Interim management across your leadership functions.

“Will my teams accept them?”

That is settled before they arrive, not after. What the teams are told, who tells them, and what becomes of the predecessor decide the first three weeks.

An interim manager arrives with no history in the house and with an assignment nobody chose alongside them. The managers already in place usually know a post has opened, and sometimes that they could have filled it. Say who announces the appointment, to whom, and in what order:

• governance
• neighbouring directors
• the direct team
• employee representatives, where the scope calls for it

Name the predecessor's place. Whether they have left, are working their notice, moved up a level or stayed on another scope, the teams will keep going to them until someone says where decisions now sit. This is the point that costs most when it is left implicit.

Then write down the delegations: what the manager signs, what they commit, what goes up to the committee. Authority announced and contradicted three weeks later cannot be recovered.

“How do I judge someone whose assignments are confidential?”

By changing what you check: not a company name, a situation taken over. Ask what state the scope was in on arrival and what they decided in the first month.

Most interim assignments cannot be told openly: the client would rather the market did not know it went through that period. Named references are therefore often missing, and that is normal. What can be checked is the situation: the state of the scope on arrival, the decisions taken in the first weeks, the ones postponed and why.

Ask for an assignment comparable to yours in kind, not in sector. Covering a leadership gap, running a transformation and turning an activity around call for neither the same temperament nor the same method, and a sector is learned faster than a type of situation.

Listen to what they say about leaving. Someone who describes precisely whom they handed over to, with which files and over how many weeks, is describing an assignment they actually saw through.

“Who carries the decisions once they have gone?”

An interim manager can decide what a permanent one could not. But a decision nobody inside takes on comes undone within the year.

That is often the very reason for the call: reorganise, stop a programme, renegotiate a contract, settle an old trade-off. The assignment makes it possible to carry those decisions without paying the social cost over ten years. Someone still has to own them once it ends.

Name that internal sponsor when the assignment is written, not at the end: a director, a board member, someone on the committee. They are the one who will later say the decision was right, and the one the manager should be settling questions with along the way.

Plan what gets handed over too:

• the decisions taken and the reasons for them
• the commitments made to clients, partners or authorities
• the files the successor will have to pick up as they are

“Interim or permanent: what decides it?”

The nature of the decision to be taken, not the urgency. A situation to take over calls for an assignment; a function to hold over time calls for a hire.

Three questions usually settle it.

• Does the responsibility have an identifiable end, or must it still exist in three years?
• Do the decisions expected commit the company beyond the period, and who will live with them?
• Is the role easy to find in your market, or will the search take months the business cannot wait for?

The two routes combine more often than people think. An assignment can hold the function while the search runs, provided it is written that way from the start: the manager then knows they are preparing someone else's arrival, not their own.

Describe the situation to us rather than the post. The form, assignment or hire, is settled at the end of that conversation.