The risk in a senior executive assignment is easy to place in the wrong spot. It’s tempting to look at the problem itself, how complex it is, how political, how large, and assume that’s where things will go wrong.
In my experience, the real risk usually sits somewhere much earlier and much less visible. It sits in the first ten days, before anyone has agreed what finishing actually looks like.
The first five days are for listening, not fixing
When one of our interim executives starts an assignment, the first five days are spent almost entirely listening: meeting everyone who matters, running a real methodology of interviews to understand what the actual requirement is, not just the version of it written into the brief. I think of the executive in those first five days as a sponge: absorbing everything, deciding nothing yet.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. A client comes to us with an understanding of what the assignment needs to achieve. Those first five days of interviews are what tests that understanding against the reality inside the organisation, before anyone commits to a plan.
Days five to ten: writing down what “done” means
Between day five and day ten, the executive writes a proposal: a concrete account of what they intend to do, based on what they heard in the first five days. The point of that is simple: get the rails right before anything moves. It goes to the board for approval before any hands-on execution begins.
Part of what gets agreed in that proposal is also the answer to a harder question: what has to be true for this assignment to be considered finished.
I think of this less as onboarding and more as a formal negotiation of scope, put in writing and agreed before the work starts. An assignment with us runs seven to eight months on average, and I’d say those first ten days set the direction for everything that follows. That written proposal isn’t only what gets the mandate through its first ten days. It’s what the board follows up against for as long as the assignment runs.
What an unambiguous ending can look like
One assignment shows what that kind of definition looks like taken to its most literal extreme. One of our interim executives was placed with a client in the nuclear industry that had acquired a site in central Africa, expecting to extract uranium there. After a period of operation, it became clear the site held none. Hundreds of millions of dollars had already been committed. The assignment was to close the site.
The mandate ended when the site was closed and the key to the box holding all the documentation was handed to a local lawyer, for the box to be placed in a safe. There was no report to interpret and no plan to sign off in principle. Either the key had been handed over, or it hadn’t.
What this means if you are the one hiring
Most assignments don’t run into trouble in month six. They run into trouble on day one, when nobody has yet agreed what it would mean to say the job was finished. The first ten days aren’t preparation for the real work. They are the point where the real work is actually decided.