I heard it again yesterday. A person mentioned that companies who are in a “crisis” or in a “turnaround” situation should consider interim management in operations, finance, sales, or marketing. That is a true statement, but the majority of interim engagements are not in troubled companies.

Just because a company brings in an interim manager it isn’t a sign the company is in trouble.

Most interim marketing and sales executives, for instance, are engaged by a company to address one or more of these situations:

• Revenue growth has flat-lined, or is in decline. What worked in the past isn’t working now and the management team needs objective insight, new energy and different skill sets for a season to help them point the growth curve in the right direction again.

• There’s a temporary gap in leadership, gap in skill set, or gap in bandwidth that has an unacceptably high opportunity cost associated with the gap.

There should be no scarlet letter associated with the hiring of an on-demand leader. It simply means the company is very smart about how it allocates its resources.

Chuck Besondy is a principal at One Accord Partners and is co-author of Leadership on Demand: How Smart CEO’s Tap Interim Management to Drive Revenue. You can read more about Interim Sales and Marketing Management by Chuck Besondy at his blog One Riot-One Ranger.

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