Great Interim Executives Are Partners

When smart owners hire managers with the intent of working together for a long time, it’s easy to call their relationship – if it works – a partnership. It’s not a partnership in the legal sense and it’s not a partnership in the investment sense, where partners share costs and gains.

But in great working relationships between employer and employee, each looks out for the other. Each invests to build and maintain a good relationship and share the gains of working well together and advancing the mission and economic and social health of the organization.

The problem with rampant outsourcing is that it leads to thinking on the part of employers and contractors that relationships are reduced to a transaction. Pay me X and I’ll perform as ordered. Stop paying me and I’m gone.

The logic is the same whether it’s one contractor or ten thousand. While it is transactional in the letter of the contract, it is not in the spirit of one.

The danger of a purely transactional mindset is that loyalty goes out the window. Loyalty from a boss to an employee and loyalty from an employee or manager to the organization.

In organizations with a strongly transactional bent you can bet that any corporate talk about integrity is a watered-down concept at best.

This is not an argument against outsourcing – far from it – we use outsourcing at InterimExecs to build our company. InterimExecs champions a different model, seizing the benefits of outsourcing matched with a close commitment to the needs of the company.

Whether a RED Team executive is engaged for three months or three years, it’s meant to be a partnership with someone well versed in accountability and the need to produce results.

We screen clients to be organizations aiming for transformational results, acting with integrity and authenticity. We similarly screen rigorously and trust our executives – what we call the RED Team – with upholding high standards and ethics, such that we can all sleep at night knowing everyone is performing impeccably.

We can’t know if the markets will reward our efforts, but we have to know that we’re acting in the best sense as partners, looking out for each other’s best interests. It’s what keeps our business human.

InterimExecs RED Team is an elite group of CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, and CISOs who help organizations through turnaround, growth (merger, acquisitions, ERP/CRM implementation, process improvement), or absence of leadership. Learn more about InterimExecs RED Team at www.interimexecs.com/red-team or call +1 (847) 849-2800.

More Resources:
*What are the Benefits of Interim Managers?
*5 Times Companies Should Choose Interim Management Over a Full-Time Executive