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Interim Management
- Introduction to Interim Management
- What is Interim Management
- The evolution of Interim Management
- The role of the Interim Manager
- What makes a good Interim?
- MORI Poll
- Interims for Management roles UK & Worldwide - Interims V Consultants
- Crisis management
- Sudden departure
- Managing Change or Transition
- MBO's and IPO's
- Mergers and Acquisitions
- Project Management
- Family-owned Businesses
- The Corporate Environment
- The Venture Capital Industry
- Finding the right Interim Manager
- The Selection Process
- Questions to ask
- Interim Management as part of an HR Strategy
- Research
- Information for Interims
- Order your CBI Guides
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Interim management links:
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Why choose BIE?
What's New?2.2. Issues with Interims
As mentioned earlier, issues with interims can arise when organisations do not have a clear idea of what they are looking for. For instance, the legacy of a bad cultural fit can linger.
“One of the things you really have to try and avoid is the collateral damage that can be caused by somebody that is a bad fit... the collateral damage from that has to be picked up by the people that remain in the organisation and that legacy can last for some considerable time”
It is important to have a proper exit strategy in place for interims, but at least one respondent readily admits to not having cracked this yet: “One of the difficulties is that people often think we need a stop-gap so we will use an interim and they haven’t specified really, or got clear in their own minds what they want the interim to do, and that leads to raggedness at the ends”
However, it could be argued that this is the interim’s responsibility: “There’s a responsibility on the interim to be that completer-finisher, to have the organisation define the purpose that they are there for, and if they can’t come up with a purpose maybe they need to suggest a different route, consultants and so on and so forth”.
The issue of accountability in the public sector elicited mixed views from several respondents. One respondent thinks there is a prevailing ‘permanent staff equals good, interim equals bad’ mentality. However, another respondent disagrees, arguing that the public sector is very much reliant on interims: “Most of the major interim providers would actually say that their business is growing faster in the public sector than the private sector. When you see, particularly in government, so much money and resources put the way of consultants, I think they are increasingly recognising they are getting their value for money from interims.”
Perhaps this disagreement is due to the ways in which different public sector organisations are held to account. One public sector respondent gets more questions about total headcount and the flexibility of that headcount, than about consultancy or interims. Another public sector respondent gets pressure from staff around the use of consultancy and interims and why these jobs are not being given to permanent people.
This leads to the next issue, equality. Respondents from both private and public sector organisations have had experience with interims being recycled, dubbed ‘the Lazarus effect’. In the private sector, there are cases of people on early retirement who keep being called back for projects. The respondent thinks this is less prevalent than it was a few years ago. In the public sector, there is pressure from trades unions who see this as being nepotism, not developing internal talent and going against best practice guidelines. One way of addressing this would be to have succession in place, as part of the interim’s exit strategy.
To discuss your interim management requirements with BIE call +44(0)20 7222 1010