A managerial revolution at Michelin

Despite Michelin's strong humanist culture, listening to the rank and file is not something that can be taken for granted, and can be eroded as time goes by. Thus, in the 1990s, workers counted for little in the operational management of plants. Jean-Christophe Guérin was appointed Director of Industrial Performance of Michelin in 2004. Together with his teams, he launched a managerial revolution designed to give more weight back to the field, encourage teams to gain a concrete understanding of problems and enable them to re-engage in their work, with a better division of responsibilities between managers and workers. While the improvements are real, it will take around ten years for them to stabilise at a global level. They still sometimes come up against patches of resistance, which can be explained, as Jean-Michel Frixon revealed, by the presence of toxic managers. While it was already not easy for industrial management to undertake such a transformation, detecting toxic managers is also a challenge.