Adventures in interim management

02 February 2004

Calling in an interim manager is the preferred route which matured management takes instead of frittering away its already stretched managerial resources

I have spent most of my corporate life heading the commercial function at the plant level. My brief assignments in corporate offices have not been entirely comfortable; temperamentally I am a hands-on man who likes to see the results of initiatives actually work on the ground.

Very often in my career, I have been frustrated at seeing very important issues being ignored at the ground level because of the way organisations function. Typically, if a crisis occurred, the management would get into a frenzy. A team from the corporate office would examine the issue and then prepare a report followed by an action plan.

The plan would involve appointing a consultant who, after being selected, would require some time to study the problem and the organisation and then suggest solutions — by this time the crisis would have blown over. The 'problem' would then appear on the 'follow up' minutes for a couple of months and then be considered to have been fixed without the real issue having been resolved.

Why organisations adopt this pattern of 'problem-solving' requires to be addressed in a larger management context, but such situations always made me long for 'consultants who implement what they suggest'.