Interim managers were once an office exotic, now they’re becoming part of the furniture. But who is this stranger in your boardroom: a corporate commando come to save the day, or a charismatic disaster zone? Either way, they’re probably going to ruffle plenty of feathers, including yours: that’s their job. So what are the implications for HR and how can you help your business get the most out of the experience? Rob Lewis looks at the unstoppable rise of the interim.

‘Ability’, ‘charisma’ and ‘flair’ are words that seem to crop up an awful lot when discussing interim management. But precisely what benefits can an interim manager provide, and would you really want to see one of these corporate commandos parachuted into your boardroom?

Interim management first appeared in the Netherlands in the 1970s, where recession and strict employment laws made it difficult to get the right people on board at the right time. It made the transition to the UK sometime in the ’80s, where it has grown steadily ever since.

According to executive resourcers Executives Online, recruitment delays cost the typical business two years in senior management time. The average delay in filling an executive vacancy is four months, and the job market is so fluid that the posts are generally held for less than four years. It’s no surprise that a recent MORI Captains of Industry survey found that almost 60 percent of leaders have used interim management at senior or board level.

However, interims have yet to win over everybody. Professor Adrian Furnham of the UCL’s psychology department has expressed doubts over the profession. “Who are these managers?” he wondered in an article in The Times. “Do really successful executives move into interim management? Aren’t many of these managers little more than prematurely ‘let go’ middle-ranking executives — one-man bands young enough to supplement their pension but not important enough to be kept on? And if I am right, how good are they?”

Furnham argues that the biggest advantage of being an interim manager was that you didn’t have to worry about long-term results. In fact, everything you had implemented could happily collapse “within weeks after the departure of a much sought-after saviour”.

Conversely, some commentators see the potential problem being that some interim managers are too interested in the long-term view. With assignments rarely lasting longer than nine months, interims by their nature are supposed to provide temporary expertise.

There are some out-of-work executives who simply pose as interims in order to ingratiate themselves into a new permanent job, often incurring the enmity of many colleagues in doing so, according to Cynthia Larbey, founder and director of People in Health.

“If you have an interim manager after a permanent job, the whole assignment becomes more political, risks losing its objectivity and sends sparks flying among the existing management team,” she says.

Tradable expertise

Alan Horn, chief executive of the Albemarle Group, the UK’s largest provider of interim management, maintains that such criticism is totally inaccurate. “The majority of people we use on assignment have been in full-time jobs, and they’ve been very good at their full-time jobs, or they wouldn’t be working for us.”

Horn also refutes the notion that interims are simply normal execs without a permanent job. “Interim managers earn a lot more working as interim managers,” he explains. “They are individuals who’ve reached a stage in their career where either their seniority through experience or their high level of expertise in a specialist area is something they can trade with.”

He certainly has a point here. New research from Praxis Executive reveals that the average daily rate for interim managers rose to £685 last year, up £100 per day since 2004. The report, issued earlier this week, reveals that Britain’s top interims are taking home £2500 a day, with 47 percent of Britain’s interim managers expecting to take home over £100k in 2007.

Surely, though, there is something inherently risky about parachuting these outsiders into positions of such authority?

“Interim has been devalued,” Horn admits, “because people who are without work call themselves interims because it sounds better than being unemployed, but anyone that does that will certainly quickly be found out by ourselves.”

So what is the secret of getting good interim management? According to Horn, it’s about making sure that process (“that dreaded word”) is managed from start to finish.

Interim managers may not like to admit it, but they disturb people. They come into businesses at short notice during periods of intense change, and their presence alone may be perceived by local managers as reflecting a lack of confidence in their competence. To counteract all this hostility, the role and scope of the interim manager should be explained to staff from the outset, says the CIPD.

The institute also outlines a number of key steps you should take to ensure your interim does the job you want:

• Clearly define both the task and the position in the organisation, and the performance goals.




• Specify the expertise and personal attributes which you require of the interim manager.




• Thoroughly check candidates’ references.




• Ensure there are clear channels of communication between yourself, the agent and the interim manager.




• Build and manage the relationship with the interim manager to ensure they have a good understanding of your business, its characteristics and needs.

Martin Eley, a director at the Institute of Interim Management, agrees. “If you’re taking a specialist look at developmental areas or management processes, there can be some resentment,” he says. “Other than that, as long as the goals are clearly established you should have little to worry about.

“Interim managers are high profile people. They’re expected to come in and deliver from day one. If an interim manger isn’t delivering within the first month of being there, they don’t last. So losing a month’s salary is pretty much the worst a company can expect.”

So what can you do about those pseudo-interims who are simply hankering after a permanent position? “People will abuse the system, but if you go with an established interim who has built up a career portfolio you’re unlikely to face those issues,” advises Eley.

If you haven’t had to help manage an interim, you probably will soon. Eley describes interim management as “a massive growth sector”, and the statistics support him. Already, many businesses are using interim management on anything but an interim basis. Doesn’t this outsourcing of important skills devalue a company’s human capital, though?

“Not at all,” says Eley. “A lot of the smaller companies tend to have a small core team of senior management and then they bring in interim managers with the specialist skills in different areas as and when required. I know of a number of companies where they’ve easily got five or six interim managers doing different things at any one time.”

The benefits

According to interim managers, at least, interim management has an incredible track record, but it’s not often you hear someone singing its praises in public.

This is often because board members sometimes see interims as an admission of corporate weakness, explains Eley, who admits interim management does suffer from an image problem in this regard.

“Businesses haven’t yet got over this public image factor that their core employee team is in control of everything, and for a lot of businesses now that just isn’t the case,” he says.

Perhaps the increasing and unabashed use of interims by the public sector has helped increase their profile, because some private sector firms have been championing their use.

Vodafone UK acquired independent service provider Singlepoint in late 2003. Singlepoint was the entrepreneurial vision of one man, John Caudwell; Vodafone was a blue chip multinational corporate. Would this be another faceless strategic take-over, or might the telecoms goliath manage a more meaningful integration? Vodafone execs saw much worthy of imitation in the Caudwell’s brain-child, and turned to interim management to ensure these qualities would be absorbed instead of destroyed.

Singlepoint MD Colin Wright says that interim manager Rob Barnard was integral to making the dramatically different cultures work together. “Our restructure plan envisaged over 100 redundancies,” he says. “We had never had any redundancies before and this represented a real risk. Under Rob, we ended up with less than 10. He did a great job for us at a tough time.”

For his work at Vodafone, Barnard won Interim Manager of the year. He’s currently found an opportunity at Carphone Warehouse helping them with their acquisition of AOL.

Richard Smelt is HR director for Carphone Warehouse and says that the organisation has always been open about the debt it owes to interim management.

“We’ve used interims for at least 10 years,” he says. “Where you’ve got a specific goal and a specific timescale, their independence and experience they bring is invaluable. Open-ended assignments don’t always work, so you do need to establish the circumstances, but interim management will always be part of the mix.”