Many people think that 10-20, or even 30 years spent in professional organizations, mean plenty of professional knowledge to clean up a department or area in a company within 3 to 6, 9 months. Professional experience is a tremendous value in becoming an interim manager. If you have also been a leader for a longer time, you may think you have everything you need to complete the task.

One important thing that many applicants often forget is that situations which require an interim manager are not just professional challenges, but also psychological crises. There may also be some other difficulties: what do I do between two projects when I am a workaholic? What do I do if I do not have a family or if I am divorced and have a new family and a small kid but not able to see the big ones? What do I do if I built my second house and I do not want to work more than 50km away from home any more? What do I do if one day I need to work 16 hours and only 3 hours on another day? What do I do when the offer is extremely good or when the recommended fee is very low? What do I do if I cannot attend a family vacation because I am on a project? These sort of questions could be asked without an end.

A crisis means that the behaviour of those involved is unstable and often unpredictable. In the long run, people in crisis become emotionally tired from many failures and become sensitive.
It is important that professionals who bring their high level of professional knowledge into an existing system not only implement solutions on a process level but also retain people on an emotional level.

Our life takes place on two levels:

1. Process level: what we do, what happens, what our performance is, where we want to get.
2. Emotional level: how we feel while processes are going on.

An interim manager brings in his knowledge at the process level, but at the same time, he has to support the participants emotionally from the very first moment. There are many ways to help people emotionally, from listening to complaints to standing up for someone in a conflict situation. An interim is efficient if, in addition to the professional knowledge, she/he also develops psychological skills in order to have as many tools as possible when working for a company in trouble or for the people in it.

In 3 to 6, 9 months not only the processes but also the people need to be reorganised. Otherwise, there will be no self-propelled changes that the interim can bring. The psychological preparation of a professional interim is essential.

A proper service provider takes already at the selection process the challenges into account which the interim managers have to meet. It also supports and develops the interim managers through individual and group training or coaching programs during and between the projects.

Let us not forget the words of our Dutch professor Jacques Reijniers: The competencies of today’s Interim managers are the competencies of future managers.

Zsuzsa Tóvári
sports psychologist, Chief Relationship Officer at Hammel & Hochreiter

Source: Hrportál