When a member of your IT leadership team departs, it creates a temporary problem. If the person was a key member of your team, and/or their area of responsibility is especially critical to your organization, then it creates a temporary and acute problem.
Typically, the departed person’s responsibilities are reassigned to other members of the leadership team, while a search is conducted for the departed person’s replacement. Or, if you have an executable succession plan, the designated successor will be promoted and/or transferred to fill the open leadership position.
However, there is a third option that is worth consideration: bring in a qualified consultant to provide interim leadership for the departed team member’s areas of responsibility. The beauty of this option is that it gives you the temporary swing capacity you need to resist the urge to replace the departed leader in kind, and use their departure as an opportunity to rethink how your organization is structured—a rare luxury!
Windward Leadership provides interim IT leaders for just such purposes. Having experience leading every function within a modern IT organization, having leadership experience at companies of various size, kind and geographic presence, with both centralized and decentralized management styles, and having leadership experience in all kinds of economic conditions, Windward is particularly qualified to provide such interim IT leadership services.
In fact, when you add in the variety of firms and situations with which we are experienced, and when you add the strategic and innovative thinking that we naturally bring to bear, we also bring a perspective you’ll find valuable to draw upon should you choose to use the leader’s departure as opportunity to think how you might want to do things differently, while you also keep existing operations running smoothly.
