Running a team while you hire its manager
When a team loses its manager, or never had one, the months before a hire are when bad habits set in. An interim lead can use that time to make the new manager's job easier.
Teams without a manager don't stop working. They keep producing, but decisions stall, priorities drift toward whoever asks loudest, and the habits that form while nobody is steering become the way things are done. By the time a new manager starts, they inherit a team that has been improvising for months.
Hiring a good manager takes time. Interim leadership covers that gap, and done well, it hands the permanent hire a better team than the one that existed before.
Keep the team running first
The first job is continuity. An interim lead sets a simple weekly rhythm: a short planning session at the start of the week, a quick daily check-in, and a look at the end of the week at what shipped. Priorities get written down in one place, so people stop working from their memory of the last conversation. None of it is sophisticated, and it doesn't need to be. A team in transition needs predictability more than new ideas.
Make decisions visible
Most of the drift in a team without a manager comes from unclear decisions. Who approves work before it goes to a client? Who decides which request gets done first? Who is allowed to say no?
A RACI chart is a plain way to settle it. For each recurring decision, one person is responsible for doing it, one is accountable for the result, and others are consulted or kept informed. It can feel bureaucratic for a small team, but it takes an afternoon to write and it clears up a lot of "I thought you were doing that".
Write down how the team works
While running the team, the interim lead is in the best position to see how the work actually gets done. That's the time to write it down: the SOPs for recurring work, the templates people keep rebuilding from scratch, and the quality bar for what counts as finished. We treat this as the real deliverable of an interim engagement, because it outlasts it. (Our approach is in how to write SOPs people use.)
Help define the role, then help fill it
After a few weeks inside the team, an interim lead knows what the permanent role really involves, which is often different from the job description written before anyone looked closely. They can help rewrite it, sit in on interviews, and give candidates an honest picture of the team they would inherit.
Plan the handover from the start
The weakest interim engagements end with one meeting and a folder of notes. A better handover overlaps. The new manager shadows the interim lead for a week or two, then leads while the interim lead watches, then takes over. The documentation, the decision chart and the weekly rhythm pass across with them, so the new manager spends their first month improving the team rather than piecing together how it works.
When you don't need it
If the team is small and stable and the gap is a few weeks, a senior person already on the team can usually cover it. Interim leadership earns its cost when the gap is long, the team is under pressure, or the way the team works was never written down.