Autonomous Governance Is a Deliverable, Not a Prerequisite
by Nicolas Henckes, Founder & CEO of Kitsune Advisory
Most interim CEO mandates begin with a request that sounds entirely reasonable: build a governance that survives your departure. The board wants reassurance. The shareholders want continuity. Senior managers want clarity on what comes next. Everyone agrees that a strong, independent leadership team is the destination.
Then, often within the first weeks of the mandate, a quieter version of the same request appears, rephrased. "Let's set up co-decision now." "We should formalise a leadership tandem." "The transition will be smoother if we share authority from the start."
It sounds like the same conversation. It is not. It is the beginning of a category mistake that derails more transition mandates than any other we have seen: confusing the destination of the mandate with its starting point.
Autonomous governance is what you build during a transition. It is not the structure you put in place on day one.
Why the confusion is tempting
The request to share authority early carries a certain moral weight. It looks humble. It looks consensual. It looks like the kind of inclusive leadership any modern executive should embrace. In organisations where the previous CEO concentrated too much authority, it can feel like an obvious corrective.
But there is a meaningful difference between concentrating authority on a single person and exercising clear authority through structured delegation. The first is a fragility. The second is what permits a transformation to happen at all.
A transition mandate exists precisely because the organisation has been unable, on its own, to make the changes it needs. The board has appointed an interim CEO because the established equilibrium has stopped producing decisions, or has been producing the wrong ones. If you respond to that mandate by reproducing the same equilibrium under a different name, a tandem, a co-decision structure, a permanent steering committee, you have not solved the problem. You have rebranded it.
The right sequence
In our experience, governance that genuinely survives the interim CEO's departure follows four phases. They are sequential. Compressing them, or trying to run them in parallel, almost always fails.
First, clarity of authority. The interim CEO arrives with a specific mandate, a defined scope, and the responsibility for decisions within that scope. This is non-negotiable. The first weeks are dedicated to making this authority legible: to the board, to the management team, to the staff. Without this, nothing else holds.
Second, identification of relays. Within the first two or three months, the interim CEO identifies the people in the organisation who will carry the structure forward. Sometimes they are already in place. Sometimes they need to be promoted. Sometimes they need to be recruited. The goal at this stage is to map the roles and the people, not yet to delegate.
Third, progressive delegation. Once relays are identified, authority is transferred in writing, role by role, with clear scopes. This is the longest phase of the mandate. It is where most of the actual work happens. The interim CEO progressively withdraws from operational decisions, retaining only those that genuinely require the perspective of the role: strategy, capital allocation, key external relationships, board interface.
Fourth, organised handover. In the final months, the interim CEO actively reduces their footprint, supports the emergence of a permanent successor, and prepares the conditions of their own departure. This is the phase where shared authority, deputy roles, or co-decision arrangements may become appropriate. They are an endpoint, not a starting point.
The cost of getting the sequence wrong
Compressing this sequence has predictable consequences.
Co-decision installed too early dilutes the interim CEO's ability to make the very decisions they were appointed to make. It signals to the organisation that nothing has really changed. It exhausts the political capital of the mandate before any structural work has been done. And it almost always produces a tandem that, when the interim CEO leaves, collapses, because the second person was selected to share authority, not to carry it alone.
The opposite mistake is also possible: a transition mandate that ends without ever transferring authority, leaving the organisation more dependent than when it started. But this is a failure of the third and fourth phases, not a justification for skipping the first two.
A different way to think about service
The temptation to share authority early often comes wrapped in the language of servant leadership. The interim CEO is told that humility, collegiality, and shared decision-making are the modern expression of service to the organisation.
We see it differently.
Service, in a transition mandate, means giving the organisation the one thing it has lost the ability to give itself: a clear, exercised authority, used in a defined timeframe, for the explicit purpose of building the durable governance that will replace it.
That governance is what you leave behind. It is not what you bring on day one. And it is the difference between a transition mandate that succeeds and one that quietly reproduces the situation it was supposed to resolve.
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If your organisation is preparing a leadership transition and you want to discuss how to sequence it properly, get in touch.
