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 get the best out of them. There is such talent out there, and it’s a real pleasure to see people develop and give of their best! I have also frequently helped the organisations I’ve worked with to set their fundraising strategic directions, and often helped them to recruit their permanent leaders – I enjoy those bits very much too, and like to think that they have great impact.
- What are some of the challenges of being an interim & how do you handle them?
Managing expectations about how quickly we can effect change is normally the main challenge, especially given that the interim role will often be working fewer days a week than the previous or next permanent incumbent. Sometimes something’s got to give, and it might be taking part in senior management or other process-focused meetings, for example. I’m also careful to ensure that while I’m suggesting or enacting strategic change or different ways of doing things, it shouldn’t be “set in stone” for the next person to then feel they can’t change anything. I handle this by ensuring that there is “rowking” and reasoning for all the changes, strategies and suggestions that I make, for example that they’re rooted in an understanding of the data or people and processes involved.
- What’s important for wrapping up an interim and handing over?
I’ve thought about this a lot! I’ve found it’s important to do a lot of signposting, because there’s no way that the person you’re handing over to will be able to take in even the most cogent summary of your thinking that you’ve built up over however many months. So ideally, there’ll be an overlap of a couple of meetings, but it’s important I’ve found not to be “under their feet” either once they’ve started, so I tend to move out of the way within a week or so, but be available down the line for all the questions they hadn’t thought of in the first few days of handover.
