Manager testimonies

The quest for performance and development encourages companies to adopt project-based management. The diverse roles that the stakeholders play influence project configuration. I work externally in managing these organisational projects. They range from mergers and acquisitions to major changes. As such, it is essential for me to link up my role based on the strengths and skills that already exist in the company.

The complexity of these projects is mainly due to relationships, and the scope of the mission always has an impact on the existing organisational models. It is thus also important for my role to evolve in tune with the constantly changing team dynamic. I therefore always offer my clients carefully chosen options, so that they are the ones who make the decisions. As for me, I implement the selected methods and categories of action.

I use the art of influencing to suggest the project organisation I can implement and coordinate, harnessing existing internal potential. This makes it possible to steer major change and transformation programmes.

As a human resources director, I used interim management. One day, the agency I worked with extended an assignment to me. So I went over to the “other side”.

I remember I conducted a particularly interesting mission for a corporate buyout at an automotive manufacturer. It had recently opened a site (four years earlier), and had hired people very quickly, without any HR professionals.It needed support and its management to be coached in line management and team leadership. We truly worked together with the client.

Most of the missions involved interim management (about 10 in 10 years). They complemented my professional experience.

It just so happened that I started working in the interim management field in 2010. But I started thinking about it back in 2007. I had realised that my approach to my career was not compatible with rigid corporate structures, with their cumbersome procedures, internal opposition, and politics.
The concept of this mission was in my genes. My many years in the French marines taught me how important it was to quickly adapt to a situation in record time. This was exactly what had to be done in this mission.
Since then, I have been happy to put my apparent talent to the service of interim management.  My taste for challenge is always satisfied. I can also take responsibility at the levels that suit me, and maintain a good quality of life at the same time.
There are, of course setbacks. With the high degree of uncertainty, you must be able to cope with the periods between missions. They may last from a few months to over a year, and are always difficult to deal with.
One mission in particular remains fresh in my memory, as a managing director, the corporate representative. This isn’t just because it was my most recent assignment.

The mission was spread over a 17-month period. It took place overseas in a difficult environment. It was exciting because it involved a mix of social issues, politics, communication, and operations. In a nutshell, this assignment suspended the activities of the subsidiaries of a European company in an African country. This mission required the managing director to negotiate at the highest level of the country where it was established, to implement a redundancy scheme, and to evacuate staff and equipment in a country plunged into a civil war.

In this situation, the interim manager had to use the whole range of abilities required for this extraordinary profession: swift adaptation, immediate on-site takeover with analysis of the issues at the same time, studies and presentations of the action plans at the European level of the company, and at the level of the administrators of the subsidiaries.