizations supports this reading. Across four cycles of the Public Service Employee Survey covering 200,000 respondents, board-governed organizations and minister-direct departments rated senior leadership identically before the pandemic. After the COVID stress event, a four-point gap opened and held. Board-governed organizations held leadership ratings about one point on average. Minister-direct departments lost nearly five. The buffer good governance produces was invisible in calm conditions and decisive under pressure.
The practitioner move is to put a different set of questions in front of the HBR four:
- Can you name three internal candidates ready to step in within ninety days?
- Does your director-tenure structure stagger departures so no more than one-third of the board turns over in any twelve-month window?
- Does every director know at least three executives below the CEO well enough to describe their strengths and gaps without prompting?
- Have you rehearsed the transition the way crisis teams rehearse tabletop drills?
The best interim CEO decision is the one you never have to make. What is your board doing to build interim readiness this quarter?
HBR article: Should You Appoint an Interim CEO? (May to June 2026)
Related research: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6730459