“We Don’t Need An Interim Manager!”
“An interim manager? We’re not doing THAT badly!”.
There’s a popular myth that an interim manager is an emergency option, that any company hiring one must be a sinking ship looking for someone to co-ordinate the bailing out. And sometimes bringing in an outside expert can be the ideal parachute for a company in freefall – but to see it as the only time for an interim hire is short-sighted and simplistic. In a recent survey of 1000 senior interim executives, less than 17% of them said their last appointment had been prompted by a company in crisis. Much more common were positions brought about by companies launching major new projects, looking to address internal change or seeking to grow their business.
Where finding and hiring a permanent employee with the right experience, skillset and culture fit can take months, interim managers can be in place and deploying their industry expertise within days. Unlike a regular hire, they’re not given a month to settle in and gently ramp up to a big project, they know they need to start immediately identifying problems and delivering solutions. Plus because of the wide variety of experience, they’ll have from working on different projects, you’ll be getting a vast amount of varied expertise, deployed for you in a short amount of time.
Ok, so they’re cheaper to get into the office – but won’t a permanent hire cost you less in the long run? Not necessarily – after taking into account the holiday days, the pension, the company car and everything else a new executive is going to expect, they’ll end up being a lot more expensive than an interim manager who you only need to pay for the days they work. This is before beginning to calculate the return on investment and the value added by bringing in an experienced senior manager who knows they need to act quickly to achieve measurable results and who will leave behind a wealth of knowledge for your permanent team.
Lynsey Moore
[This article originally appeared on Lynsey’s LinkedIn. If you have any interim management needs, contact us on 01216432100 or info@kindconsultancy.com]
Read more on the pro’s of interims here, and why you should think about choosing an interim solution here.
