What will the post-Tavares era look like for Stellantis? – Technologist

It took a long time for Stellantis to confirm, after the group’s board meeting on Sunday, December 1, the resignation “with immediate effect” of its eminent CEO, Carlos Tavares. Tavares discussed the terms of the press release in much detail. A famously tough and demanding negotiator, he set conditions for his severance package.

The amount has not been revealed. But everyone has in mind the check cashed by Fiat Chrysler’s American boss, Mike Manley, when he left the group after the merger with PSA, leaving the number one spot to the European boss: €51 million. Tavares’s pay package is also well known: €36.5 million in 2023, €23.5 million in 2022 and €19 million in 2021, according to the automaker’s financial report.

However, these sums include variable components that are only payable if certain targets – such as share price performance – are met. The time to settle scores has therefore come. “The compensation does not go beyond what is provided for in his contract,” asserted a source close to Stellantis’s reference shareholders. But the severance package is not the only issue raised by this shock departure.

How will Stellantis function without its CEO?

With the selection process for Tavares’s successor now underway, John Elkann, the president of the board of directors and representative of the Agnelli family, has taken over interim management of the group. He immediately left for Detroit, Michigan, to meet Stellantis’s American teams. Above all, he wanted to present the new management structure on Monday, “to show that there is no operational latency,” said a spokesperson for the automaker.

Elkann began by bringing back a man he trusted: former Fiat Chrysler (FCA) CFO Richard Palmer, who will be his special adviser. Palmer left the company in 2023. Tavares replaced him with Nathalie Knight, who came from the retail sector to improve financial communications. She only lasted a few months. She was dismissed in October.

Elkann has put an end to Tavares’s rake-like management structure. He had a top executive team of 35 people, who reported directly to him. This fall, for greater efficiency, the team was reduced to… 29 people. Tavares called a remote meeting every Tuesday, convinced that he could detect everyone’s moods and annoyances by scanning the little thumbnails on his videoconferencing tablet.

The interim CEO has opted for a more pyramid-based set-up, with an interim executive committee of just nine people, in which he has kept the familiar faces of the Tavares team, such as technology boss Ned Curic, formerly of Amazon; Europe and European brands head Jean-Philippe Imparato; America and American brands lead Antonio Filosa; and chief purchasing and supplies quality officer Maxime Picat. Béatrice Fouchet, in charge of strategy and product development planning, is the only woman. The heads of the Italian brands Maserati, Alfa Romeo and Fiat also report directly to her.

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