At 35, Isabelle Harsch already has solid experience as a business manager within the company that her father passed on to her when she was 28 years old.
“It may be unusual to start so young, and it’s true that it was not easy,” she confided on Saturday in the RTS #Helvetica program. “I was still very inexperienced, so I had to prove myself on the pitch and learn from my mistakes.”
She started twelve years ago in logistics, to train. “I got to know the company that way, the employees got to know me too. I think that fostered a bond of trust,” she says. “It’s what I wanted, what my father wanted,” continues the CEO. “I knew the company a lot when I was a child, my father talked regarding it a lot at home, I grew up with it. There was also a notion of pride”.
We can endanger the company depending on the decisions we make.
However, it is not always a good thing to take on such responsibilities at a very young age, she admits. “I think it can help, it brings something to the company, but it can also be a risk”. For lack of experience, “we can endanger the company depending on the decisions we make”. That said, Isabelle Harsch also sees the opportunity to think a little off the beaten track. “And we are perhaps less afraid of criticism”.
Need more proactive management
His father Bertrand managed the business in a more traditional way, even a little patriarchal. She wanted to modernize the way of managing it. “I made sure that it was an evolution and not a revolution”, underlines Isabelle Harsch.
But I needed a little more proactive management, she adds. “I wanted to broaden the hierarchical stratum by putting more operational managers (…) so that, ultimately, decisions are made more quickly, that employees are also closer to decision-making centres.
We need to be agile in the context we know, adds the Genevan. “I think the employees saw the result, maybe it gave more meaning to their daily lives. And it also increased motivation.”
The worst for an entrepreneur is layoffs, but we are dependent on the market.
Still, a business leader must also, sometimes, make unpopular decisions. “The worst thing for an entrepreneur is layoffs,” she notes. But sometimes, “you have to make this decision to lighten the company, resize it according to the volume of business. We are dependent on the market in which we operate”.
Isabelle Harsch nevertheless believes that we are more in a relationship of trust between employees and employers in Switzerland. “Labour law is made on a model of trust. I think the perception is rather positive, even if that does not mean that we are popular all the time”.
And in the face of current crises, the key word is adaptation, she says. “You have to be resilient, it’s a quality that the company and I have”.
Women helping each other
Today, there are only 2.9% of women in corporate CEO positions in Switzerland. “I am really campaigning for women to be given positions of responsibility,” she reacts. “In the actions that I can carry out, I always have this element in consideration, because it is necessary that we can help each other mutually between women”.
I think the fight to empower women is also a right-wing fight.
A member of the Centre, Isabelle Harsch briefly sat on the (legislative) Municipal Council of the City of Geneva a few years ago. “I think the fight to empower women is also a right-wing fight,” she points out, even though she has now left politics aside. “I am committed to my company”.
The example of Alain Berset during the Covid
Among the Swiss personalities she likes, she says she was very impressed by Alain Berset during the Covid crisis. “I found that he managed this crisis like a real industry boss, it inspired me a lot on the way of communicating, on the humility he had to say the situation”. And the business manager says she used it extensively in communications to her employees “in relation to the measures that we had to take and the uncertainty in which we lived”.
The Harsch company, whose head office is in Geneva, has 150 employees for a turnover of more than 25 million francs per year. It specializes in the transport of works of art, international and corporate removals, as well as in the management of archives.
Interview by Elisabeth Logean/oang
