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John Bloor from Boyden Interim Management gives his views on the role that interim managers can play in restoring an underperforming business to health.

More often than not it’s a business’ stakeholders that determine it is seriously underperforming and has to be restructured and turned around. The directors – assuming they are still there – will then have several obstacles to overcome. They have to re-establish their credibility, convince whoever they need to convince that they can do the job and come up with a credible plan that includes a detailed route map for their journey to success.

More than likely, they will be on unfamiliar ground. Stakeholders will have become more demanding and difficult to read. Directors will be under considerable pressure to deliver improvements quickly, which usually means attacking costs before revenues; and as a consequence there will be some tough messages to be given to a workforce already questioning the competence of senior management.

Perhaps for the first time the directors will be negotiating from a position of weakness with the business’s key stakeholders – certainly its financial backers – and this can create enormous stress and tension. So much so that in trying to manage the crisis, the business itself may not get managed at all. This is where interim managers come in.

Unlike change, turnaround and restructuring are not stages in the life of a company that can be described as business as usual. They can only be temporary – programmes that get a company from condition ‘A’ to the desired condition ‘B’ – or the business will fail. Rarely do you find a business manager whose effectiveness stretches across the whole corporate life cycle and at no stage in the cycle is it more important to have the right team in place than when trying to reverse a company’s decline in front of an audience that is at best fidgety, at worst downright hostile.

The interim manager’s role in turnaround and restructuring can be varied; providing temporary leadership to the enterprise; leading critical aspects of the programme as a chief restructuring officer; taking charge of a critical function such as finance, HR or operations; providing support at an operating level in these areas; or taking more of a discreet role supporting and mentoring the senior team.

By engaging an interim manager the company is buying in skills, experience and credibility that are in short supply or don’t exist in the business and are needed urgently - but not for ever. From the perspective of a company and its stakeholders the issue is right team, right place, right time and this is what the interim management industry provides.

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