The Interim's Inspiration
Defining success for short term leadership engagements
In the Ferrari Museum of Maranello, Italy, sits the race car called the Interim. In 1959 only seven of them were built. They represented the chassis of prior years while acting as harbinger for exciting new Pinin Farina body designs. The Interim, while few in numbers, was the bridge to transformation -- classical foundation driving future brilliance. Its history as a model was brief. It did its job. It bequeathed a legacy of change and a metaphor for transition during high-speed times.
In the late 1950’s Ferrari was confronting a structural shift in racing. Ferrari’s focus was power and endurance in grand touring competition, but the new equation of success was power and agility. The exoticar's competitors were driving toward racetrack balance, prompting changes toward mid-engine architectures and tight circuitry. Like most companies today who face the brave new world of AI integration and governance, the Italian icon of seventy years ago was rethinking the definition of performance.
Rivals like Jaguar, Aston Martin, and Lotus were accelerating their vehicle designs, innovating, experimenting, and shortening design cycles.
Similar to today’s AI races for LLM dominance and rapid integration, the automotive firms either accelerated their development or were left in the dust. To maintain Ferrari's brand reputation, a bridge between the previous generation and the next generation was the Interim’s contribution. Sustaining, Refining, and Transforming. The Interim met the challenge.
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Change is in the air. As it always is. Wait long enough and the weather’s breath strikes you again; our world evolves and our environment bends with socio-economic winds.
Over the past generation, Information Technology organizations optimized for stability, throughput, and control. Now AI-era organizations are optimizing for adaptability, learning speed, and responsiveness.
With change comes new faces, in our organizations and our lives. Some faces depart for new journeys, and some faces arrive to briefly help existing journeys. They are called interim leaders, hired for short term assistance until new decisions or permanence is settled.
The most successful interims align to this concept, and adjust according to the depth of need. The prerequisite for hiring them, however, is to define why you need them – something that is often shortcut and poorly executed.
Many years ago, I heard a reference to interim leaders as “babysitters” until the “permanent” successor is molded from within, or discovered outside. The characterization is offensive to the interim leader. And it is offensive to the leader’s reporting team -- especially those leaders who embrace their role as change agent, orchestrator, or sculptor.
For leaders who consult, the interim position can be the most gratifying, inspiring and “impactful” experience that one has experienced.
Interims are the bridges, walking us from learned history to yearned future. Companies of wisdom seek eyes with varied paradigms, versatile skills, and veritable trust. As interim leader, you’ve not much time to deliver that.
Their objectives are part of a continuum: they can sustain; they can refine; they can transform.
Sustaining leaders are often engaged for 3 – 5 months. But sustaining is not idling. The corporate mandate, given the current activity of the group may require an operational manager who can continue the success of the previous leader.
This is not stagnation. And it is not easy.
All organizations have had periods where operations were generally robust, but enhancement fuel was running on fumes. If you believe current processes are optimal, you misunderstand the roaring innovation landscape.
Optimized processes are fleeting, given dynamics of change. Sustaining interim leaders are those who perceive the stresses and anomalies, identifying opportunities and recommending adjustments. That interim leader should bequeath analytical assessment of the environment, make some incremental changes no matter how conservative the “interim” period. They create a roadmap for continuous improvement.
The sustaining interim leader is she who ensures the ship of state is clear, explainable and rational. Successors to the sustaining interim leader should be inheriting a department or a company that is perfectly defined in its organizational raison d’être, touch points, and operating model. Further, the information provided to the successor is perfectly suited to AI deliberation — where we can accelerate processes or seal leaks.
Conversely, fixing defects, filling gaps, and running around to cover ignored and festering process liabilities without a go-forward plan are unfair to the incoming successor. And this results in unfinished promises and reputational decay of the sustaining interim leader.
Refining interim leaders are of modest duration, but often require at least six months to institutionalize improvements, measure the group’s viability, and generate cost savings. The refining leader manages and directs by way of a holistic view of the project/innovation portfolio, its impact and dependency on suppliers, business processes, services and stakeholders.
That leader mandates a portfolio management mindset and a business-impact perspective. For AI brainstorming and execution, this means a taxonomical review of process costs and process contributions to the firm.
Why do we hear the recurring whispers that AI returns are not being met? Because their measurements were faulty, their data was not refined, and there is ambiguity in how use cases are financially managed.
The legacy value of the refining interim leader is a project and service view of the group’s value chain, and a use case hierarchy of AI process candidacy -- a dashboard of projects with explained prioritization, and their intersection with AI business activities. The refining interim leader identifies the order of AI projects with transparency, based on a rational assessment of feasibility and AI potential.
This is welcome and formidable knowledge for the successor.
Transforming interim leaders will require nearly twelve months or longer, entrusted with strategic creation and strategic planning. Both sustaining and refining attributes are present in the transforming leader, especially a financial appraisal of a group’s services; but the real challenge is in reshaping the value proposition or the means of production.
Any transformation demands mobilization of workforces, capturing the buy-in of fellow executives. The transforming interim leader is expected to leave a legacy of optimization and rigor, and a thorough roadmap for the succeeding years; the successor can carry on the approach and vision of the transforming interim.
This is not an undermining of successors, be they internal candidates or external ones. This is not stating that a successor is incapable of transformation.
But transformational plans do not have the luxury of time; they must be launched as aggressively as competitors are launching theirs. The successor of the transforming interim leader should possess the foresight and the experience to evaluate the interim’s strategy, adapt nuance or modification based on new information, and mold it into a sustainable competitive advantage. Quickly.
The transforming interim leader always recognizes the changing nature of the innovation economy, and provides rationales on how the strategy was developed.
Interim Legacy
The periodicity for each type of interim leader is variable, of course. But consider the expectation of the permanent successor, the expected time frame for determining or discovering a successor, and the critical needs of the organization.
What is your formal expectation of your interim leader?
What is that interim supposed to prove and hand off?
You may not demand race car speed, but your interim role should be specific and measurable, leaving behind a legacy — a smooth operational state, or a refined vision of the portfolio, or a strategic culture that can be realized.
When the successor arrives at the doorstep, how much time is wasted if her “100 days” of observation are consumed by absorbing tribal knowledge, interpreting the whys of activities, and trying to determine the value propositions of her departments?
Your greatest success as “interim” is meeting the challenges of sustaining, refining, or transforming. Set your vision and your understanding of the role, the time constraints, and the feasible outcome.
The interim leader is neither placeholder nor stopgap, but a change agent for the company’s survival. In Ferrari’s history, the Interim was the bridge of adaptation, embracing the pedigree of yesterday to inspire greatness for tomorrow.
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* Scheidel’s quote from his article at https://www.carrozzieri-italiani.com/the-ferrari-250-gt-interim-bridging-the-gap-between-icons/