The CEO has just birdied the 12th hole at Oakmont. She raises his club above her head and shakes it gleefully.  Then she appears to lose her balance and stumble blindly, clutching her forehead and groaning.  Finally she collapses.

The CEO has had a stroke and will be incapacitated for at least six weeks.  Or maybe she won’t be coming back at all.

What does a company or nonprofit organization tell the many people who depend on it?  What you communicate in the days and weeks after the heart attack or other ailment will determine if important groups retain a high level of confidence in your organization.  Those groups include:

• Customers and clients
• Suppliers
• Employees
• Strategic partners
• The board of directors
• Investors, if a public company
• Regulatory and other governmental offices
• The general public
• The news media that serves all these groups.

The organization needs to tell all these groups that it is continuing to operate under competent leadership with a focused vision on fulfilling its mission. And it needs to say it quickly and to every group, giving no one the opportunity to begin to doubt.

The content of what you say should emphasize two messages:

• The interim leader is a competent professional who will lead the company.
• The company will continue to pursue its mission, which is …fill in the blank.

If the CEO is not coming back, or as soon as you know she/he is not coming back, you should add a third message: that the organization has a plan for identifying the next permanent leader.

During the CEO’s recovering, it is important that the interim CEO replace the CEO completely in the public eye, going to all community and industry functions, giving speeches, frequently communicating with employees in newsletters and emails. 

One of the most important roles of CEOs in contemporary American society is to be the face and the voice of the organization.  An organization that is squeamish about transferring these responsibilities out of some misplaced belief that it would be insensitive to the ailing CEO will only be crippling itself.  Whoever is the temporary CEO of a company for however long must be prepared to enthusiastically perform all tasks, and that includes the very public function of representing the organization.

If the interim CEO has not undergone spokesperson training, she/he should find time for a spokesperson seminar as soon as possible.  If she/he has had training, a refresher course still wouldn’t hurt.  Spokesperson training should focus on teaching the interim CEO techniques for persuasive speaking in three situations: 1) speeches; 2) other group situations; 3) the news media.

As soon as the CEO comes back from convalescence, or a permanent new leader is selected, the person in charge, old or new, should take charge just as aggressively and publicly as the temporary leader did. 

The key again is to communicate continuity.  The attitude should be that while our leader was and is important to us (and we miss her/him), as an organization we have a strong corporate culture: we know where we’re going and we know how to get there.