How to Make the Most of an Interim Leadership Role  🔗 **Source:** [How to Make the Most of an Interim Leadership Role](https://share.snipd.com/episode/20861abe-339b-4e6a-acab-0dd217cd688f) ## Highlights - **Tennis Lesson That Proved Foundations Matter** - Rachel Cooke describes being forced to do tennis footwork drills before hitting the ball. - After weeks of foundation work she finally hit and performed better than expected, illustrating slow prep yields outsized performance. Transcript: Rachel Cooke So when I was a kid, like maybe eight or nine, my parents lovingly shoved me into tennis lessons. I can't say I was excited, but I did get my own racket and that seemed cool. I showed up on day one and the instructor had me leave my racket on the side of the court. By the lesson's end, I still hadn't picked it up. In fact, it wasn't until maybe my fourth lesson that I even got to put my hands on it. I was not a patient child and this was just really annoying. Up to that point, I had been doing footwork drills, I'd been bouncing balls, stretching, basically everything but what I thought of as tennis. But then in week four, when I finally started hitting the ball, I was better than expected. Like not awesome, but not too shabby. The coach had forced just a little bit of foundation into me and it had paid off. ([Time 0:01:34](https://share.snipd.com/snip/52a8c1be-3770-47a1-8aa6-c6209b71fa46)) - **Treat Interim Roles As Lily Pad Hops** - Short interim roles are best treated as targeted hops toward a larger vision rather than full leaps to a final destination. - Name the larger shore but scope one or two achievable lily pads you can complete and measure before your stint ends. Transcript: Rachel Cooke First, choose your lily pad. You may have heard my lily pad bit before. I tell my clients, imagine you're a frog in the middle of a pond. I want you to look to a point on the shoreline where you'd like to arrive. Let's call that your goal or your vision. What we have the tendency to do is look to that point and then endeavor to take a giant single flying leap towards it. We usually miss. We fall in the water, we end up soggy and wet with no change of clothes. And what I prefer instead is the lily pad approach. Ask not how do I soar towards that shore point, but rather what is the series of smaller lily pads I can safely hop to? This approach makes our journey more safe and dry. In the context of an interim role, we may not realistically make it all the way to the shore. If our role is short term, we should be clear on that point on the shore, but really our focus should be on successfully hopping to just one or two pads. In an interim assignment, you're so much better off being able to show that you've made meaningful, intentional progress that left you and your team closer to a destination than you Are trying to show that you tried really, really hard to land on that shore, maybe a little wet. This may feel unsatisfying for the ambitious among us, but leaders who can name a vision and then scope a piece of it and actually achieve the piece they've scoped, they're the ones that Get picked for bigger things. ([Time 0:04:07](https://share.snipd.com/snip/653f12df-32c5-4bd8-aa05-7d65d6999b3c)) - **Interim Roles As Low Risk Practice Grounds** - Interim roles let you practice leadership without risking your whole career, offering low-stakes development. - Leaders who successfully scope and deliver small wins get chosen for bigger opportunities. Transcript: Rachel Cooke This may feel unsatisfying for the ambitious among us, but leaders who can name a vision and then scope a piece of it and actually achieve the piece they've scoped, they're the ones that Get picked for bigger things. In an interim role, you get to practice without betting your whole career on the outcome. ([Time 0:05:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b2872f5d-3de7-4454-b546-2b2e0fcbcadf)) - **Use Your Humans To Deliver Fast** - Use your humans: ask the people who know the work for insights and delegate expertise you can't gain in the short term. - Change meeting formats, information flows, or debate structures to unlock efficiency and better results quickly. Transcript: Rachel Cooke Next, use your resources wisely. And by that, I mean mostly your humans. I don't mean that in the capital H, capital R human resources sense. I mean the people around you who actually know the work, who live inside this team or project, who have expertise that you don't, and that realistically, you're not likely to develop In the time that you've got. When you're tapped to deliver in an interim way, you're not typically expected to be the expert, but to find and harness and activate the expertise. So ask the knowers and the doers, get their insights on the content, but also on how things can be done more efficiently or effectively. Don't be afraid to change up how meetings are run or how info is shared or how debate happens, or even if it happens at all. ([Time 0:07:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0fe42726-3a4a-41bc-b333-7ac5f585741e)) - **Lead With Impact Not Just Authority** - Focus on impact over authority by using formal power to remove blockers but using influence to get people to bring their best ideas. - Build trust by crediting wins, soliciting input, and listening to create voluntary contribution. Transcript: Rachel Cooke You step into an interim role and voila, you've got authority you didn't have yesterday. And it's awesome when you use it well, but it backfires when you use it wrong. Formal authority grants you the magical power to call meetings and make decisions and redirect resources. It works well for moving blockers and reaching across silos and sometimes making the call when there's no consensus. Use it well for those things, but also be clear on what it doesn't do well, like compelling people to speak up their scariest ideas or ask their dumb questions, to collaborate well with Peers and imagine creative new ways to get things done. Great work happens when people choose to bring it. And to unlock that, you've got to lean away from authority and into building trust. When you've asked them what they actually think, when you've credited their wins publicly, when you've made it clear that you're really listening. The foundational leadership skill you can build in an interim role is the dial, knowing when to turn it up and when to turn it down, when to lean on influence and collaboration. The leaders who get pulled into bigger and better roles can move that dial almost without thinking. They use authority to clear paths and they use influence to fill them. ([Time 0:08:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ea245d63-1ef5-4613-8888-28380284a175)) - **Decide Early How This Role Fits Your Story** - Write the chapter you want by deciding early what piece of your story this role should become and shape the assignment to match that. - Name whether it's mentoring someone, shipping a product, advising a senior leader, or doing research so it's not a blur later. Transcript: Rachel Cooke I love that famous Steve Jobs commencement speech from 2005 when he talks about how we can only write our stories in hindsight. I really do think it's one of the truest things I've heard. Ambitious people, broadly speaking, tend to get so caught up in wondering, what's the next right move for me? Will this be the thing that propels me forward? When the real answer is you get to decide in hindsight. Don't wonder if this is the right opportunity. Instead, grab the opportunity and make it right. What's the piece of your story you feel like you're missing? Is it one of how you mentored a colleague to success or facilitated the building of a product that made a customer's life better? Or is it about the research you turned into action or the senior leader you successfully advised? Shape this opportunity so it becomes that piece of your story. Weave it into your broader timeline. Name it for yourself early. Don't wait until the role is ending to figure out what you wanted from it because that's how people end up looking back on these stints as a blur. ([Time 0:09:34](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a169f34b-d22c-4deb-9880-7d31721f75ee))