On this episode of business today, Pam and Kristen talk about why interim management is every CEOs secret weapon.
Full Transcript below:
SEAKER: Kristen
And as you scale a company you really can’t do it without people and talent which is why everyone is such in a rush to get the right talent in the right places with large scale companies to grow them. We’ve got everyone in place including our leadership team and then John walks in the door on Friday morning, my number two, my right hand and says.
SPEAKER: Pamela
I’m leaving. Everyone has experience that at one time or another.
SPEAKER: Kristen
My heart sinks if it’s not going into heart attack mode.
SPEAKER: Pamela
It happens.
SPEAKER: Kristen
And this happens everything from John decides he’s leaving as of Monday, he may offer me two weeks’ notice. I have two weeks to get someone else in place. I cannot go without my right. Without a right hand what do I do?
SPEAKER: Pamela
You know it’s interesting. We all need to not be blindsided by this because think about the talent market right now. It is so tight. Talent is in such demand that no matter how well you know your employees. Somebody can come in and steal one right out from under you. So yes you want to take very good care of your employees that they don’t do that but sometimes money talks and they’re going to leave no matter what you’re doing for them. So you have to be ready, you have to have a solution that you can quickly implement to be able to fill that position, should something like that happen.
SPEAKER: Kristen
Personally I think that every CEO and their succession plan, it should be kind of like a trust or a will if anything happens call my attorney. They’ve got everything, you ever see on needs to have in case of anything. You’re Cerius. Call their number. I’ve talked to Cerius. I know exactly what they know my company. They know my leadership team, they know everything I need. Call them in case of emergency and fortunately that doesn’t happen. We get the phone call at 4:00 on a Friday afternoon that says my CFO or my CEO just gave notice, they gave me two weeks’ notice. How quick can you get someone in your training, we’ve had them in there by Tuesday Wednesday. We can absolutely interim management can be used for those cases but there’s a number of other scenarios.
SPEAKER: Pamela
Absolutely. Absolutely. So another one is you want to promote someone, they’ve been really good in their job but there’s no one to succeed them. They have no one they can step up to take the roles of a sudden, you leave them in that position. That’s true. That can happen and what can happen from that scenario is that person will leave because they’re not getting promoted so you don’t want that to happen. So you have to make sure you have some kind of succession plan in place to be able to move people around or you have a scenario where that person really needs to go back, like they really meant to go they were meant to go a year ago but you didn’t do a thing about it. Well you need to do something about those people because all they’re doing is hurting the growth of your company.
SPEAKER: Kristen
And that’s a tough one because we all have their sacred cows or otherwise. We all have someone, we look at our leadership team, you know either the company and most the time we here. My company has outgrown them. And that’s a really tough move because there’s two decision points there. One, how do I replace them with someone who is the right person and what I do with this individual? Sometimes you can upscale them. We’ve done shadow programs where we’ve brought in let’s say an interim CEO to work with the operations manager or director of operations coach then gave them the till the toolkits worked with them for six to 12 months and they were actually able to step into that role and be saved. Actually I love that story as I manufacturer about 15 million and that individual is still on board and that CEO comes in every year as th