Interim Marketing Team Lead for a Defined Leadership Gap

An interim lead here starts on one condition, agreed in writing before the first day: the team is told why the seat is empty and how long the arrangement lasts, by you, in your own words, before we are introduced. Teams work it out inside a fortnight regardless, and an interim who arrives inside a story their colleagues do not believe has already spent the authority they came with. Weeks one and two: An hour with every direct report, and with the three people outside the team who complain about it most. What is in flight, what has been in flight since before the last lead left, what everyone is waiting for permission to stop. At the end of week two you get one page: what continues, what stops now, and what stays frozen until the permanent lead arrives because a caretaker should not decide it. What the seat holds: Approvals, priorities, budget within the plan already signed, and the performance conversations that were overdue before we arrived. We will hold a difficult conversation where the facts predate us and the decision is yours and documented. We chair the weekly, defend two focus days a week against meeting invitations, and take the board and founder questions that would otherwise land on a marketing manager who cannot answer them and should not be asked to. The gaps this fits: A lead who resigned with a month's notice. Parental leave with a fixed return date, where the work is to hand the team back intact rather than to leave a mark on it. Post-acquisition integration where two marketing functions are being merged and the sequencing needs somebody with no stake in which side wins. The move from agency to in-house, or back again, where the team is learning to own work it has never owned. Hiring the permanent lead: Scorecard first, then the search, then a panel we sit on without a vote. Asked to help decide, we say what we saw and stop there. We will not be a candidate for the permanent role and we tell the team that in week one, because a caretaker who might be applying is not a caretaker anybody speaks freely to. What we refuse: Carrying out a reduction in force the team has not been told about, or being introduced as an interim lead while in fact assessing people for someone else's decision. Dismissing the person you have not been willing to manage. Signing medical, legal or regulatory approvals in a pharma or medtech marketing function, an authority that is not transferable to a contractor and which any interim willing to accept it is telling you something about. Rebuilding the agency roster or renegotiating retainers in the final month, when the incoming lead should own that choice and will inherit it either way. Not included: Hands-on channel work. We do not run campaigns, build tracking or write copy while holding the seat, and if the team's actual problem is a missing media buyer then a caretaker in the lead's chair solves nothing. Brand or corporate strategy, unless it was already underway and simply needs someone to chair it to a decision. How it ends: A handover written for your successor rather than for you: every open decision with the context around it, every person with their current standing and what has been promised to them, every commitment made in your name and to whom. One three-way conversation between the incoming lead, you and us. Then we leave on the agreed date, with nothing sold on the way out, and the team keeps the cadence because it was theirs before we borrowed it.