What is a good interim manager at Actiss Africa?
Or rather, what are the characteristics that make an interim manager fulfilled with Actiss? These characteristics are specific, because the Actiss offer is just as specific. Beyond the usual qualities of a good manager, we need to work with specific profiles.
On the general characters, we find mainly the professional experience (and little the sector). And there, we favor profiles with experience in all areas of their profession. For example, a CEO must be able to take on a social mandate, know how to read a balance sheet, deploy a commercial policy, manage industrial investments and lead multidisciplinary and sometimes multicultural teams towards objectives. Similarly, a CFO must have held an accounting department, been an industrial management controller, with several types of GAAP (and therefore IFRS), must obviously speak English perfectly, have deployed an ERP. And if he held a DAF function under LBO, it’s even better. A HRD must be comfortable with social relations, personnel management and human capital development (training, recruitment, GPEC, etc.).
Commercial and producer
The transition manager at Actiss Africa is not an off-the-shelf product, but is part of the solution offered to the market. As such, he intervenes from the sale process of the mission. We therefore expect some commercial qualities, first and foremost listening and the ability to bounce on the words of a prospect, reformulate. We also like managers who know how to show motivation and who smile.
And of course the interim manager intervenes in specific emergency conditions, demotivated teams that will nevertheless have to be moved forward. So we are looking for leaders. And we particularly like interim managers who have three specific qualities, known at Actiss as “ICC”: Intuition, Communication, Compassion
The 3 “ICC” qualities
Intuition here is the ability to quickly detect the levers on which to act, as well as the profiles of the members of your team. The idea is to be able to state the conclusion first, and only check the basics afterwards. In transition management, there is no time to analyze in order to decide. You have to decide right away, without making a mistake, and then possibly analyze afterwards. So you need a good dose of intuition, or at least a lot of experience.
Communication in interim management (and in leadership in general) is the ability to understand the true springs of a situation beyond appearances. To explain this situation with simple words, to show there too with simple words the direction to get out of it. In our opinion, we couldn’t find a better way to galvanize teams and get them back on track.
Compassion expresses seniority, in other words the fact that a good manager has made peace with his main neuroses and faults, is sufficiently confident in himself. During the mission, he can thus keep and inspire confidence, forget himself and soak up the neuroses of the teams he manages, to make them his own, transform them into energy to be redirected towards the objective of the mission. Common sense, empathy, listening, serene strength, calm, intelligence of the heart, are words that fit into this framework.
So much so that Actiss Africa managers are endearing, uncomplicated and quite specific personalities: less than 5% of the CVs we receive turn out to be eligible!
(Also read:: TRANSITION CFO : ZOOM ON A SPECIAL JOB)