Most companies that bring in an interim manager make the same mistake in the first few weeks. They start giving instructions.

I’ve watched this happen for over two decades. I started as a client myself, back in 1998, when I was HR Director Europe at Honeywell Automotive and we needed a CFO for our production site in Hamburg. A year later I joined the firm I’d hired from, and today I run it as CEO. I still practise as a labour and service contract lawyer in Germany. That legal background taught me something most providers don’t focus on: mandates rarely fail because of the wrong person. They fail because of how the contract is handled once that person is inside the company.

The freedom is the product

An interim manager works under a service contract, not an employment contract. That distinction sounds administrative. It isn’t.

They are free in how they work. They decide where to work, when to work and what to work on. A permanent employee takes instructions from a boss. An interim manager doesn’t, and that’s not a loophole in the arrangement. That’s the entire point of it. It starts with the contract: it’s a service contract, not an employment contract.

The reasoning is simple once you follow it through. A company doesn’t hire an interim manager for a pair of hands. It hires them for experience and expertise, built over years of leading through exactly this kind of situation. The moment a client starts issuing direct orders, arrive at eight, do this, do that, that experience stops being used. They cannot bring their best performance if you take away their freedom.

When clients push back

This isn’t theoretical. It comes up regularly: a client unfamiliar with how interim management works wants to instruct or interfere with the interim manager the way they would with an employee. When that happens, I tell them plainly that they’re about to take away the advantage they’re paying for.

There’s a legal safeguard behind this too. If a service contract starts looking, in practice, like disguised employment, that creates exposure for the client, not just a management problem.

We do have a licensed route in Germany to formally employ and place interim managers, through a government-issued agency licence. I avoid it by default, because it removes the flexibility the client is actually there for. It exists as an option. It isn’t the answer I recommend. It’s also one of the advantages of working within an international network like IMW: in every market, there’s a local partner who understands that country’s specific legal framework, so a mandate isn’t managed with the same assumptions everywhere.

What this means for the client, not just the contract

For a CEO or board member doing this for the first time, the practical implication is uncomfortable: the less you try to direct the interim manager day to day, the more likely the mandate is to succeed. That runs against instinct. When you’re paying a premium daily rate for someone senior, the impulse is to want more oversight, not less.

Oversight and control aren’t the same thing. The client still defines the mandate: the turnaround, the growth push, the process failure to fix. And still owns the outcome. What changes is the how. The interim manager is trusted to work that out, because that’s the experience being paid for. Knowledge transfer to the client’s own people, something I expect from every mandate I place, only happens if the interim manager has enough latitude to actually demonstrate how the work gets done, not just report on it.

The real constraint isn’t talent

The assumption behind most searches for an interim manager is that the hard part is finding the right person. My experience says the harder part usually comes after: whether the client is actually willing to extend the freedom that makes an experienced outsider worth hiring in the first place. The contract can protect that freedom. It can’t manufacture the trust required to honour it. Get that right, and the return usually speaks for itself: across our assignments, the interim manager typically saves the client more than they cost.