The Emotional Cost of Interim Work

What nobody tells you about the work... and how I sustain myself in it

Photo by Jonny Clow

My first interim role was supposed to be a career side quest. A temporary pause. Something a little slower and a little easier than the relentless pace of long term leadership. I imagined myself as a helpful bridge, stepping in for a few months to keep the lights on, and stepping back out with minimal drama.

Boy, I was so naive.

Nine interim roles later, I’m still here, having fallen in love with leading in the liminal: that strange, potent space between what was and what’s coming. But I’ve also learned some hard lessons along the way, in ways I could have never expected. The hardest one? Interim work will require something very specific and difficult from you: To go deep, build real trust, put the full weight of yourself and your expertise into a mission… and then leave before you see what grows.

It’s easy to find and read up on the skills needed to be successful when leading through turbulence and transition: strategic thinking, financial acumen, decisiveness, communication, adaptability, etc.. But rarely do I see anyone talking about what it would really require of you professionally, personally, emotionally.

So I want to name it, and share what’s helped me keep saying yes, again and again.

What Makes This Work Hard

📍You rarely see the impact of your work.

As hinted, many leaders spend years, even decades, at a single organization, stewarding initiatives from conception to maturity, building lifelong friendships, and witnessing the full arc of their impact.

An interim leader’s experience is very different. We arrive, often thrust into making major decisions that will shape the organization for years, and leave before seeing most of them fully play out. I've helped organizations completely overhaul their mission and strategic plan, launch new programs, initiate partnerships and funding relationships… I mean, major, foundational work.

But I didn’t get to carry it all the way through. I left and had to watch from afar to see if the calls I made the right calls. The responsibility is heavy, and sometimes I'm only left with hope that the work will hold.

📍Relationships are intense, then over.

Any time you join a team, you build real relationships. You learn people’s anxieties, celebrate their wins, sit with them through hard conversations and sometimes tears. You become someone they trust. And these relationships can be more intense than typical work relationships, as you’re often going through hard things together, under a lot of pressure, in compressed time.

I once joined an organization where the entire C-team had collapsed. I spent months recruiting and integrating a whole new leadership team, setting up shared values, coaching them through their first big decisions, celebrating when things clicked. We went through the intensity of culture redesign and enterprise-wide systems change together… and we became a real team.

But then the assignment ended, and I had to hand over the work and step back. Unlike most professional relationships though, you don’t get to let this evolve into something long-term. There’s no shift from boss to mentor to ex-colleague I grab coffee with. You have to cut cleanly and create space for the next leader… only to just jump in and do it all over again with a new team.

📍High Stakes, Little Grace.

A typical new leader gets 90 days to learn before they’re expected to act…. Interim leaders sometimes get half that. Heck, sometimes day 1 arrives with a crisis that needs solving immediately.

I once walked into a an organization facing a multi-layered crisis: a double executive transition, a call-out that threatened donor relationships, financial gaps that required immediate audit, and governance problems that had festered for years. There was no orientation period, no grace for learning the culture first. Day one was triage.

And I've found that as an interim, the margin for error is thinner than usual. People are less resilient during transitions… tired and anxious. Trust is fragile and small mistakes can more easily amplify into crisis. You need to make people feel heard, while also making hard calls.

Hardest of all though is that the learning and the doing has to happen simultaneously. You sometimes have to make a decision today without all the information you want or need… and just stay humble and flexible in the execution.

📍Sometimes you can’t move the needle.

Not every problem can be solved in an interim window (…though, id argue, not every problem should). Some challenges require longer timelines than the time you have or more resources or, simply, a long term leader’s authority and longevity to see through.

In worse situations, sometimes the solution will be crystal clear to you… you can see exactly what needs to happen and the path forward is obvious… but the board or staff aren’t ready to move. They need more time, more trust, or a different messenger (or something…!)

So, in these cases, you do what you can, document what you’ve learned, name what still needs attention, and hand the rest to the next person, hoping they’ll have better luck. It's frustrating and unfulfilling.

📍The isolation is real.

Long-tenured leaders get to build networks counterparts at similar organizations over years, whereas interim leaders tend to move between missions. And the people who truly understand this work are few, and we’re often mid-assignment and unavailable to one another.

And gosh, the problems I confront…. every assignment is similar but different, and I long for peer guidance. But it’s so hard. How do you bring someone up to speed about all the complexities in an organization, its people, its problems, its politics... in an hour, with time left over for actual advice? And when the environment is shifting rapidly, week to week sometimes, the context you shared last month is already outdated. It gets lonely fast. You start to realize that you need to get way better at seeking advice in fragments, at trusting your own judgment more, at making peace with the fact that no one else will ever fully understand the situation you’re in.

📍No proper goodbye.

When a permanent leader leaves after years of service, there’s usually a farewell… a party, a toast, moments of collective gratitude. Interim leaders don’t often get that. The new person starts, the organization’s energy shifts toward them, and you fade out. This is appropriate; it’s their moment, not yours. But it means you often leave without ceremony, without much acknowledgment of what the work took.

I once spent a year with an organization, leading through a painful downsize, pivoting programs, and championing some serious culture change. When the new executive was hired, I got ready for transition. In many of my assignments, I’ve been lucky to get a few weeks of overlap with a new executive… you know, time to transition knowledge and relationships, to get closure. But this one? Four days. All virtual. When Friday came, I signed out of my email, and just like that, I was done. The organization just moved on, quickly, with problems still left to solve and work still unfinished.

Though this doesn’t happen often, you need to be ready to pack up quietly and move on.

📍Change is constant and exhausting.

New organizations, new teams, new cultures, new problems… again, and again and again. It is both exciting and draining. It is both exciting and draining.

Just as you’re hitting your stride, building real momentum… it’s time to leave and start over. Most of my assignments last about a year, which means every twelve months I'm starting from scratch on relationships, credibility, and context. The weight of that change is cumulative, even when each individual assignment goes well.

My 7 Tips for Sustaining Yourself in This Work

So, what's helped me keep saying yes? Here's what I've learned. Not all of these might be right for you, but maybe they'll give you some inspiration for finding the right rituals and guardrails to make the work sustainable.

• 1️⃣Develop a toolkit for leading under constraint.
  Interim leadership requires different skills than permanent leadership. Here are some of the core practices I’ve learned to rely on:

  • Use the 80/20 principle. 80% of your results will come from 20% of your efforts. Identify what truly matters and concentrate there

  • Use frameworks to cut through complexity. Tools like the pyramid principle and MECE can really help you make sense of massive quantities of data quickly and structure your thinking under pressure.

  • Understand one-way and two-way door decisions.. You need to be an expert at figuring out what decisions you should make vs the long term leader, and why.

  • Define decision-making authority up front. Make sure everyone knows who can decide what, and how quickly.

  • Timebox decisions. Give yourself or your team a clear deadline to decide, then move. This prevents analysis paralysis.

  • Treat early decisions as drafts. Master provisional decision-making… make the best call you can now, stay open to adjusting as you learn.

  • Admit mistakes quickly and publicly. This builds trust faster than pretending you had it right all along.

  • Set clear expectations. Be honest about what you can and can’t promise in your window.

  These skills, and more, are learnable. You can check out more of my some of my specific advice for leading under pressure here or subscribe and follow along as I share my toolkit over the next few months.
  

• 2️⃣Find a trusted partner inside the organization.
  External peer support is hard to access when you're deep in the complexities of a specific organization. You need to find a trusted staff member or board member who can really go side by side with you… someone who understands the nuances without needing constant context and who can be your sounding board in real time. This internal partnership can help bridge the isolation gap and give you someone to think through decisions with when outside advisors can't fully grasp the situation
  

• 3️⃣Protect the new leader by protecting your boundaries.
  This might be a hard take, but when I leave an organization, I maintain low or no contact with former staff for at least six to twelve months. This gives the new leader room to build their own relationships and prevents the team from splitting their trust. When a former colleague reaches out for advice, the kindest thing I can do is redirect them to their new leader. The boundary can feel severe, but it serves everyone. Eventually the connection can be reforged, but I found honoring that space is best for everyone.
  

• 4️⃣Create rituals for closure.
  Find your own way to mark endings. For me, I take a picture somewhere on site and frame it in my home office. I write goodbye notes and give small gifts to staff and board members and donors. I schedule final coaching sessions and exit coffees. I take a weekend away with my husband. And I write a reflection right away, then revisit it a few months later once I’ve got some distance. You need to find a way to make peace and prepare for the next assignment.
  

• 5️⃣Build real community outside your assignments.
  The only way to do this work well is in community with others doing the work. Seek out other interim leaders. Stay connected through your state np association or informal groups. For me, this looks like a group chat with peers in similar roles, attending conferences, and staying active in online spaces. I also serve on a board and have volunteer commitments, which keep me connected to the sector in a different way, grounded in relationships that extend beyond any single assignment.
  

• 6️⃣Anchor your identity outside the role.
  When your position is always temporary, it’s easy to lose track of who you are professionally. Identify what stays constant across assignments: your values, your craft, your approach to leadership. Write about it. Talk about it. Let your sense of self travel with you rather than depending on any single organization.
  

• 7️⃣Rest between assignments when you can.
  If you have the option and flexibility, building in time between roles to decompress can make all the difference. Even a few weeks can help you arrive at the next organization with a fuller tank. (Truthfully, I’m not great at taking my own advice on this front, but when I have been able to honor it, I feel the difference.)
  

And… 8️⃣Recognize that the weight you’re feeling is not weakness.

The exhaustion after an intense assignment, the sadness of leaving a team you’ve come to care about… these are not signs that you’re unsuited for the work. They’re the natural cost of doing it well. Caring about places you cannot stay is hard.

Honor it, feel it, and give yourself real time to recover before diving back in.

Why I Do It Anyway

As I said at the start, I never expected this to be my career path. I came into interim leadership by accident and fell in love with the dynamic nature of it. I get to see organizations at inflection points, when they’re most alive to change. I’ve built diagnostic intuition that only comes from variety. I’ve learned to travel light, emotionally and operationally, and there’s freedom in that.

And I get to help people—really help them--navigate those moments. To walk alongside someone as they find their courage, rebuild their confidence, or finally feel heard. The organizational work matters, but it's the human moments that stay with me.

So, if you’re considering this work, or already doing it, know that it is both rewarding and costly. To repeat: The weight you’ll feel isn’t weakness. It’s the natural cost of caring about places you cannot stay.

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❓Are you an interim leader? What do you do to make the work sustainable?

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