Rarely will a person without at least an MBA be able to enter interim executive management. A PhD is better. Often having a law degree will give you a real advantage.

Working With Difficult Situations

Interim executive management often involves dealing with difficult management situations, like downsizing and business change or acting as a temporary replacement for a bad executive. Your position will come with some heavy baggage, and you’ll need to overcome preconceptions your coworkers won’t even realize they have.

When you’re taking over position of a fired executive, you must step in and make position your own. The more quickly you can thoroughly replace failed executive and begin reversing damage he did, easier it will be to gain respect of your coworkers.

If you’re in a company that needs interim executive management because of business change – downsizing, offshoring, or other strategies that may be leading to loss of jobs – you should remember to be tactful at all times. Even if you know who’s going to be let go, you need to treat all coworkers equally and divorce yourself as far as possible from that knowledge. It goes without saying that you also should never engage in any kind of gossip.

Each new position will not only be challenging in itself, but peculiar circumstances surrounding it will provide further challenge. Interim executive management is one of most challenging and interesting careers you can choose.

2. Team Communication – In any project, most important element is communication. You should not only learn to tell team what to do, though, but also learn how to best listen to what team has to say. Communication is a two-way street, and usually most important part is part that’s coming to you.

3. People Management – Project management is ultimately about managing people. You will always run into issues in a large project, and you need to be able to handle tough situations when they come up.

4. Materials Management – you won’t need materials management in every type of project, but many of them will require you to understand how to plan ahead for materials to be present when you need them. Just-in-time management is a topic you should understand – how to have just enough materials at exactly time you need them.

5. Time Management – more than anything else, project management is about management of time. When any part of your project fails to run on time, it throws everything else off.

Project management training can also be provided in classroom, but be certain to speak with your instructor. Find out what his or her background is in project management. An inexperienced person teaching you project management will only be able to teach you mechanics; best project managers understand that it is really an art.