OpinionWay x Grant Alexander Study – Interim Management: Many Executives Still Off the Mark – FocusRH

Grant Alexander recently shared the results of a study aimed at evaluating how executives perceive interim management and how they actually use it.

The key finding: 40% of executives have never heard of interim management. Often seen as a “firefighter” or a “cost-cutter,” the interim manager remains poorly understood by business leaders, according to the OpinionWay survey for Grant Alexander.

While 60% of respondents claim to have some awareness of interim management, only 32% fully understand what it entails, and 40% have never heard of it. Consequently, 78% of executives have never used an interim manager, and 66% say they probably never will. Only 12% foresee using one in the future.

Perceived Barriers

The main obstacles cited are:
Cost, mentioned by 85% of respondents.
Concerns that the interim manager will not understand the company culture (84%), particularly pronounced in the industrial sector (96%).
Fear of negative perception within the organization (60%), higher among men (73%) than women (54%).

Belief that a temporary professional may lack commitment.

A Professional with a Wide Range of Missions

In practice, interim managers handle far more diverse tasks than commonly assumed. The most frequent assignments include:
Temporary replacement of an executive (64%)
Supporting organizational transformations (58%)
Improving profitability (47%)
Crisis management (45%)
Additionally, 44% of executives also use interim managers to lead innovation projects or digital transformations.

For those considering using interim management in the future, transformation projects (71%) and executive replacements (68%) remain top priorities, but crisis management is mentioned more frequently (62%).

Read the full article on FocusRH
Download the summary of our study.