Link, share, join, listen ...
Link, share, join, listen ...
It can be a competitive market being an interim.
Which begs an obvious question, but one I think we rarely ask to those interims who are constantly in demand; those whose names are top of everyone’s mind; and those who rarely have a break between assignments – except by choice:
What’s the secret of their success?
Is it:
- An “interim” mindset and love of complex challenges?
- Current industry expertise (and thereby associated credibility as an external resource)?
- Deep specialism in a burgeoning market?
- A catch-all CV which can be tailored according to role?
- Extensive networking, even when on assignment?
- Softer skills: good interview technique, ability to adapt to different styles of working and general, all-round “good egg”?
Your thoughts would be appreciated. Clearly the ideal would be to have all of these – but which of these factors is key?
And who knows, your comments may be doing your bit to help others who are newer to the market.
Liz Sinclair is the Key Account Director for Interim Partners.
Click here to read other blogs on the Financial Services sector
Jargon like “blue-sky thinking”, “it’s not rocket science” and “critical path” (think literally with this last one and it will make you smile) are commonplace in business everywhere now.
New phrases are springing up every day; some more annoying than others (“net-net” a particular case in point for me). As a quick tally, there are easily five words I can think of immediately which simply mean making contact with someone – namely; reach out, touch, plug in, touch base and reconnect.
This fashion for using jargon shows that we are what exactly? The undoubted aim is to appear punchy, on the ball, driven and “with it” in our use of language. Yet it goes much further and deeper when you start to investigate technical and sector jargon. If you’re in Retail, you’re surrounded by SKUs and POS; in Financial Services FATCA, MIFID and SOX are the “name of the game”.
In my view, these acronyms all enhance the elitism of each sector. Although you could argue that they are intended to shorten words for speed, often this isn’t the case. Alternatively, nobody knows what they mean anyway.
I would be interested to hear your thoughts on business jargon. Is it good, bad or are you indifferent? I hate it but find myself joining in the trend for irritating words despite myself on occasion!
And finally, do we think that text speak is entering business language? LOL and OMG have been spotted in emails received by Interim Partners.
Oh, and don’t get me started on smiley faces 
I’d love to hear your thoughts. In the meantime, I’m off to push the envelope.
Liz Sinclair is the Financial Services Account Director for Interim Partners.
Click here to read other blogs on the Financial Services sector
It occurred to me recently that we are quite an insular nation, us British.
In a previous life, I remember being headhunted for my cross-sector industry experience. During the interview process, I was told that it would be incredibly helpful to have a “fresh perspective” – i.e. to take the learnings from my previous companies and think about how they could do things differently.
The reality couldn’t be further from the truth. I quickly learnt that mentioning best practice from my other company had the new team running for the hills, determined that their way was the best!
In my current role, it would seem that that trend is continuing.
Understandably, clients are keen for interim candidates to have relevant experience of their sector (although you could argue that, as in my case, other sectors may be useful too). So we place financial services lifers into Financial Services companies, retailers into Retail and so on – and in this risk-averse economic market, it doesn’t look set to change any time soon.
But a constant refrain from interims across our network is that they do have transferrable skills on the whole, whether it be Business Transformation, HR or Finance to name but a few.
And with a little faith on the part of the client, they believe they can do a great job.
What do you think? As a client, would you take a risk and hire an interim from outside your sector?
In my view, the only time it really happens nowadays is when someone comes recommended through direct sources – and I don’t hear of too many failures in these cases.
Liz Sinclair is the Account Director at Interim Partners.
Click here to read other blogs on the Financial Services sector
PricewaterhouseCoopers is on track to receive a record 30,000 applications for its graduate entry scheme with just 1200 places available - the latest indicator of the strains in the British labour market. That’s an amazing twenty-five applications for every one place.
This figure is 50% higher than the 20,000 applications received for its 2011 intake. Ian Powell, Chairman and Senior Partner, notes however that one of the “real challenges” of applications on this scale is the fear of quality candidates slipping through the cracks. That means you’re eliminating a lot of people on paper.
I have some sympathy with this view. Compared to this time last year, the Interim Partners financial services practice has seen an increase of approximately 40% in new candidates wishing to join our community. This is largely due to investment projects being abandoned or postponed, redundancy programmes and generally more candidates opting for the interim lifestyle. What becomes increasingly important, therefore, is the quality of each individual’s ability to market him or herself effectively. There is a variety of tools on hand to help nowadays, from the obvious Linkedin/comprehensive CV to less commonly used techniques such as Twitter/websites/thought leadership pieces.
But for my money, the main route to success is to stick to the basics. Well- presented (grammatically correct!) communication, flexibility and polite persistence will ultimately pay off.
I would be interested to hear what your best marketing tips are…
Liz Sinclair is Account Director for Interim Partners.
Click here to read other blogs on the Financial Services sector
Interim managers often tell us they go into this partly from a lifestyle choice. The opportunity to work hard for some months but not all of the year can be very attractive. However, if you’re on assignment and have your head down working away, I don’t know about you but I find my lifestyle changes immeasurably as the nights darken, oh, and remind me again why the clocks go back (no, with small children you don’t get another hour in bed). Running home after work in the cooling heat of the day in summer is almost pleasurable, in the mellowing sun of autumn is a delight, but in the blustery, leaf-strewn chill of winter is never fun. Allow me a moment to moan. People are greyer, more irritable and there seem to be more of them on the daily commute. It’s a real effort to exercise or even to make yourself go out at night (although it’s still mostly worth it when you get there). Battening down the hatches in front of the TV/iPad seems infinitely preferable of an evening.
But the good news for industry is that I imagine we are probably more productive. No wistful gazing out of the window wishing you were in a park or on a beach, or snatched lunch breaks in a rare London patch of sunlight. And work feels strangely homely compared to the sight of wet and miserable shoppers tramping the streets outside.
Roll on the spring, but in the meantime it’s good news for British industry in my view. Does your work pattern change according to the season? I’d be interested to hear how you manage (or not) to maintain a healthy balance in your life.
Liz Sinclair is an Account Director at Interim Partners.
Click here to read other blogs on the Financial Services sector
In the wake of recent corporate fiascos, it’s only seconds before negative attention is turned to Board members to see how they could have managed their businesses better.
One of the issues seems to be a tendency to reward well deserving colleagues and acquaintances with a Board position without understanding whether they are actually the right people for the job. A while ago, the government tried to encourage a shake-up of boardrooms – The Higgs Review advised there needed to be greater representation of all aspects of commercial life in the boardrooms and to draw on a much bigger talent pool. The impression is that fundamental change to board make-up (e.g. more women, more ethnic minorities etc) is not happening.
The Financial Reporting Council (FRC) has recently undertaken a review of corporate standards for listed companies and produced four clear recommendations for board members:
To increase accountability, all directors of FTSE 350 companies should be put forward for re-election every year.
To promote proper debate in the boardroom, there are new principles for the leadership of the chairman, the responsibility of the non-executive directors to provide constructive challenge, and the time commitment expected of all directors.
To encourage boards to be well balanced and avoid groupthink, there are new principles for the composition and selection of the board, including the need to appoint members on merit, against objective criteria, and with due regard for the benefits of diversity, including gender diversity.
To help enhance the board’s performance and awareness of its strengths and weaknesses, the chairman should hold regular development reviews with each director and FTSE 350 companies should have externally facilitated board effectiveness reviews at least every three years.
What do you think? These guidelines seem eminently sensible, but do you think they will help? Or do we need more stringent performance metrics, such as external auditing, to prevent further corporate disasters? And equally, what effect (if any) do you think these standards will have on the demand for C-level interim resource in the future? Your thoughts would, as ever, be welcomed.
Liz Sinclair is an Account Director at Interim Partners.
Click here to read other blogs on the Financial Services sector
Holding on to your best people within the financial services industry is becoming increasingly difficult. Recent research conducted by a talent management consultancy suggests that while almost all firms (88%) feel that the key to business performance is their internal talent and nearly half of financial services organisations have talent management programmes, only 18% of such firms were able to describe themselves as very successful at retaining talent. Already this year both Barclays and RBS are fighting a rise in “regretted losses” despite efforts to keep their teams.
The recent EU imposed changes to banking bonuses won’t help either. Bankers will now receive no more than 40-60% of their bonus immediately and the rest will be deferred and linked to long-term performance, with 50% paid in shares. Hedge funds will almost certainly be included in the legislation, meaning that for the first time the pay of hedge fund managers will be regulated.
While many of the banks have already changed their pay structures in anticipation of the legislation and are attempting to structure remuneration around increases in base salaries to become more attractive to both new and existing employees the effect on hedge funds and alternative investment funds could be more significant. London is the European hub for these organisations but the sector could easily relocate to offshore locations such as Switzerland.
Undoubtedly, for all areas of the financial services market, this will mean changes to the employment equilibrium.
What will this mean in practice? The key players will potentially become more promiscuous, jumping ship for the promise of an early windfall in the form of increased salary. However, we may just see more altruism in the workplace – where bankers will actually take on a challenge where they feel they can make a difference and customers will see the resultant improvements more quickly than they perhaps otherwise would have done in the past.
I would be interested what you think this all means for the state of the interim market. We’re pretty sure of one thing – the pack of cards is likely to be reshuffled and dealt more frequently. In my view this spells more movement for both interims and permanent employees.
Liz Sinclair is an Account Director in Financial Services at Interim Partners.
Click here to read other blogs on the Financial Services sector
There is no subject more guaranteed to energise normally taciturn employees than one of the last remaining taboos – the size of people’s remuneration packages. You only need to open the business pages at this time of year, and a whole set of telephone numbers come tumbling out. An average payout of £233,000 for the investment bankers at JP Morgan. A £9.7bn pot for the tanned types at Goldman Sachs. The £2m goodbye wave for Eric Daniels at Lloyds has given cause for many to raise their eyebrows given the purchase of HBOS, including its disastrous property loan book.
If you ask City executives to justify such huge bonuses, they have two reasons for their mammoth handouts. First, bonuses spur on staff to perform better, which in the end is better for both the business and the wider economy. The second defence is the one given by the boss of Barclays, Bob Diamond, to MPs on the Treasury select committee last week. Unless banking chiefs paid out these vast sums, he said, they would lose their best and brightest and oh-so-rare employees (Bob, by the way, is himself in line for an £8m bonus).
Having conducted some research into the theory behind bonuses and whether they work to motivate us, there is something in what bankers say – they do. However, the evidence suggests that where bonuses would be most useful is not in finance – but in jobs such as fruit picking and working on supermarket checkouts. The people who should be getting bonuses aren’t in the glass and steel office blocks of Canary Wharf.
Take the financiers’ first line of defence, about the relationship between pay, targets and performance. In 2005, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston published a piece of research called Large Stakes and Big Mistakes, in which a team of behavioural economists reported on experiments they had conducted with American undergraduates. The students were offered money to tap a keyboard as fast as they possibly could and also to add up some numbers. When it came to the simple chore of hitting computer keys, bonuses worked a treat: the more cash on offer, the faster the undergraduates tapped. On the more complex task of doing maths, however, incentives served to worsen performance. “Tasks that involve only effort are likely to benefit from increased incentives,” wrote the economists. “While for tasks that include an element of thinking, there seems to be a level of incentive beyond which further increases can have detrimental effects on performance”.
It seems bonuses can spur workers on to do basic mechanical tasks faster and better – clearing a field of fruit before it goes rotten, say, or scanning in multi-packs of Andrex in busy supermarkets. But on more complex tasks paying bonuses is counter-productive. The same results have been shown in other studies. When investment bankers argue that their work is so complex they need bonuses, they are contradicting the research. The history of the past few years shows that bonuses drove an entire industry to gamble – with disastrous consequences.
Now for the other argument, that financial institutions need incentives to keep these superstars. That theory is neatly quashed by Boris Groysberg in his recent book, Chasing Stars. “Moving employer on Wall Street is no big deal. You hand in your BlackBerry, pick up your coat, cross the street and in 45 seconds you can be back in business. But what you leave behind is your colleagues, your bosses, your knowledge of how your company functions – in other words, all the institutional and collective factors that made you a success, but which usually get forgotten in the acclaim for individual achievement.”
The mirage of talent is how management writer David Bolchover labels this. He argues that those skills aren’t so rare nowadays when China and India are churning out tens of thousands of maths and engineering graduates.
My own view on this is that is all makes perfect sense. In fact, bonuses in a complex organisation like a bank can often serve to generate self-motivated behaviours which negatively affect the culture of the business, and utterly fail to serve the customer. I’d be interested in your views on this research – do you think bonuses spur the banking fraternity on to deliver significant performance improvements? Or we simply jealous that we’re not one of the favoured few with a bonus in six figures?
Liz Sinclair is a Key Account Director at Interim Partners.
Click here to read other blogs on the Financial Services sector
