Only 21 percent of companies worldwide have a formal, documented CEO succession plan in place. That figure has held steady across surveys of companies of every size for several years, showing little sign of change. Most leadership teams quietly operate on the assumption that the question of “who will run the company when the current boss leaves” doesn’t apply to them – until it does.
CEOs step down for health, personal, and career reasons, often without much warning. And the company suddenly finds itself in a situation nobody had a plan for.
Succession Planning: Management’s Blind Spot
Succession planning typically only gets addressed once it’s too late – after a sudden resignation, a health scare, or a departure to a competitor. Companies with a clearly defined process for identifying and developing successors can fill a key position within weeks. Without such a process, the search for a new CEO commonly stretches to six months or a year – because it’s a decision with a high cost of error, where the wrong choice can damage a company for years to come.
What Happens When the Boss Leaves Overnight
In practice, it plays out similarly across industries. The CEO announces their departure, often for personal reasons, and the company has no successor lined up. Instead of one clear decision-making center, the agenda is temporarily split among several members of leadership – each taking on their own slice of the business. On paper, a solution that costs nothing extra.
Except divided leadership without one person carrying full responsibility for the company has its own price. Decisions that used to get made in a day suddenly need coordinating among several people. Investors, key suppliers, and the internal team all sense the company is temporarily “on hold” – at precisely the moment it needs to be running at full capacity: in the middle of a successor search, partner negotiations, and day-to-day operations.
Executive search research shows that finding a new CEO typically takes seven to twelve months – from first contact to signed contract. For that entire period, the company routinely operates without clearly defined leadership, which raises the risk that decisions on investment, hiring, and strategy slow down precisely when the company should be moving fast.
How to Bridge the Gap Without Losing Momentum
Interim management solves exactly this gap. An experienced interim CEO doesn’t step into the role on a trial basis or part-time – for the duration of the search for a permanent successor, they carry full responsibility for running the company, bringing experience from similar situations they don’t need months to catch up on. This buys the company time to find the genuinely right candidate for the permanent role, without having to decide under pressure or provisionally split responsibility among people who were never hired for it.
The same logic applies a level down. When a key position opens up – say, an interim HR manager – and the company has no internal replacement ready to step in immediately, an experienced interim specialist can take over responsibility practically from the day the new colleague starts, maintaining continuity where a gap in leadership would otherwise open up.
Succession isn’t a question worth addressing only once a crisis hits. But even companies that underestimated it have a way to bridge the period without permanent leadership, without having to sacrifice decision-making speed or the quality of their eventual choice. Companies that ask themselves this question in advance are buying the most valuable thing there is in crisis decision-making: time.
Need help on your team? We’re here for you – whether it’s short-term cover or resolving complex situations. Big Interim is your partner for interim management.
