 I'm saying welcome and thank you all for joining us. It is Monday, or as I like to say, Monday, because Friday shouldn't get all the celebration. But we have David Harris with us today as the managing partner of Interim Executive Solutions. And David will be talking to us about leading a nonprofit with Interims. Before we get started with the show, we of course want to make sure that you know who we are, Julia Patrick is here, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. I'm Jarrett Ransom, Julia's sidekick, also known as the nonprofit nerd CEO of the Raven Group. And we are so extremely honored to have the continued support and investment from our sponsors. Thank you to Bloomerang, to the American Nonprofit Academy, Fundraising Academy, Nonprofit Nerd, your part-time controller, the Nonprofit Atlas, nonprofit thought leader, as well as staffing boutique. These companies are here to help you do more good. They are here to support us in the show, but to bring to you the magic of the conversation and as we continue to navigate forward. If you have missed any of our 500 plus episodes, you can find them here on Roku, on YouTube, Amazon Fire TV, as well as Vimeo. But wait, there's more. We're also in podcast form. So wherever you stream your podcast, please do queue up the nonprofit show. Again, thank you to our sponsors that keep this show going and growing. And with that, I'm gonna toss it over to you, David. Welcome, and we are so thrilled to have you here joining us today. Well, I'm so thrilled to be here. Thank you ever so much for inviting me. I'm looking forward to the conversation. Absolutely. Well, this is a conversation that I love to nerd out about, interim executive solutions. So let's start off, if you would, tell us a little bit about you and your organization or your business and how you support nonprofits in this interim executive space. Great, thank you. Well, our organization has about 50 associates in the Northeast through New York, New Jersey area. And what we do is we help nonprofits that are going through leadership transitions. And the way that that works is that when an organization comes to us, we identify sort of what the key things are that they are working on during a transition. And we'll talk more about sort of what those might be as we go on. And we identify a couple of our professionals who are all former EDs and other senior leaders in nonprofits, who we think would be really a good fit for that organization. We share their profiles with the client and let them decide through their own interview process who they think will be the best cultural fit for them. And then once we start working together, our organization continues to work with both the interim and the board to ensure that at the end of the process, that organization is in a much more sustainable and stable place where it really is ready to attract its next leader. And we mostly work with interim EDs. We do a little bit of work also with interim CFOs and interim development directors where those are helpful. Now, I'm really interested in this. How long have you been doing this work and how long has the marketplace understood? I mean, I still think there's a lot of education. I think still think there are a lot of organizations that don't understand this, but how long has this option been in place? Yes, well, that's a great question. One of my partners started doing this work back in 2001 and he certainly wasn't the first person ever to do this kind of work. There are organizations that we affiliate with who've been doing this work for 25, 30 years. I think what has happened though, is it's become a much more of a profession. There are a lot of independent people. In fact, my partner started by being on a board when the organization went into crisis and they sort of turned to him and said, would you step into this role because we need to get through this process? And that's very typical of, I think, how people got started in this. But these days, the people doing this work have often gone through professional training programs in interim leadership. Interim leadership is quite different from a permanent role of leading an organization. And so the people coming to it these days, look at it as a way to bring their knowledge and skills to the organizations that are going through these challenges and then be able to sort of turn it over to somebody who can then carry them all forward. Wow, so that helps paint a picture. And you talked, Jared asked you the question, what does this look like in regards to titles? So talk about that interim, those types of interim leaders because it seems to me, going back to what we were just talking about, seems to me like there are a lot of groups that would obviously need this but they might not even know that it exists. And so how do you communicate that and what are the types of interim leaders that it can exist? That's an excellent question. I think for the most part, if you're sitting on a board and your executive director either decides to retire or finds another job and moves on, for the most part, you're thinking, oh my gosh, I have to sort of fill a seat for a short period of time while I do a search. And so what you do see in many instances is that somebody coming off the board to keep a seat warm or possibly somebody within an organization who has a senior level role, gets sort of elevated into an interim leadership role with a view of this is just gonna be short term stopgap measure while we go through a search process. And there were certainly organizations where that actually makes sense because the organization itself is fundamentally running well and you sort of know where you're going, you know what direction the organization needs and so it's a matter of going through a search process and these days, search processes are not easy. They're taking four to six months, the costs are getting higher because of the great resignation that we're all aware of. But I think more and more organizations are realizing that when you come to that moment when a leader chooses to leave or when the organization realizes that they need to change the leadership, that it's really a time when you actually need to take a step back and you need to think about what it is that is working really well in this organization and what it is that would make it work better so that we can really attract that next leader. So the kind of interim leadership that we're involved in the professional interim leadership is really about take getting that organization to a point where it really is ready for what's next, ready for the next leader to come in and carry the organization forward. So it's about empowerment. It's about empowering the staff so that they feel confident in the future of that organization and they feel like this is a stable place to spike the fact that the leader might have turned over, that they recognize that the next person isn't gonna be the same as the last person. So if you've had a long time leader in an organization oftentimes, I'm sure you guys are very familiar with this, the organization sort of builds itself around that person. Well, you're never going to plug somebody new right into that role and sometimes you don't actually wanna plug somebody new into that role. So there's this need to sort of take that step back and decompress and create an environment where everybody feels like they are part of the future of the organization and then you can start to make those moves. And then the other pieces oftentimes there are things that aren't working well in an organization and boards don't always have good insights into that. Do we have good HR policies and practices? Are our finances really well in control and trusted and so on? And so part of that interim leadership focus in those organizations is to make sure that everything is working as it should that you address the issues that are of concern and that the board can have confidence in the future of the organization as they go out and do the search process. David, bringing in an interim executive leader is what I believe a very strong strategic decision. And as you had said, there's many professionals now that have gone through training and certifications and I'm so honored to be one of those individuals. I've been through two different trainings and have really learned so much about the strategy behind this. And I'm curious if you could talk briefly about how this is such a strategic opportunity because too often I feel our board becomes complacent and they choose to do the easy thing, which is to say, hey, tap, tap, tap, would you step up and be this interim person so that we can hire someone? And for me on the outside, it comes to that education. I just wanna say that is mostly 99% the worst thing to do because this time is such a great opportunity to reach in and lean into your stakeholders to say, this is what we're doing, this is why we're doing it. And we are investing our time, energy and effort during this strategy time. Could you share a little bit about how you approach this? I will, I wanna say one thing just before that too, which is, Jarrett, that to the degree you've tapped somebody on the shoulder and asked them to fill in that seat, you're actually, especially if that is a person who has some potential to be the future leader, doing them a disservice because now, if they don't end up getting the job, they're disappointed and they'll probably leave. If they do end up getting the job, then it can be a situation where people sort of think it was an inside deal and that person wasn't objectively looked at. But to your point, the whole idea of interim leadership is you want an objective assessment of the organization. And anybody who's close to an organization can't be objective. By bringing in an outside professional, you open the opportunity for everybody's voice to be heard because a good interim starts by listening and starts by really learning from the people on the ground in the organization. Those are the people with the expertise. They know what works, they know what doesn't work. But then a good interim pulls all that together and assesses where the strengths and weaknesses are and partners with the board to actually assess what the priorities should be as to what to work on. Because when you hire a permanent ED, you sort of say, well, here's the organization. I'm giving you the reins and I'll see you every couple of months and we'll talk about how things are going. But you really don't get into the day-to-day operations. But if you're gonna do a hiring job and pick somebody who's gonna be a good leader, you need to know enough about the organization and what's working and how it works to know what characteristics that next leader should have. So a good interim is going to work with the board to give you that assessment, to I agree on what the priorities are, but then to go and execute, to make the changes that need to be made, sometimes changes that should have been made a long time ago, sometimes changes that people just really weren't aware of. And therefore when the new ED comes in, they're not coming into fight fires, they're coming in to grow the organization. The one other thing though that an interim leadership period gives you is the ability for the board to ask itself what I think is a fundamental question, which is where are we going? What's our vision for the future? Not what the strategic plan is or the details. That's for the next ED to be part of formulating, but the board has to take ownership of what the organization wants to accomplish overall because that's gonna help you find the right person to do the work. What about the length of stay for an interim? What is the standard process for this and curve ball question? Has that changed over the last two to three years? That's a great question. I think we went in to many assignments thinking it was sort of a nine month time period. What we found over the last year or so is most are extending to about a year, the lower year. And if I were to break that down, the first four to six weeks is really this assessment phase. It's learning the organization, it's building the trust and the confidence. It's just stabilizing some of the basics. The next two to six months really is the work phase of taking those top priorities and starting to address the key ones and make the changes that are necessary, reinforce the things that are working really well. Building oftentimes there are gaps in an organization. So there's some hiring that's taking place and you're trying to create a team and really create a cohesive leadership team that can consistently adapt to a changing world. At a certain point in time and we're finding this is sort of six to eight months in, you're realizing, okay, now we actually have a pretty good story to tell as an organization as we go out and do a search. So you begin a search process. And by the way, I think one of the things that intrams can be really valuable in is providing input to the search process. These are some of the things that are really gonna help this organization. Most boards don't have insights into some of the personal characteristics that actually make a leader appropriate for a particular thing. They'll look at all the resume items. Oh, they've done this and that and the other. But nonprofits run on culture. They run on personalities. They run on having the right chemistry in an organization. So it is important to know those things in addition. And once you start a search process these days, again, it's about four to five months, maybe a month to select a search company in four months to do it. So we're finding a year is typical. I have some assignments that have gone on significantly longer than that. And those are mostly ones where really understanding where the organization needs to go is the biggest challenge. In a couple of instances, an organization has used this interim period to say, you know what, our mission is not as relevant as it once was. Maybe we need to find a merger partner. Maybe we need to do something that can allow the mission to go on but not the organization because we can't sustain ourselves. And typically then an interim will actually work all the way to the end of the merger process. And I feel David started to interrupt that that interim really has that truth to power opportunity unlike the person inside that's been tapped on the shoulder because they still have such a commitment to their job, right? And then to the mission but to really bring in a third party perspective, I feel like that's really when those merger conversations tend to come up. One of the things you hit the nail in the head on was about culture within the organization. And we have one of our dedicated viewers send in a question that I think is appropriate now but she wants to know if you would be willing to talk about the objections we often hear when an interim has no direct experience in the type of work the nonprofit does especially when that departed CEO was an expert in this field. Good question. That's an awesome question. It's a really good question. I get it all the time. What? No, an understandably so but understand what the interim is there to do. They're there to stabilize the operation. They're not there to lead the programming. You have a team in place who have the expertise to deliver and execute on the programming in most organizations. If you're missing that then you have a much bigger problem than an interim. So the organization doesn't have its fundamentals. So I almost think about an interim ED as a chief operating officer. They're there to make sure that the organization is running as smoothly as it possibly can. And that means building on the expertise of the people who are there. They're not going to tell anybody how to do their jobs. They're going to ask somebody a lot of questions about how they're doing their jobs and how to make sure that those things are as successful as they can be and not give them the support that they need. When you hire your permanent ED you want somebody who has the expertise in that organization because now you're thinking how are they going to carry me forward for the next three to five years? The interim's job isn't to do that. It's to create a sound foundation out of what is already in place. And yes, you have to have enough knowledge to ask the right questions about any particular area but a good professional leader it knows how to ask good questions. So before we go on to our next question did I hear you correctly that when you bring on the process of the interim you're waiting to actually even open up that job posting it sounds like, right? You're not like hiring an interim and posting the job or starting a search. You're trying to figure out what the landscape is and then do the search? Absolutely. I mean, starting a search without giving an interim time to actually do an assessment and help the organization figure out what the search should really look like. To be honest with you, it minimizes the benefit that you get from an interim. There are times that somebody will come to us and say, we're starting a search and we'd like somebody to fill in and I'll have this conversation with them and I'll say, well, we can do that but to be honest with you if you give us three or four months to actually do the assessment figure out how to help the organization be in a really strong position then that search is going to go a lot better and you're gonna be much happier with the outcome. Well, and you've been strategic to identify what is it that we need to hire for where we're going, right? As opposed to we're hiring for the deficit of the person who has left we're really hiring for who is the person we need now for where we're going in the future and what that looks like. David, you've given us so many great best practices I believe so far but I'm pretty sure you have more to share with us rather. Would you share a few more interim best practices and how we should be looking at this? Sure, I think one of the things that we feel very strongly about in the work that we do is that our interim has no interest in being the permanent ED. Because quite frankly- One more time. So explain that because this is also an ethical position, right? Absolutely, absolutely. I will say that almost every single engagement we've had people have said, are you sure such and such doesn't want to stay and do more work? I'm laughing because I've had that. And I think that speaks to the fact that an interim isn't necessarily I think people fear intrams because they're thinking, oh my gosh, it's a change agent. They're going to screw around with things. They're going to do all kinds of stuff and then we've got to transition to the next person. That's not what an interim is about. An interim is actually about stabilizing. And so in order to do that, you need to leverage the skills that are there. You need to build a team that's there. And if you are looking at this as, this is my next job, then you're starting to build it around me again. And that's a get where interim leadership really falls down. You want that next transition to be seamless because you sort of can fade into the woodwork because everything is working. And so a big part of best practices is how do I get to that point? But that also brings up another area of best practice, which is you have to document. You have to pull together information so that the next person can really step in and be successful. And part of what you do is make sure that in whatever transition period you get, and often it's not very long, you give them the tools to know where to start, know what some of the priorities are, and you give them the comfort level that they can always turn to you with any questions that they have. I think those are some of the things that are most important. The other thing that I would say about best practices with interim leadership is that the board, again, is your partner. And you see yourself as an agent of the board. And again, that's a very different from a permanent ED. And if you do that, you can help the board to actually organize itself to be better able to support the next ED. Do their governance documents really reflect how the organization should work? Do they have the kinds of committees that are gonna support that next ED in finance and development and so on? So we actually spend a little bit of time in our work helping the board to see where they can make some adaptations during this time period. And again, that's part in our organization of we're having a partner liaison who's both working with the board and with the interim through the process can reinforce some of those things and help them just get to a better place. You know, when you're talking about this, I'm getting a sense that that interim is going to be such a guide towards this next, next phase of leadership. Does that extend to the point of that interim being involved in the hiring process that they're there with the board during interviews and vetting people? Does it go down to that level as well? That's a great question. And I strongly discourage our entrants from being involved in the hiring process. They're providing input as to what kinds of characteristics are going to be valuable. They're ensuring that the organization has a good search committee pulled together to actually do the work. We frequently provide a list of search firms for a particular organization to consider based on the particular areas of expertise. But then we try to stay out of the actual search process itself. The board has to own the decision making around that. All we can do is give them the tools. And at that point in time, when you get towards the end, we're happy to have a conversation with the last candidate, the last couple of candidates. And maybe we can bring some perspective if we think that there's some things that the board may have missed in their evaluation that would be important to know about. But we really feel pretty strongly that that should not be our decision at all. And so we stay the heck out of it. Wow. That's not what I would have thought you would have said. So that's great to hear that perspective. And I can understand where you're coming from on that. Yeah. It's all about enabling the organization. We want that organization to end up better at decision making, better at teamwork, better at actually having impact. And we don't want to be the ones to do it. We want to be the ones to enable it. Yeah. And really building level setting to expectations to say, here's the type of person we need. This is the organization's path forward. It'd be great if the person brought in X, Y, and Z skill set and knowledge. And that, I believe, what you're saying, David, is really that's been done through the interim executive journey to really level set the expectations of the board for that next right hire for what's next. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Wonderful information. And this is such a topic that I absolutely love. I have made interim a part of my career and have had the great ability to serve as interim CEO, COO, as well as CDO. And I love them all. So this is really great, David. Thank you for joining us. David Harris, managing partner with Interim Executive Solutions. If you have any questions about how do you get to what's next for your organization, I'm sure David would love to hear from you. And thanks for all that you do in our sector. This is such a, again, it holds a great place in my heart as going through certification for this and really being a professional in this landscape. And I'm so glad to have met you. Likewise. Thank you so much for inviting me on this show and for your great questions. And I've really enjoyed this conversation. Good. Well, we've enjoyed it too. And I can tell you, I think that there have been times in board service that I was a part of these decisions. If we had really understood the concept of interim leadership and how it works and how it can actually not be something just to put in for a crisis, but actually be strategic. Man, I wish we would have known or I would have known more about that back in the day. But no, you do. That's the point. That was back in the day. I'm saying like, I'm saying, you know, good 30 years ago. Yeah. You never had heard this. And it was more to your point, the tap on the shoulder and stick it up and stick up for the organization and get them through the time. So super cool concept of how we can move our organizations forward. Hey, everybody. Again, thank you for joining Jarrett and I today. It's been a great way to start our week. Again, I'm Julia Patrick with the American Nonprofit Academy. Jarrett Ransom, your nonprofit nerd. My nonprofit nerd, the nonprofit nerd. Everyone's. Everyone's. Again, we want to thank all of our presenting sponsors from Bloomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, your part-time controller, the non-profit nerd, Fundraising Academy, the non-profit Atlas, non-profit thought leader, and staffing boutique. Again, these folks are here with us day in and day out. And they help us to provide all this information. Wow, David. I loved, loved, loved starting my week with you. Thank you very much. I enjoyed it very much. Hey, everybody. This was another great way of leveling the field and at the same time expanding our horizon so that we can be stronger in the nonprofit sector. As we end every episode, we like to remind everyone and ourselves, stay well so you can do well. We'll see you back here tomorrow, everyone.