WORKSHIFTER - Dispatches from the New Executive Frontier

A recent study was conducted by Executives Online in the UK, which sought to uncover the latest trends in the fast growing interim management business. They concluded that the interim management sector has grown by orders of magnitude over the past eight years and the potential in this sector is considerable. They go on to say the following:

• Driving this growth has been the need for companies to respond rapidly and flexibly to the increasing pace of change without adding to their long-term overheads-something interim management is ideally placed to do.
• In this cost and results oriented business climate, the question of optimal resourcing is never far from the surface and the debate doesn’t stop at numbers of production workers or front-line customer service staff-it extends straight up to a company’s most senior executive roles.
• Interim Management is defined by them as…the provision of a mature, professional manager, well qualified by relevant practical experience, either to fill a gap in permanent staffing or to deliver a specific business result within a limited time period
• Interim managers are a natural alternative to management consulting. They are often more cost effective, experience in both strategy and implementation, are more results oriented and project focused.
• Organizations which need to transform themselves in some way are logical candidates for the temporary addition of additional senior management talent. Whether the challenge at hand is the integration of an acquisition, a plant closure or relocation, a cultural transformation to produce a more service-oriented ethos, de-layering and streamlining of the organizational structure, or the reorganization of roles to align with a new business process or IT system, an experienced change management professional can often be of great help.

This study predicts a paradigm shift from the traditional view of interim management with its full-time contracts having fixed start and end dates, to a model in which talented executives with specific experience and track records are engaged quickly to deliver a result, via whatever structures their clients prefer.

I predict this is not only a phenomenon in the UK…..it is happening in the US as well!