Effective Interim Leadership and Management

Last September, the British Academy of Management (BAM: http://www.bam.ac.uk/) held a conference at University of Aston – BAM2019, where the attached paper was presented.

Co-authored by Prof. Stephen Woods, Dr. Geoff Thomas (both University of Surrey) and Mary Murphy and Nick Diprose (both of Holdsway), it provides a very good summary of the available academic literature related to interim leadership and management.

They also propose a ‘4-box’ or Johari window model for the stages of any interim assignment and consider the personality traits, competencies and leadership styles seen as most relevant in the literature for each stage of the assignment process ( preparation; entry; delivery; exit ).

The proposed model feels intuitively reasonable to this practitioner, with the possible improvement in representing reality that stages 2, 3 and 4 tend to run in a phased but parallel manner, not neat sequence.

It would be interesting to be able to add additional primary investigative work to the discussion, such as that conducted by Anton Fishman (“Interim Executives achieve goals 20x faster” 2010 – see attached article) or “Pillars of Transformation” by Savannah Executive Search & Interim (2019), or “Executive Team Effectiveness” by Optima (2014) but much of this has been commercially confidential and therefore not easily accessible for peer review.

Online_IIM Summary of Anton Fishman Research

EFFECTIVE-INTERIM-LEADERSHIP-MANAGEMENT_BAM-Paper_