Most companies in Northern Norway are small. The management team is three or four people, and each of them holds more roles than their title suggests. The one responsible for sales also has marketing. The one with finance also has personnel. And the managing director has everything that does not fit anywhere else.
It works, until it doesn’t. One person leaves. Or the company grows into a need it has never had before – someone to build up the commercial side, someone to take responsibility for the organisation as it grows, someone to take communications out of the managing director’s inbox. In a large company, someone is appointed to act in the role. In a small company, there is no one to step in. So the managing director does the job, on top of their own, while the recruitment runs.
And it can run for a while. The right person is not necessarily available at the moment the company needs them – and the right person is worth waiting for. In the meantime, much of what nobody owns is left lying. Not because nobody cares, but because everyone already has a full job.
That is the situation I want to be useful in.
I don’t think of interim management only as filling the managing director’s chair. I think of it as taking a leadership role where a person or a capability is missing, for a defined period, with responsibility for that area. It might be the commercial side – market, sales, new customers. It might be the organisation – the management team, the structure, the people to be recruited and developed. It might be communications. I have held all of those roles myself, in companies of different sizes, and I have been the managing director responsible for making them fit together.
What matters to me is that I join the management team – not sit alongside it. I am given goals for my area, and I deliver on them on the same terms as everyone else. That is the difference between a colleague and an adviser. And we agree on one thing before I start: am I keeping the area running until you have hired, or am I building it up? Both are right in different situations, but it has to be settled.
How long the assignment lasts follows from that answer. If I am keeping the area running, I am done the day the new person starts. If I am building it up, it takes the time it takes – and then it is better that I stay until it stands, and help find and bring in the person who will take over. What matters most is that the company does not have to choose between hiring too early and leaving it lying.
If you recognise the situation – a role nobody holds, and a recruitment that takes time – I would be glad to talk.