Nick Diprose of Holdsway and Professor Steve Woods of Surrey Business School were at the British Academy of Management Conference 2019 at Aston Business School this week to present the paper they co-authored on interim management.

Their paper, Effective Interim Leadership and Management: Development of a Cyclical Model of Interim Assignments is the fruit of world-leading research, recognising the growing use of interims in organisations, and the importance of their contribution in uncertain times. They contend that this improved understanding is critical from a human resources perspective. They propose a framework for interim assignments – the interim assignment cycle – comprising the stages of preparation, entry, delivery and exit.

Interims are arguably the silent and often unnoticed guardians of business sustainability. They make the difference in many situations between a business surviving or failing during difficult times. As management and business environments become increasingly uncertain and turbulent, they perceive a growing need for the contributions of interims to continuity and long-term sustainability of organisations.

This background, the current high degree of informality of interim deployment in practice, and the limited evidence base that they have uncovered, collectively indicate a pressing need for management scholars to better understand why and how interims are effective in their assignments, and to inform human resource management practices on how they are selected, deployed and managed. Their review and proposal of the interim assignment cycle are offered as a foundation stone for this future research effort.

The paper, published at BAM Conference 2019, is downloadable here.

Holdsway is independently ranked by the Institute of Interim Management as one of the UK’s leading interim management firms. The interim executives they introduce help organisations accelerate change, manage transition and deal with uncertainty.

Surrey Business School actively promote business engagement and knowledge-sharing, enabling businesses to benefit from the expertise of world-class academics and cutting-edge research facilities to enhance industry competitiveness, productivity and performance.

BAM is the leading authority on the academic field of management in the UK, supporting and representing the community of scholars and engaging with international peers.