Interim Leadership Coaching for Higher Education Leaders
Confidential coaching for interim deans, chief academic officers, and other higher education leaders who want to use an interim appointment with intention.
Leading when the position isn’t permanent
Accepting an interim leadership role is often an act of service to an institution. You raise your hand when leadership is needed, sometimes with little notice and at a moment when faculty, staff, and students are looking for stability and clarity about goals, priorities, and direction.
Far from being a placeholder or seat warmer, an interim leader can use the defined timeline of their term to accomplish meaningful work. The appointment may not be permanent, but the impact can be. I encourage interim leaders to ask what they can accomplish with the authority and time available to them. Coaching gives you a confidential place to work through those choices while the term of your appointment is unfolding.
What does the institution need from your interim term?
One way to give the appointment purpose is to think beyond its end date. What can you do now that will help the institution attract excellent candidates for the permanent role and set up the next leader for success?
For many interim leaders, that will mean addressing longstanding personnel, fiscal, curricular, or organizational issues. It will likely also mean clarifying responsibilities, improving processes, strengthening a team, assembling better information, or rebuilding relationships the next leader will depend upon.
Interim leaders often have to make consequential decisions with incomplete information, distributed authority, financial pressure, and competing institutional interests. Good data, processes, and relationships provide better raw materials for those decisions, and even when an issue cannot be fully resolved during your term, you may be able to leave better information, stronger relationships, or a sounder process for your successor.
Use the interim period to learn what comes next for you
The interim leadership role gives you direct experience of greater responsibility. If you intend to pursue the permanent role, you have time to test your skills, show colleagues how you lead, and learn what the job actually requires. If you do not want the permanent position, you can still use the term to create institutional stability by addressing issues that have lingered, strengthening the team or processes your successor will inherit, and creating conditions that attract strong candidates.
Coaching gives you a place to think through both the institutional work and what the experience is teaching you about yourself. You may finish the term more certain that you want the permanent role, clearer about what you would need to succeed in a similar position elsewhere, or better able to see that your strengths and values point in another direction.
What can you bring to interim leadership coaching?
You may bring an immediate decision or conversation into one session and a larger question about the role, the institution, or your own next step into another. We might work together on:
clarifying your mandate;
deciding what deserves action now and what can appropriately wait;
identifying where you have authority and where you can influence;
improving the data, processes, or relationships surrounding an important decision;
addressing issues that would otherwise pass unresolved to your successor;
considering whether you want to pursue the permanent role; and
reflecting on what the experience is teaching you about your strengths, values, and future leadership interests.
An early question about mandate may give way to a decision about priorities, while experience later in the appointment may change how you think about the role itself or what you want to do next.
A coach who has served in interim roles
I have held several interim roles during my own higher education career, which includes 15 years as a faculty member, five years as an associate vice president for academic affairs, and five years as provost and vice president of academic affairs. I understand what it is like to create institutional stability in a role whose authority, timeline, and future may be unsettled.
A typical interim leadership coaching package
A typical starting engagement includes eight individual coaching sessions over four to eight months. That gives us time to work with the role as it develops and revisit decisions as you learn more about the institution, the position, and yourself.
The right structure will depend on what you want from coaching. When an institution sponsors your coaching, we establish expectations about goals and confidentiality at the beginning so you retain a genuinely private place to think.
Start with a discovery conversation
An exploratory meeting gives us a chance to talk about the role you have accepted, what you want to accomplish, and what you want to be able to say about the term when it ends. We can then decide whether coaching would be useful and what an appropriate engagement would look like.