How do you adapt to a new organization and culture?
It almost always starts with a meeting with the manager, or management team, who hires me, where they explain what it is they need. We usually talk about what they expect – is it a management or developmental assignment. I’ve had about 15 or 16 interim assignments, and they’ve been both management and developmental in nature. Some assignments started with an emergency situation, and then it’s often about coming in and creating stability first.
Many people think that you bring in someone to maintain a function until you bring in a new person. I think it’s important to highlight that if you bring in an interim manager, you can get a development that moves the business from the point they are now to the point where they would like to be when you hire a new permanent solution.
It often takes one individual, resource or skill to make a displacement journey and another to take it further.
What success factors do you think are important to succeed as an interim manager?
Understanding where we are and where we are going is very important for success during an interim assignment. The most important thing for me, and it’s a term I use a lot, is to find out the “honest current situation”. Often you think you have certain conditions and you have a certain starting point, but I think it’s really important to find out what it looks like naked and stripped down. To ask ourselves where we stand, how are we doing, what are our shortcomings, what are our strengths? We need to know where we are in order to decide where we are going.
How do you measure success as an interim manager, and what key performance indicators do you use to evaluate your performance?
I always try to have both start-up and exit interviews with the same managers. Sometimes it is part of my job that some managers need to move on, but I always try to catch up with those I have worked with in exit interviews. An interim manager needs to be a good listener and not think that you have all the answers. During an exit interview, we raise issues such as what they think about the period, what they are taking away, what progress they have made and what lies ahead. I also try to explain what I have learned from them. My mission is really to get those who are already in the organization to do their job a little better. And I think that’s cool.
What advice do you have for companies considering hiring an interim manager?
I would advise them to really think through how you are going to get the most out of the interim manager and to take the opportunity to make changes. Hire an interim who can take you from place A to place B so that you can recruit the person who will then take it further to get to C.
Often you can’t have the same person taking it from A to C because you, so to speak, consume a person at certain moments. See it as an opportunity to not only get someone to keep the business going, but by picking up this person’s previous experiences take the organization further.
How do you work with the team and motivate them during an interim period?
First, I try to get as much information as I can before I start the assignment from the people who hired me. That is always the first step. Then I identify the key people. They don’t always have to be subordinate managers, they can be controllers, HR or others within the organization.
It is not unusual that the reason I am there is that something quite dramatic has happened. Someone has had to leave very quickly or someone has fallen ill and cannot complete their mission. In such cases, it’s often a matter of pouring a little oil on the waves and first creating some calm.
I sit down and have structured individual conversations of at least an hour with all the key people, and sometimes more, to get their picture of the honest current situation. Ask the people to give their picture of the situation and of the business. What their challenges are and how they are doing, feeling and feeling. What support do you need from me? It is important for me to get a picture from the organization, and not just from the client. It takes time, but it is in the interpersonal encounters that you can actually make the biggest difference in bringing staff along on the journey.
I usually ask the question: if you had been given this job, what would you have started? You often get very honest answers. I have the same basic questions, but then the questions differ between assignments. With the summarized answers as a basis, I have a good map of where to start and then it’s a matter of creating some simple improvements by picking the low-hanging fruit first. I often use the golden ratio. Focusing on the 20% of actions or metrics that deliver 80% of the impact. If you put 80% of your energy into that 20%, you will get a big improvement.
Is this a concern? How can we put it out? Is there anything that needs to be done right away? Can we do it right now so that people feel that things are happening? The map I build in my conversations about the honest current situation creates a good foundation for how I will work and build trust through the mission.
How would you say your role as interim manager differs from other management roles you have held?
Especially because they are not long-term. That’s the big difference – you often hire an interim consultant to do something quite concrete. Then it can change during the course of the assignment. I’ve seen the assignment extended several times and then we may have changed direction a little.
An interim assignment is usually about optimizing and working yourself out of a job. And that’s different from a regular management assignment. There, you hope that you will continue to develop for a longer period of time.
What experiences do you take with you as an interim manager that you think can help you in future assignments?
You take something away from every assignment, no matter how big or small it has been. Now I have worked a lot on the municipal side, but in my background, the absolute largest part has still been on the private side.
From each mission, I take away a greater understanding. A publicly managed organization is a bit different from a privately managed one. I have taken away that you need to talk in a different way in a politically governed organization, you can’t act quite as spontaneously as you can in a private organization.
One strength of having worked as an interim manager for so many years is that most people who hire me now know what I have done before. I stand on a much stronger platform where I feel that I am listened to more now from the beginning than I was before, so I get greater impact and legitimacy within the organization from the start.
Do you need the support of an interim?
