There’s a particular kind of dread that sets in around month five or six of a hold, when it becomes clear the CFO isn’t going to be the right person to take the business through the next phase. 

Everyone on the board has half-noticed it for weeks. Nobody’s said it out loud, because saying it out loud means dealing with it, and dealing with it feels like it’ll cost more time than it’s worth mid-plan. 

Here’s what actually costs time: waiting. The longer a CFO who isn’t going to work out stays in the seat, the more decisions get made on incomplete or slightly wrong numbers, and the more those decisions compound. 

I’ve seen boards delay a CFO change for two quarters to “avoid disruption” and end up with a much bigger disruption anyway, just delayed and disguised as a series of smaller reporting problems that all trace back to the same root cause.

The part that actually determines whether this goes smoothly isn’t the firing itself, it’s the sequencing before it. Have the interim plan sorted before the conversation happens, not after. 

Know who’s covering the immediate reporting cycle, know what the board needs to hear in the next update regardless of who’s in the CFO seat, and know roughly what the search timeline looks like. 

A CFO exit handled with a plan already in motion reads to the rest of the organisation as decisive. The same exit handled reactively reads as chaos, even if the underlying decision was exactly right. 

The other thing worth doing, and it’s the bit people skip because it’s uncomfortable, is being honest with the CEO about why this is happening before it happens, not after. 

CEOs who get blindsided by a CFO departure they should have seen coming lose confidence in the board’s judgement generally, not just on this one decision. CEOs who were part of the conversation early tend to come out of it more aligned with the operating partner, not less.