My Biography

I have recently graduated from the University of Warwick with a degree in History and Politics, Studying history has provided me with an excellent background in research and analysis, whilst my politics background has afforded me valuable communication skills with people from all walks of life. These skills have come in handy as I look to begin my career in recruitment. In my free time I still try and keep up with current affairs, read, and play football.

My Areas of Expertise

Research
Communication
Data Analysis

My Languages

English

My Interests

Reading
Football
Hiking

Line managers are at the forefront of recruitment, retention, and contract extension—three critical pillars that directly impact an organisation's performance. Here's a look at how line managers can navigate these challenges while leveraging the unique advantages of interim professionals.

Recruitment: Finding the Right Fit Quickly

For line managers, recruitment is often a race against time. Vacancies need to be filled promptly to ensure that operations continue smoothly, yet finding the right talent is no easy feat. This challenge is even more pronounced when hiring interim managers, who are expected to deliver immediate results. The pressure to identify candidates with the right mix of expertise, industry knowledge, and cultural fit can be overwhelming.

To address this, line managers must streamline the recruitment process, focusing on clear, concise job descriptions and leveraging specialized recruitment agencies like Malikshaw Interim & Executive that understand the nuances of interim roles.

Retention: Keeping Talent Engaged

Retention is a well-known challenge in line management. Keeping permanent employees motivated and engaged is critical, but with interim managers, the dynamics are different. Interim professionals typically have shorter contracts and are often highly focused on specific objectives. However, their engagement is crucial, as their performance can significantly impact the success of a project or initiative.

To retain interim managers, line managers must create an environment where they feel valued and empowered. Regular check-ins, clear communication of expectations, and recognition of their contributions can go a long way. It’s also important to integrate them into the team culture, making them feel like part of the organisation, even if their stay is temporary.

Contract Extension: Balancing Needs and Expectations

Extending contracts for interim managers presents its own set of challenges. While an interim manager may have successfully led a project, extending their contract requires careful consideration. Line managers must weigh the benefits of continuity against the potential for over-reliance on interim solutions.

When considering an extension, line managers should evaluate the interim manager's performance, the ongoing needs of the project, and the availability of internal talent to take over. Open dialogue with the interim manager about their interest in continuing and the conditions under which they would stay is essential. Balancing the organisation’s needs with the interim manager’s expectations is key to making informed decisions that benefit both parties.

Conclusion: Strategic Line Management

By adopting a strategic approach—focusing on clear recruitment processes, fostering engagement, and making informed extension decisions—line managers can effectively manage these challenges. Interim managers, when well-integrated and properly supported, can provide invaluable expertise and agility, helping organisations navigate periods of change and drive success in critical projects.

Scholars commonly credit the ancient Romans with publishing the first newspaper, Acta Diurna, or daily doings, in 59 BCE. Although no copies of this paper have survived, it is widely believed to have published chronicles of events, assemblies, births, deaths, and daily gossip.

In 1566, another ancestor of the modern newspaper appeared in Venice, Italy. These avisi, or gazettes, were handwritten and focused on politics and military conflicts.  However, the absence of printing-press technology greatly limited the circulation for both the Acta Diurna and the Venetian papers.

The game changer came when Johannes Gutenberg’s invented a movable-type press that permitted the high-quality reproduction of printed materials at a rate of nearly 4,000 pages per day, or 1,000 times more than could be done by a scribe by hand.  This innovation drove down the price of printed materials and, for the first time, made them accessible to a mass market. Overnight, the new printing press transformed the scope and reach of the newspaper, paving the way for modern-day journalism.

The first weekly newspapers to employ Gutenberg’s press emerged in 1609. German language papers, Relations: Aller Furnemmen, and Aviso Relations over Zeitung, were a success, and newspapers quickly spread throughout Central Europe. Over the next 5 years, weeklies popped up in Basel, Frankfurt, Vienna, Hamburg, Berlin, and Amsterdam. In 1621, England printed its first paper under the title Corante, or weekely newes from Italy, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Bohemia, France and the Low Countreys. By 1641, a newspaper was printed in almost every country in Europe as publication spread to France, Italy, and Spain.

But printed newspapers have been in decline for many years now. 

The newspaper industry has always been cyclical, and the industry has weathered previous troughs. Television's arrival in the 1950s began the decline of newspapers as most people's source of daily news. But the explosion of the Internet in the 1990s increased the range of media choices available to the average reader while further cutting into newspapers' dominance as the source of news.

Press baron Rupert Murdoch once described the profits flowing from his stable of newspapers as "rivers of gold", but several years later said, "sometimes rivers dry up." "Simply put", wrote The Buffalo News owner Warren Buffett, "if cable and satellite broadcasting, as well as the Internet, had come along first, newspapers as we know them probably would never have existed."

Ironically, these dilemmas facing the newspaper industry come as its product has never been more sought-after.

As the demand for news has exploded, so have consumers of the output of newspapers.

Naturally, therefore, newspapers have needed to undergo their own form of transformation to compete in the modern world.  Some are succeeding. Others not so.  Indeed, a 2023 Department for Culture, Media and Sport committee report revealed that over 300 local newspaper titles closed between 2009 and 2019, and that those who remain are having to compete with fewer resources and journalists against online news providers.

In January 2024, Jim Mullen, the boss of Reach plc who owns several national newspapers including the Daily Express and Daily Mirror as well as several local titles such as the Manchester Evening News warned that the print newspaper business could become loss-making within 5 years.

So, is anyone fighting back and winning?

Well, in spite of all those stories about failed transformations, the New York Times is certainly putting up a good fight. They have made the challenge of moving a business from legacy to digital almost look easy (put up an early paywall, launch podcasts, hire armies of the best people (one of Pulitzer-prize-worthy millennial journalists, and another of product people), and have the leadership spend every Friday afternoon on strategy). But a full digital pivot is an anomaly, and successful examples, while they have important things to teach, are far from simple.

Drawing from Tolstoy, every legacy organisation that has succeeded in a digital transformation has done it in its own way and often this is not about technology. The common theme derived from the countless interviews we ourselves have held with leading transformation practitioners is that it is the internal changes to how an organisation operates that prove critical to success. The culture, leadership, talent and the many micro changes in how people make decisions and interact on a daily basis and win Hearts and Minds.

Indeed, similarly to the New York Times, the Guardian in the UK led a digital pivot that has clearly transformed their business and their trajectory.  And much in tune with what Tolstoy mentions above about unique factors, theirs has been brought about through the use of data. An analytics tool, in fact, named Ophan.

Ophan has been credited with providing visibility of a level of data and analytics that no other newsroom was able to boast. With a dashboard that displayed to the nth degree page views, attention time, social referrers, the breakdown of readership, where they have come from, where they went to next, who were the biggest Twitter/X influencers, we could go on, Ophan became a peerless example of disruptive technology emerging from within a legacy newsroom going on to change the fabric of the entire organisation.

And, whilst this pioneering work is well known in the sector, the cultural dimensions perhaps less so.

The starting point was one person’s goal of improving the readership of articles when they moved from print to digital. But of course, like in many change projects, progress was difficult. Entrenched cultural values were blocking change – and data emerged as a solution.

The first data tool was a morning email, which was initially distributed to just four top people, out of a concern that that data insights might skew journalists away from serious subjects. It showed what worked yesterday and what didn’t.  The next step was to introduce data insights in a very limited way into the morning meeting allowing the team to build on this and push certain messages.

By this time, the data was clearly leading the organisation to understand that it needed to grow traffic.  And linking this back to the theme of this newsletter, maybe this was one of those realisation moments that print really was on its way out and that online readership had to be the future. Who really knows, but it was clear that the next step was to set up a system to review headlines before they went digital. But here was the next problem, culture didn’t allow someone to say, ‘you’re writing the wrong headline’ as it couldn’t be proved, and the very limited system providing the data insights clearly wasn’t scalable.

Within 24 hours, one of the developers had hacked up the SEO dashboard, as it was then called, which showed everything that had happened on the Guardian site in the previous 3 minutes. And so Ophan was born.

As this data analysis dashboard grew, so was the organisation’s ability to nudge the culture.  A little tweak here, a little tweak there and people became enthused, empowered and started to see the real value in the data. Which articles worked (e.g. by readership numbers, or how long they stayed on an article), and which headlines didn’t. And a critical nudge came when a benchmark was set for minimum readership. If it doesn’t meet X page views, do we really care about it? And, if we do, what went wrong?

The point here is that, as Tolstoy says, change is delivered by a number of means. Each legacy organisation that has pulled off a digital transformation has done it in its own way. It has found its own levers.  In the case of the Guardian, it was data interventions that have proven to be the catalyst to deliver both cultural change and strategic change. But there is a proviso, and that is that there needs to be clarity around what needs to be delivered from the start. 

“My job was to take what we did in print and put it online”. And it worked.

Interim management involves bringing in experienced professionals to temporarily fill senior executive positions during periods of transition. These seasoned experts are often brought in during crises, to manage change, or to bridge gaps while a permanent executive is sought. Unlike traditional consultants, interim managers take on operational roles with full accountability, making them integral to the organisation’s leadership team during their tenure

Succession planning is a proactive process of identifying and developing future leaders within an organisation to ensure a seamless transition when key roles become vacant. It’s not just about having a list of potential candidates but involves preparing these individuals through training, mentorship, and development opportunities.

Interim management can significantly enhance this process in several ways:

1. Gap Filling with Expertise: 
   Interim managers provide an immediate solution to leadership gaps which buys the organisation time to make thoughtful, strategic decisions about permanent appointments rather than rushing to fill a vacancy. Moreover, these interim professionals bring a wealth of experience and a fresh perspective, often identifying and nurturing internal talent that may have been overlooked. 
   
   
2. Mentoring and Developing Potential Successors: 
   With their extensive experience and objective viewpoint, good interims can guide emerging leaders, offering insights and practical advice. This real-time coaching is invaluable in preparing future leaders, not just for their next role but for the overall challenges of executive leadership. 
   
   
3. Enhancing Organisational Agility: 
   The right interim manager can introduce a level of flexibility and agility to the organisation that is crucial for effective succession planning. They can help the organisation adapt its succession strategies in response to changing business conditions, ensuring that the leadership pipeline remains robust and relevant. 
   
   
4. Evaluating Internal Talent: 
   An external perspective, free from internal biases, can be invaluable when assessing the potential of internal candidates objectively. 
   
   
5. Implementing Best Practices: 
   Interim managers often bring with them a wealth of knowledge from their experiences across various industries and companies. They can introduce best practices in succession planning that the organisation may not have considered, thereby strengthening the overall process. These practices could include more rigorous talent assessments, improved leadership development programs, or more strategic alignment of the succession plan with the organisation’s long-term goals. 
   
   

Case Study: How Interim Management Transformed Succession Planning

Consider a mid-sized technology company that unexpectedly lost its CEO due to health reasons. The board appointed an interim CEO to manage the transition. During their tenure, the interim CEO identified gaps in the company’s leadership pipeline, particularly the lack of readiness among senior managers to step into executive roles.

The interim CEO implemented a structured leadership development program, introduced new assessment tools to evaluate potential successors, and worked closely with the HR team to align the company’s talent management strategy with its long-term goals. As a result, when the board finally appointed a permanent CEO, they had a clear, well-prepared pool of candidates for other key leadership positions, reducing the risk of future disruptions.

In conclusion, interim management plays a critical role in improving succession planning, offering a strategic advantage that can help organisations navigate the complexities of leadership transitions with confidence and foresight.