Interim management, a new way of looking at one’s professional career

Today, both organizations and people need to transform themselves in order to survive in a globalizing economy. Interim management is an appropriate response for companies that are increasingly using it. It is also a good solution for managers and executives at the crossroads of the generations, who find their balance and the freedom they are looking for.

 

In recent years, companies have been increasingly using interim management . This use of interim management is now one of the most appropriate managerial solutions for transforming organizations and people. Transformations necessary to survive.
Transformations are crucial today and they must be profound; they now affect above all people, their culture and their habits. It is no longer just a digital issue, which is only the technical underlying. For this to work, we need to align processes, people and, above all, engage them. It is therefore a subject of Management, centered around People.

Thus, interim management in 2019 becomes a form of work in its own right. For executives, it becomes a new way of looking at their professional careers. Which is experienced in a context of generational transition.
Carrying out interim management missions is a professional solution that is approached with sometimes different reading prisms:

Career choices that are sometimes difficult and constrained for former players

The challenge for the generation currently in the last part of their professional career, now aged between 45 and 65, is to question themselves in order to survive professionally.
This generation, now in the power of companies, has acquired valuable experience. She knows the company and its political workings as well, a reflection of their generation.
Having seen the way companies behave with their employees, she no longer has any illusions; An unexpected career or employer change is an integral part of the career path. And this, even though the executives have given all their lives, all their commitment and all their energy.
However, they are most often helpless when this happens to them. While they know perfectly well how to make a difficult decision in the context of their role as a leader or manager, the most crucial doubts come back when the same type of choice is made about themselves and their career. They have never been accustomed to exercising their critical thinking freely. Regardless of a social context on which, most often, like their peers, they have focused their professional and personal references.
When it comes to making a choice about “whether or not to become an interim manager”, they most often approach it as a definitive alternative, with a latent ulterior motive for how they will communicate with their group (family, friends, social status). However, their journey does not call for any justification; They are excellent managers, fine negotiators and hard workers committed to results. They are also ready to give their all for their client or for their mission.

The possible exercise of freedom and meaning for the youngest

On the other hand, we find the generation that lives with the times and therefore forces our society to carry out all these transformations: the ” Millennials “, born between 1980 and 2000.
At the gates of corporate power from 2025 (the oldest will then already be 45 years old), they have been described and studied many times; Hyper-connected, digital native, authentic and demanding. They want sharing and meaning in their actions, with a rich and personalized human experience.
They also have use-values and not possession-values. This means that the operating scheme of interim management is almost in their genes; Commit to a clear and accepted mission, in line with their values of freedom and choice, to lead to make things happen and that allows them to manage their work/life balance as well as possible. What could be more enviable in their eyes.

However, it appears that the generational gap is not so steep.

The profile of the interim manager: cut from flint

From experience, current interim managers who have taken the plunge and who have now made it their job are most often happy. They carry out a series of missions. Because they have gained the confidence in themselves that they will be able to find their next mission, thus resolving their anxieties of inactivity. They are nourished by the diversity of the different missions, one after the other. And, most encouragingly, when a client wants to “secure them with a permanent contract”, they refuse.

A pioneer in the way you approach your career if ever there was one, interim management certainly has a bright future ahead of it. Especially if it is operated with quality and added value for the customer and the manager, in the way that the best players on the market offer.
His modus operandi is in tune with the times. It is a perfect response to the disarray experienced by many managers and leaders in the face of the unfulfilled promises that companies had made to them.

But it is above all the transformation of working populations and their new way of approaching their lives. Among them are their professional careers, which will accelerate our profession.
Once again, transformation does not primarily involve means, but rather people.

 

By Benoit DURAND-TISNES – Managing Director WAYDEN