Interim manager: the man with the golden Colts!

Publication on April 2, 2020 in Le Journal de l’Économie, by Daniel Brechignac, Transition General Manager.
The Covid-19 crisis and its containment rules have triggered a flow of declarations of goodwill from transition management or interim management firms. The moment is therefore particularly appropriate to shed light on the particularities of the interim manager.

Transition mission, no additional recruitment or recruitment preamble.

A transition mission is above all a provision of intellectual operational management services. The interim manager comes to a company to compensate for a lack of operational skills in a tense context (failure of a manager) or even a proven crisis where urgency predominates (blockage of a logistical or production situation, collective procedure) . Whatever the context, its objective is to maintain day-to-day operations and change the situation to return to normal. This last point will imply in particular that it comes with an ability to question the habits and procedures in place, to point out serious dysfunctions and try to change the situation and working methods.

He therefore comes into the company to move the lines. In this he does not come to review the strategy or with any ambition to perpetuate his presence, he is not in the company to settle there, but simply to spend time there, the time to restore order in mobilizing internal teams and giving them back their autonomy. He will be able to challenge and test the strategy on the perimeter that will have been set for him (Finance, Production, Information Systems, etc.) but he will do so by being precise and operational and never by venturing into sophisticated strategic positioning analyses. The transition manager is a pragmatist who relies above all on the triptych: “Experiment, Measure, Correct”

Edward Dmytryk’s film, “Warlock” with Henry Fonda, is in every way a splendid parable of what a transition mission can be. Admittedly, the film is from 1959 and rather recommended for western lovers, but millennials can be reassured that it is in color.

But who is “the man with the golden colts”?

This man who comes when the situation seems hopeless or quite simply blocked, and who will leave after having normalized it. This traveler who will transmit and restore the confidence of the teams to better hand over to them afterwards and wish them a good trip when everything is going better. This strange man who traveled around, saw many different situations, companies, landscapes and contexts; is above all a personality who resists or even appreciates the unexpected. He shows emotional stability and a disconcerting calm in the storm. He evaluates and measures at a glance, checks his intuitions and challenges them every day. He distances himself from power, or rather he avoids power games and isolates himself from internal company politics. That is not his subject, much more, that is the abyss he knows he must avoid, and it is for this reason among others that he is not here to stay.

The interim manager is not only not a man of power but much more, his relationship to power and authority is prudent and sharp. He would somehow be on the way to what Baltasar Gracìan describes in his “Art of Prudence”. Thus he is concerned with transmitting and distributing; experience, knowledge, methods, values. And this through simple and authentic human relations with the teams he leads as much as with the interlocutors with whom he will manage his mission (suppliers, customers, institutions, etc.).

No thank you at the end of the mission, no medal will ever be worth the discreet sentence of an employee who says to you on the day of departure: “thank you for coming to help us, we really saw things differently”.

When and for whom does it intervene?

To say that he intervenes in contexts in tension does not sufficiently describe the situation in which the interim manager finds his place. He is the man for the job when all the internal solutions have been tried or when the teams in place are unable to deploy an idea or a project.

Above all, it intervenes when the management or the shareholder of the company expresses the wish to see the lines move beyond the simple resolution of the crisis. The watchword is then to avoid returning to the starting point when the tense situation has passed. The interim manager will be interested in what he can use from the crisis to develop teams, teach them to work differently together, and change the organization and methods so as not to go back into bad habits once the distant storm.

Because the crisis, whatever it is, binds the teams together and makes them discover another face of the other, the interim manager is committed to giving them back the taste and the pleasure of working together.

Whether the interim manager is at the service of the company and its principal shareholder or not, he intervenes as much to help the teams as to get the organization out of a difficult patch. And for that it must be in tune with its sponsor. From this proximity and this perfect understanding will depend the sustainability of the actions undertaken in his presence. If he intervenes rather in companies with more than 50 employees or large multinational companies; it must be admitted that it is not so much the size of the company as its governance and its shareholding that condition the use of this new kind of managerial traveler. It could, for example, be very effective on a company of 20 to 50 people which finds itself suddenly deprived of its manager, in industry as well as in services.

More than the type of organization, it is the context of the relationship to power and decision-making that guides the effectiveness of the use of an interim manager. Is the company (its management) ready to hear everything and put everything in place to get out of the situation for the long term and not come back to it?

By Daniel Brechignac, Transition General Manager.