When do you need a transitional manager in France or Germany?

In France, interim management has gradually become a common practice. 20 % of French companies have already made use of it, as did 17 % of big international groups, 29 % of medium sized companies and 15 % of small companies in Germany. In fact, oftentimes, when French and German companies rely on interim management, it's during a merger between two companies that aren't based in the same country. But generally speaking, there are several configurations or strategic issues that can lead a company to think about temporary or "interim" management.

To give you a better idea of the way this practice is spread out:

• 22 % of recorded interim management missions are in the financial sector

• 15 % in the industrial sector

• 14 % take place in HR departments and companies

• 12 % revolve around IT

• 10 % of missions are recorded in the logistics business

The average duration of such a mission is 7 months, all sectors included. In this brief article, we describe 5 scenarios in which hiring transitional management may be the right choice for you.

Selling a company is part of the natural business cycle and is not a problem in itself. However, the arrival of new foreign shareholders can trigger a new positioning of the brand in its sector, a new organizational diagram, as well as questions within the initial teams and even among the final customers.

An interim manager will be someone who has proven technical and managerial skills, allowing them to manage the transition between shareholders during the sale. They can also be involved in the months following the takeover, helping the company to go through its renewal and to establish a constructive internal dynamic.

This is especially the case if the buyout triggers the creation of a new activity (within a subsidiary for example), or the launch of a new product line requiring R&D, marketing and logistics.

If you are a company manager, you know that regarding crises, the question is not so much whether one will happen one day, but rather when, and more importantly, how you will manage it. There are other types of crises besides bankruptcy and closure that can nonetheless create major problems.

These crises can be purely HR related (wave of departures), economic (drop in turnover), regulatory (RGPD), sanitary (Covid, bacteria in a consumer product for food brands) etc. All situations that can clearly jeopardize the survival of a company if they are not taken seriously and dealt with in a timely manner.

The interim manager knows exactly how to provide valuable answers to these burning issues very quickly, and to help your company react effectively. As specialized transitional managers, they have been trusted with more such situations than what would ever be likely to happen to a single company. Keeping their cool and providing exceptional insight, they are often able to gain the respect of the companies they work with.

Interim management can also be a solution if one of your company's executives is absent. A long term sick leave can indeed deprive you of a central link in your structure. You may also be confronted with a sudden departure, requiring a long recruitment process to fill a very specialized position. In both these situations, the interim manager offers a relevant, efficient and speedy solution.

Their high analytical capacity and situational intelligence enable them to quickly position themselves at the heart of your organization and to identify the main issues.

Lucid as to the overall situation, they are able to take over the operational and decision-making management. Of course, it will be necessary to define the scope and objectives of this reinforcement, because your incumbent executive has built up reflexes that cannot be immediately adopted by your interim manager.

Their charisma and rhetorical skills should still allow them to make important choices, to reassure the teams and to maintain the progress of your ongoing projects, whether they are strategic or operational.

Sometimes you feel the need for reinforcement even when no one is absent. Management is a valuable and sensitive skill in our companies and a job in its own right. The quality of managers has been even more scrutinized since the rise of the quest for meaning and recognition among employees. A failing management can jam the wheels of your company, and directly harm the commitment of your teams, but also the satisfaction of your customers.

A transitional manager relies on solid leadership skills and behavioral characteristics that allow them to be a trusted ally of the teams, and to re-engage them towards a common project. If he or she is not a magician, the interim manager will nevertheless have the ability to listen to and stimulate the teams in place, while ensuring their commitment to your company's project.

You have identified deficiencies in your current organization and you would like to make it evolve to gain efficiency? Interim management can actually help with that.

Whether it's a question of reorganizing teams, tools or customer projects, a transitional manager will be able to map out your initial situation and help you line out the path to a more efficient organizational scheme & faster chains of command, based on your company's objectives (increased productivity, profitability, customer satisfaction or team well-being, for example).

The temporary executive's fresh perspective can be a valuable asset in such a phase.

All these cases require professional and human qualities, and the profiles in question can be difficult and expensive to recruit. Interim management therefore offers an agile, temporary and less costly solution for companies to help them meet their current challenges.

Whatever the cause of your need, it's important to rely on a firm that specializes in these cases and has a well established "rent a manager" model. They will be able to provide a profile in adequacy with your needs.

Honoré Associates has a solid expertise, having provided managers to clients for more than 30 years. Each of their problems also become our problems, or rather new challenges, that we tackle with our pool of interim managers.

If needed, we rely on the best methods to seek out the profile you need, in France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Luxemburg, or all throughout Europe, and accompany their high-speed onboarding until successful implementation of their skillset.

Nikolai Rabald