“It’s only temporary. We’ll sort it out properly once things settle down.” This always starts with good intentions. A leader departs unexpectedly or otherwise. The organisation needs continuity.

Someone capable is asked to step in on an acting basis, just until the right permanent decision can be made. Everyone agrees it is temporary. Months pass. The acting leader performs well enough. The permanent search is deprioritised in favour of more urgent matters. A year later, the title still says “acting” and the organisation is still treating the arrangement as temporary, even though it has become anything but.

This pattern shows up regularly in Bermuda’s business community, across sectors and organisation sizes. It is worth naming directly because the cost of leaving it unaddressed is higher than most organisations recognise. That cost has risen as Bermuda’s employment regulatory environment has tightened this year.

Why it happens

Interim appointments are rarely the result of poor planning alone. More often, they reflect the genuine difficulty of making a permanent leadership decision under time pressure.

Permanent appointments require careful thought, internal process and, sometimes, an external search. When an organisation is also managing whatever circumstances created the vacancy in the first place, the capacity for a thorough and timely decision may simply not be there.

The problem is that “we’ll deal with it properly when things settle down” rarely produces a decision. It produces delay. Delay in a leadership context creates its own set of problems, separate from whatever prompted the interim arrangement in the first place.

Position without authority

“He’s running the department but can’t actually decide anything.” Acting leaders operate with a particular kind of authority deficit. They are accountable for results but may lack the formal mandate to make the structural or personnel decisions those results require.

Teams know the situation is temporary, which can affect how seriously they engage with or take direction from, an acting leader. Employees are less likely to invest in building a relationship with a leader whose tenure remains uncertain.

There is also a personal cost to the individual in the acting role. They are doing a more demanding job, often without the full recognition, compensation or authority that comes with the permanent title. The longer the arrangement continues, the more that imbalance becomes a retention risk in itself.

It is often the acting leader, the person who stepped up when needed, who eventually leaves. From a governance perspective, extended interim leadership creates accountability ambiguity that compounds over time.

Who approved what, under whose mandate and with what authority? These questions matter less during a short transition. They matter considerably more when the “temporary” arrangement has extended beyond 12 months.

Why it matters more now

Bermuda’s employment landscape has shifted this year. The State of Labour in Bermuda 2026 report sets out a strengthened Employment and Labour Code, with the maximum severance entitlement for long-serving employees rising from 26 to 32 weeks’ wages, new statutory rights that include mandatory meal breaks and expanded parental leave, plus reinforced provisions on bullying and sexual harassment.

The Department of Labour has also published a “Know Your Rights at Work” guidance document, written in plain language and designed to be printed and carried, that employees across the island can now reference directly.

Extended interim leadership arrangements sit uncomfortably in this environment. Accountability gaps create policy gaps. Policy gaps create compliance exposure. In an employment landscape where employees are better informed about their rights than at any previous point in Bermuda’s history, those gaps are more likely to be identified and acted upon.

What good looks like

A genuine interim appointment has three things that an accidental permanent one typically lacks: a defined end date or decision trigger; a clear mandate setting out what the acting leader may and may not authorise; and active succession work running in parallel from the day the interim arrangement begins.

The organisations that manage leadership transitions well in Bermuda are not necessarily the ones with the most sophisticated processes. They are the ones where leadership transition is treated as a governance matter rather than an operational inconvenience to be managed quietly at the people level. That distinction becomes most visible and most expensive, when things go wrong.

If your organisation has an acting or interim leader in place right now, there is a straightforward question worth asking: is this still a temporary arrangement, or has it become a permanent decision that nobody has formally made?

The answer shapes everything from compensation and authority to succession risk and governance exposure. It is better to ask the question now than to have it surface in less comfortable circumstances later.

• Kelly Francis is founder and managing director of Performance Solutions Ltd. She advises boards, business owners and leadership teams on the people decisions that shape organisational performance. Kelly can be reached at 441-232-5270 or kelly_francis@psolutions.bm