The debate about bringing managers back is for companies that have one

22 September 2026, 08:09

Yesterday's Il Sole 24 Ore, in its Management section, carried a piece by Gianni Rusconi that starts from Roberto Mancini's return to the Italian national team bench — his debut is on Friday 25 September against Belgium — to ask a question that holds off the pitch too: when a leader comes back to lead a team they already knew, does it work?

The answer comes from Allison Howell, chief executive of Hogan Assessments, interviewed in the article, and it is worth quoting in full because it is precise:

'A return is in itself neither positive nor risky. The fundamental question is whether the factors that led to the previous departure have genuinely changed.'

The criterion shifts the judgement from the person to the situation, and that is the right way to frame the question. There is, however, an assumption the article never discusses, and it changes everything for anyone reading from inside a company with €6 million in turnover.

The question assumes something that isn't there

The whole line of reasoning — the board weighing things up, the top manager who left and might come back, the memory of past success — assumes a business that has actually had a manager. One that has had a general manager, a finance director, an operations director. One that chose them, paid them and, when necessary, replaced them.

In the businesses we deal with, that figure has almost always been missing from the start — and not because the business owner fails to see the point. Because they cannot afford one.

Let's put a price on it, which is the only way to get past opinions. A finance director on a gross salary of €90,000 costs the company, once social security contributions and other on-costs are added, around €120,000 a year.

Take a healthy company: €6 million in turnover and an EBITDA of fifteen per cent. That €120,000 cuts EBITDA by two points: from fifteen to thirteen per cent. For a single person, and for good, because the cost goes into fixed costs and stays there even in the years when things go badly.

An experienced accounts clerk, by comparison, earns a gross salary of €40-42,000 and costs the company just under €60,000 a year. Less than half the executive. That is the figure an SME of that size can realistically sustain.

That is why the Sole's question, for most Italian businesses, is the wrong one. It is not 'do I bring back the old one or hire a new one?'. It is: where do I get management skills, given that I can't afford a manager?

So what can be done

The most common answer is to hire nobody: the business owner does everything, decides, signs, checks, and in the meantime doesn't steer. That is the situation of most Italian SMEs, and it is not a choice: it comes straight from the sum above.

When the need is a defined problem, with a beginning and an end — a company to turn around, a plant to reorganise, a procedure to build — what is needed is a temporary manager, who comes in, solves that problem and completes the assignment.

But when the need is not a contained problem, and is instead the running of the company day by day, the right form is a different one: fractional management.

The fractional manager stays in the company on a stable basis, with reduced hours: one or two days a week, every week. It is not a fixed-term intervention, not a one-off piece of consultancy, and above all the fractional manager does not leave when the project is over, because there is no project that ends: there is a company that needs leading. They get into the processes, work with the people, set up methods and tools and then make them work month after month.

The cost sits in the clerk's bracket, not the executive's. The expertise is the executive's. It is the only way an SME has of getting both at once.

The part nobody usually mentions

There is, though, one point that is always presented as a sacrifice and is in fact an advantage, and it is the part I like best.

A full-time in-house director is there for the company every day: knows the people one by one, deals with emergencies as they happen, guarantees continuity. That is a value no part-time arrangement can replicate, and those who have it hold on to it.

Some things, however, call for a different position. To tell a business owner that a product line is losing margin, that a long-standing customer isn't paying its way or that a handover needs redoing, you need no internal career to defend and no balance between departments to protect. And to know that a solution works, you need to have seen it work elsewhere.

The fractional manager holds exactly that position: not tied to the structure and not beholden to it, and bringing the experience built up in other companies and other sectors.

The upshot is that the added value is not reduced in proportion to the days. For equal ability it is the same, and often greater, precisely because of the two things that look like limits: there is less time and there is no sense of belonging.

Back to Howell's question

The criterion also holds for those who have never had a manager, and it translates precisely. If the factors that have kept your company without managerial leadership have not changed — the cost, the risk of weighing down fixed costs, the difficulty of finding someone who can handle your sector — then giving the problem a new name will not solve it.

What solves it is changing the way that expertise comes into the company.

This article was prompted by a news item published in Il Sole 24 Ore.