Ep. 7 Initial Thoughts as Interim CEO

I was an interim CEO for 6 weeks! This episode of 'Learning to Manage' discusses my initial thoughts about my experiences as interim CEO and the setbacks I faced. 

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Transcript

Welcome to the Learning to Manage podcast. I'm your host, Aruna Seegolam, an operations and administrative professional trying to learn to, well, manage. I realized that I needed to improve the ways in which I managed others because at the end of the day, it's not about the work, it's about how you treat others. As such, I've been actively trying to be a better manager and professional by using what I've learned from my academic coursework and my day-to-day experiences.  Please join me as I learn strategies and get the inspiration needed to excel in a leadership role and try to embody some attributes of a servant leader. 

Welcome back to the podcast. Happy 2025. So it's been a while since I've been here, and I am going to take full responsibility. My laziness took over. I just started to prioritize other things over the podcast, and I am sad and sorry that I did that because sitting here trying to record a podcast, I keep forgetting how much I love doing this.

Since we last spoke, a few really exciting things happened in my career,  one of which was I became the interim CEO for my company for six weeks. And it was not the experience I thought I was gonna have. It taught me that being a CEO was hard. Well, no kidding, Aruna. No matter the size of the company, it is hard being that person that has to make the decisions that people look to and that  people sometimes respect and sometimes don't respect. It's difficult. And I personally was in a really unique situation because the new CEO had already been named. There was like a lag between the old CEO leaving and the new CEO coming in. And I'm gonna be fully transparent before I start going through some of the points that  I wanna make in this episode  but I was not the first choice. I was the first person to say yes to being the interim CEO and  taking on the responsibilities that came with that.  In being the interim CEO, I was also  a remote interim CEO, because I was already a remote director of operations. So I wasn't in the office.  I wasn't there to see how I could support staff and the most I could do to support staff was through sending emails. And it was the holiday season, so everyone was really busy and I didn't feel that it was the best use of everyone's time to say, "Hey, come sit in a Zoom with me so that I could pacify my leadership feelings and, and have these great conversations and be supportive." um, it it, it just wasn't a good use of staff time. And again, I only had six weeks, so I didn't do that.  And the reason that I named this podcast episode, "Initial thoughts as Interim CEO", is because maybe I'd like to come back to talk about this, but I am not quite sure.

So when I was putting together my outline for this episode, I kept thinking, I don't even know what I wanna focus on. There's so many different things that I can focus on, I can talk about the relationship between the board of directors and a CEO. I can talk about the relationship between a CEO and staff. Um, I can talk about some of the intricacies that come with being an interim CEO,  especially given the unique situation that I was in. And then I remembered,  I created this podcast to track how I was growing and how close I was to being deserving of being called a leader. So I said, fine, I'm gonna relate this to my academic work.  Before my interim appointment, I was actually able to finish the end of my course. At the time I was taking research concept, which is basically putting together what I want to talk about in my final paper,   so that I could get my DVA.

Um, so I was lucky that there was not too much overlap between  my school assignments and the interim appointment because I can tell you that the amount of hours that I put in while I was interim, I would not have been able to give my coursework the attention that it needed.

So again, I was named interim CEO for that six weeks because there are things that still need to get done.  And there needs to be a person that staff look to, there needs to be a person that, members look to.  So it wasn't like I was gonna be making any great changes or trying to implement anything because when the new CEO came in,  I wasn't sure what I, I didn't wanna put  work and effort into implementing new processes that weren't gonna stay.
 

Me being in the role that I was in, it was more can you Aruna support staff and can you be with the board of directors, the executive committee,  the president - can you be what they need during these six weeks? Can you make sure that the association runs and anything that might come up in that six weeks that you address it? And one of the biggest lessons I learned is that my academics do influence my work and vice versa. So every time I was asked to make a decision, what I would try to do is think of what did I learn, what have I learned, and what do I think is the right thing to do? And sometimes what the right thing to do academically is not the right thing to do  in real life. 

However, it does help a lot. And one big thing for me, and I spoke about this, is servant leadership.  I took a servant leadership class and I realized that this is it. This is the leader that I wanna try to be.  And knowing myself, I know that I won't reach that point, but I'm gonna try and in earnestly trying to implement many of the servant leadership qualities in my work, I realized how difficult some behaviors are because they're not natural.  And I read an article the other day and it said that you can learn some behaviors.  So even if I were to be successful one day in becoming a servant leader,  I think that a lot of my behaviors would have been learned.  They wouldn't have been innate or natural for a number of different reasons,  both personal and professional.

The whole point of me saying this is that what I found came naturally to me was serving others. I love being there for people. I do, but what I found difficult was empowering others so I could be there for you. I could be there for those that I work with, and I could serve them and figure out what it is that they need,  but when it comes to giving them empowerment and inspiring them, I fail tremendously.  I failed tremendously. And I say that twice because I found the words coming out of my mouth and I heard myself failing multiple times, and it was because I was too busy. 

So I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about. I had a staff member who at the beginning of my interim appointment was extremely supportive and I would give my suggestions. I would say, Hey, let's do A, B, or C, and they would say, you know what?  That's a great idea, but we don't need to do A, B, or C. You're authorized to do it.  So I said, fine, but you know, actually this isn't something that I feel that I can make a decision on given the information that I have. And again, there's another CEO coming in after me, so I wanna take that person into account when I make decisions.

Long story short- the following week, I got the same feedback to me from the person. It was like, well, I don't think you should be making the decision. I think you should be taking into account what someone else is thinking or saying. And I realized after that it was kind of like a flip flop all the time. So one week I was supported as the interim CEO, and the next week  I was reminded that I was the placeholder. And it was hard to make decisions like this because I didn't know who I was on that day and I wasn't strong enough to be what I was.  So I was there, but I wasn't there. I was respected by some, but not by everyone. And then there were some that completely respected it. And to them, I failed tremendously. I failed. I remember seeing in a phone call that I felt defeated and the person said to me, yeah, Aruna, I feel defeated too. And that was the worst possible thing I could do. I did a horrible job during that conversation because I was too busy in my feelings about what all of this was. And getting too caught up in, you can't make an impact and it's only six weeks and you can't do enough. And that's the biggest difference between a manager and a great manager. This empowerment of others. And I realize how important it is to be able to empower others. So now I'm working on my final paper and I realize that empowerment makes things different for different leaders 

and to piggyback on my additional setbacks, it's weird. It's weird being interim CEO in the way  that I was. So, another challenge was that I knew I was going back to being a colleague.  To everyone. I, you know, I was going back to being a peer, so I needed to tiptoe around certain conversations because I wasn't always gonna be the person that these folks reported to.  I was gonna go back to my original position where no one was higher up on the hierarchy than anyone else.

So I didn't wanna come off as someone that didn't act their wage. And my mentor, who I've worked with for  coming on five years now told me, she said, you just have to be the final. Someone just needs to be responsible for the decisions and learn that you can trust yourself. 

The decisions that I made, kind of seeing that, making those final decisions and seeing the results of those decisions, that was extraordinarily refreshing.  Through that I unlocked a whole new level of confidence. I noticed since I've gone back to my position as director of operations, that I'm fine with making decisions.

 Sometimes I'm waiting three, four days to hear back from people, or I'll send an email and people just won't respond. And I am like, okay, I am just gonna go ahead and make that decision and I'm confident knowing what my limits are and what I can just go ahead and make a decision on.

My second lesson that I've learned is that it isn't as easy as they say to set boundaries because you cannot control the level of respect that others have for you. And setting boundaries means that you've created this definition of what you accept and what you don't accept, and the situations are constantly changing. They're so dynamic that there's no way to easily set these boundaries.  In creating these boundaries, I learned that I have to be flexible. 

Would I do it again? Absolutely. It was really challenging and different,  but what leadership at a C-Suite level means, especially a CEO, means that I get to use the skills that I learned and gained throughout all these years. The good days, the bad days, and I'm using them differently. I'm taking them, and I'm applying them in a whole new way.  

My biggest takeaway from this entire experience as interim CEO, was that the experience was worth the late nights and the sleepless nights. Taking that plunge is never a bad thing.

Thank you for joining me on this episode of Learning to Manage. If you enjoyed today's episode, please be sure to subscribe to this podcast for more discussions on leadership and management. And don't forget to leave a review to let me know how I'm doing. If you have any questions, topics, suggestions, or stories to share about your own leadership journey, I would love to hear from you. Please visit the show notes from my Facebook and LinkedIn profiles and some additional resources. Until next time, I'm Aruna Seegolam signing off from Learning to Manage.