Steady the ship but don’t get under your successor’s feet! – Life as an interim!

Here are a few Q&As I wrote recently with my thoughts on working as an interim in the charity sector. How do you make sure that you can get up & running quickly for an interim? For a “high-speed induction”, I read as many key documents as I can as well as poring over the organisation’s website, audited accounts and any other publicly available information. I also make sure that I speak to as many key people as possible – not necessarily the most senior people, but team members, previous or outgoing postholder, people they work closely with. As I go through this literature and these meetings, I tend to type and scribble a lot and come up with lots of follow up questions. With the discussions, I try and ask very open questions, and as soon as I am ready, I will play back to the person who has hired me what I think will be the main areas of my work, for clarity and to set expectations. For example, in my most recent interim appointment, those headings were set on the first day, and remain, as follows: people, processes, pipeline. Have you got some examples of where you’ve been able to make a particular impact when doing an interim? In several interim roles in recent years, I’ve been appointed to “steady the ship” – to bring the best out of a team, who may otherwise have lacked leadership due to the departure of the most recent team leader. I really enjoy this aspect, getting to know them, to understand what makes them tick, and how to ge