Interim managers play a crucial role in driving organisational change and achieving results within a limited timeframe.
But as interim manager you face significant pressure to deliver fast and deliver effectively. In a recent survey of companies considering interim management, daily rates were the number one concern, followed by concerns about the actual effectiveness. These concerns put interim manager on the spot to perform efficiently and effectively.
Danger of losing the client's team
Loss of trust and cynicism. When your client’s employees perceive that your improvement measures are happening without a genuine effort to understand the root causes of problems, trust in leadership and the overall decision-making process can be eroded.
The team may become skeptical of the intentions behind the changes, leading to cynicism and decreased engagement. Without trust, employees are less likely to support or embrace the restructuring efforts, resulting in decreased productivity and therefore decreased effectiveness of your work.
Danger of overloading the organisation
Most experienced interim manager conduct a thorough analysis of the current situation in their client company. This involves reviewing relevant documentation, conducting interviews with key stakeholders, and analysing available data.
And for most the core part are the face-to-face interviews and process reviews. Their expertise is in designing and executing highly effective processes so they focus on understanding existing processes and probing deeper to find weaknesses, using data mainly to validate the identified process weaknesses.
But most companies in need of interim management support show a wide range of process weaknesses, which either could or actually did contribute to the current underperformance. And overloading an organisation by trying to address too many weaknesses at once is the most frequent error in any turnaround project.
Prioritisation and phasing, based on a proper evaluation of impact versus effort are core to a successful, effective and efficient interim management project.
So how do you know, which of the process weaknesses to prioritise in order to address the situation most efficiently and sustainably?
Use data to identify and target the highest impact weaknesses
Complementing your process analysis with a rigorous root-cause data analysis, allows you to:
1.) Test different potential processes weaknesses and validate their existence
2.) Model the impact of each of the validated weaknesses to identify the high impact issues
The results will help you to prioritise and evaluate impact versus effort.
This approach will ensure that you can:
a.) align the team in clear understanding of the root-causes and their impact
b.) be efficient in generating direct impact by targeting the highest impact weaknesses
c.) deliver sustainable results as you can be sure to address the true root-causes and not some existing, but low impact process weaknesses.
Comments