Interim Marketing Lead While You Hire the Permanent One

An interim lead is the right hire when the team is capable and the operating system left with the person who resigned. I take the seat for three to six months, run the team properly while your search runs, and hand over to the permanent hire with everything written down. I decline the permanent role in the contract, so nobody on the team spends the interim wondering whether the search is genuine. Week one: Thirty minutes with every person on the team, in Japanese or English, whichever they think in, asking three questions: what are you working on, what part of your week is wasted, and what decision are you waiting on. The third answer is where the backlog of unmade decisions is stored. Clearing it in the first fortnight buys more output than any restructure, and it is free. What I run: The cadence, the priorities and the people. One weekly planning meeting that ends with named owners rather than a discussion. Fortnightly one-to-ones that I do not cancel, which is unfortunately a differentiator. A written priority list the team can see, on which cut items stay visible with the reason attached, because the fastest way to exhaust a team is to let the same idea be re-proposed every month by someone who never heard why it died. I chair the agency and vendor calls myself and I am direct in them. The conversations nobody enjoys: If somebody is in the wrong seat, you hear it from me inside the first month, in writing, with what I observed rather than what I felt. I will sit in that conversation with the person, but I will not have it on your behalf while you are absent from the room. An interim who performs an owner's dismissals is a device for avoiding accountability, and I will not be one. In Japan the workable route is usually a documented improvement period and a change of role rather than the American path, and I will explain that difference to a foreign parent company that expects otherwise, before it makes a promise it cannot keep. Agencies and partners: Most teams I inherit carry two or three agencies with overlapping scopes that nobody has read since signature. I re-read the contracts, put one named owner against each relationship, and end at least one of them. Japanese agency arrangements frequently carry media rebate structures that do not appear on your invoice. I will find out whether yours does and tell you plainly, including when the answer is that the arrangement is still worth keeping. The handover: A written pack: the cadence and why it is shaped that way, the state of each person and what they need next, the vendor list with dates and exit terms, the decisions I made and the ones I would revisit. I brief the incoming lead in person, remain available for two calls in their first month, and then I am gone rather than hovering. Not included: I am not your recruiter. I will write the scorecard and sit on the panel, but sourcing and closing candidates belongs to a search firm. I do not own the growth number in this engagement; the number belongs to the team, and my job is to make sure it is being worked rather than admired. No hands-on media buying. No creative direction beyond approving work against an agreed brief. Not for you if: You want somebody to hold the seat quietly and change nothing until the permanent hire arrives. You want a manager who will not bring you personnel problems. Or the team's real issue is that the strategy is wrong, in which case appointing anyone to manage the existing plan competently costs you a quarter and answers nothing.