Management is a never-ending debate. We know that it is essential to the success of a team and, more broadly, of a business, but we love to hate managers, or at least the way they embody and perform their role.
Added to this is the fact that management is a cultural reality.
Anyone who has worked in an international business or abroad, or has been able to discuss the subject with foreigners, understands that French-style management has its peculiarities, which are often criticized, and in my opinion rightly so.
It’s a bit of a paradox: managers embody a dysfunctional system that we complain about and whose effectiveness is questionable, but they are also its first victims.
Last March, the General Inspectorate of Social Affairs (IGAS) published a report comparing French management practices with those of some of our neighbors (in French) (Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Sweden).
Let’s take a look at its bottom line, to which I will add my own perspective.
In short:
- The French management model is considered rigid, focused on control rather than leadership, with little autonomy or recognition, which is detrimental to employee well-being and collective performance.
- Compared to other European countries, France stands out for its highly vertical hierarchy and lack of employee participation, which reinforces top-down communication and low accountability.
- Managerial autonomy is largely illusory, contradicted by excessive control and increased standardization through digital tools, resulting in management practices that contradict its stated principles.
- Managers, often selected for their technical rather than interpersonal skills, are poorly prepared for their role, poorly supported, and overworked, which affects their engagement and health.
- To reinvent effective management, we must recognize management as a profession in its own right, rethink training, value experience in the field, and make it a strategic lever for public policy.
Preamble: a French management crisis
The report confirms a widely held view: France is suffering from a management model that is on its last legs. The legacy of a rigid hierarchical culture, this model grants little autonomy, fails to value interpersonal skills and too often ignores the recognition of work accomplished. Management is seen more as a tool for control than a lever for motivation, in a regulatory framework where rules take precedence over relationships.
Comparisons with our European neighbors are stark: in terms of autonomy, participation, and recognition, France consistently lags behind countries such as Germany, Sweden, and even Italy. This persistent verticality undermines employee health, fuels absenteeism (particularly among managers) and undermines collective performance. Worse still, managerial technocracy has joined forces with intrusive digital tools to create a ‘soft bureaucracy’ that infantilizes rather than empowers.
Faced with this impasse, the report calls for profound change: rethinking manager training, promoting professional dialogue, placing managerial practices at the heart of social policies, and making management a public policy issue in its own right. A paradigm shift is necessary, but it must be willed.
A hierarchical tradition that still stifles teamwork
French management remains trapped in an authoritarian model inherited from the central government and the grandes écoles, where prestige is valued more highly than skills. Managers are trained to lead, rarely to listen. In comparison, Sweden requires employee participation in decision-making through co-determination, and Germany structures its management around works councils.
The IGAS report notes that hierarchical distance remains very high in France. This verticality produces top-down communication, which is not conducive to debate and work adjustments. As Philippe d’Iribarne has already pointed out, the French mindset is based on statutory honor, not on contracts or consensus.
Autonomy, a French fiction
The autonomy proclaimed in speeches about transformation actually hides increased control. According to IGAS, 68% of managers say they are subject to excessive control, well above the European average. The proliferation of digital tools (ERP, CRM, reporting) has reinforced standardization, to the detriment of professional judgment.
This poorly managed hybridization between the French culture of control and imported Anglo-Saxon methodsproduces schizophrenic management: autonomy on the surface, control in reality. In contrast, the Netherlands and Denmark are focusing on real room for maneuver and accountability.
Management without recognition
Recognition of work is a weakness of the French model. It is absent from evaluation processes, reduced to anonymous indicators, and does not take into account the effort or situational intelligence of employees. This denial is all the more serious given that studies (IGAS, Eurofound) identify it as a key factor in psychological health and engagement.
In contrast, Ireland values daily contact between managers and employees, in person and not through tools. Recognition is given through relationships and words, not through grades.
French managers: the sacrificial lambs
Held responsible but deprived of leverage, middle managers are the first to be affected by the malaise. According to AXA Datascope, absenteeism among executives has jumped 50% in five years, particularly among those under 40. Managers are becoming targets, buffers, and scapegoats all at once.
France trains brilliant students in management (six schools are ranked in the world’s top ten), but devalues the managerial role in the field. In Germany, managers are trained over time, supported, and selected for their people skills, not their CVs.
A blind spot in public policy
The IGAS report shows that France is over-equipped in terms of measures but under-strategized: freedom of expression, QVCT, and social obligations exist, but they are not bringing about change. Management is not treated as a major political issue.
Elsewhere, targeted initiatives are making a difference: Sweden requires companies to manage psychosocial risks, Germany’s INQA program supports SME management, and in Italy, the right to remote work is seen as a lever for autonomy.
For a new management deal
Quality management is a common good. It affects public health, economic performance, and social cohesion. The IGAS report proposes several runways, such as integrating management into social policies, overhauling training, and supporting managers in their mission.
- Valuing field experience in career paths and no longer restricting managerial positions to elite graduates.
- Establishing forums for discussion about work that are long-standing and recognized by organizations as drivers of sustainable performance.
- Rethinking management training to include organizational sociology, occupational psychology, and the complexity of human dynamics.
- Make management a public evaluation criterion in calls for tenders, public procurement, and social incentives.
- Support managers as agents of change through support policies, peer assistance, and institutional recognition.
It must also be recognized that management is not a secondary function, but a pillar of any living organization.
What the IGAS report highlights is not a simple technical failure but a profound cultural shift. As long as management is seen as a supervisory function rather than an art of bringing minds together, France will remain trapped in a model that is demotivating and ineffective. Giving managers back their rightful place means embarking on a genuine social project: one that is fairer, more effective, and more humane.
French management beyond the IGAS report
The IGAS report has the merit of highlighting a reality that everyone can see. It may also have the merit of intellectualizing the observation, although I am not sure that this is a good thing. Furthermore, we are talking about a real cultural problem, and I doubt that making it a political issue will change much.
In my opinion, it is therefore not useless to reframe the issue in much more concrete terms.
In France, management is not a profession
I have already touched on this subject in the past, but management skills are not given their true value compared to technical skills (Is manager still a profession?).In France, managers are still too often promoted for their technical expertise, not for their ability to manage. This can be seen in job advertisements: a director is recruited with the requirement that he or she knows how to perform the tasks of his or her direct reports.
The result? A shift in function: management becomes a secondary task, when it should be a core skill, or even a career in its own right. Being a manager is not about “doing things instead of” others, but about creating the conditions for others to do things well (Managers are responsible for everything that goes wrong). And that, in itself, deserves to be recognized as a profession.
But let’s go a step further.
– We train people to exercise power, not to take responsibility. In France, we prepare managers to make decisions, not to deal with the human consequences. Legitimacy is based on qualifications and titles, not on the ability to listen, adjust, and arbitrate. The result is leaders who see things from above, often disconnected from reality, sometimes truly helpless (Why corporate governance fails despite good intentions).
– Job descriptions as a symptom of the problem. In France, job descriptions are often multi-layered, combining technical requirements, reporting requirements, and idealized behavioral virtues, but rarely explaining how the position contributes to the collective.
– We confuse complexity with complication. To respond to complexity, French organizations pile on processes (The organizational complication: the #1 irritant of the employee experience). But complexity requires flexibility and judgment, not more layers. Complication masks uncertainty instead of helping to remedy it.
– Management as a role, not a posture. Many people play the role of manager as if it were a part they were acting out: expected posture, set phrases, smiling in meetings. But managing is not about performing. It is about engaging with reality, taking hits, and juggling paradoxes. It is not a cosmetic function.
– We don’t give management time. Managing takes time: time to speak, listen, mediate, and give feedback. But in French organizations, this time is seen as unproductive. We overload, we rush, we automate. The result is that we deprive ourselves of what holds teams together.
Bottom line
France is not condemned to its current management model. It has the resources, intelligence, and experience to reinvent a form of management that is grounded in reality, based on trust, and meaningful. But this requires a clean break with the myth of the all-knowing boss, massive investment in interpersonal skills, and a revaluation of the role of the manager as a pillar of team life and work organization. It is almost a societal challenge.
Visual credit: Image generated by artificial intelligence via ChatGPT (OpenAI)
Related articles:
Considering the gap between management 2.0 and enterprise 2.0
Holacracy at Zappos : no boss or hierarchy. Really
Lessons on the hard job of designing communities in the organization
Don’t confuse enterprises without managers with without management
The Future of work by Jacob Morgan : digitizing Drucker
How can you avoid becoming a bottleneck in the workplace?
