Interim Chief Human Resources Officer — Renewal

Someone whose people judgements have stood up in the boardroom

The Board Chair is looking for a human resources leader whose assessments of people have been tested by directors and held. You have led organisations whose revenue reached $870 million or more, with 3,400 or more people across seven or more countries, and one of your own calls was to halt a people commitment before the damage landed. A board chair and the managers nearest the work have both challenged your baselines, and they stood.

Your experience includes a carve-out, an integration and a turnaround, three moments when an organisation discovers how thin its succession really is. Talent succession at level 4 is the heart of the brief; at level 3 sit reward architecture, capability building, and the handling of the board and stakeholders. You can say where local discretion is worth keeping, and you put that line in writing.

Readiness on evidence, not opinion

Succession evidence is weak in most organisations for the same reason: it records opinions about readiness rather than evidence of it. A name in a box marked 'ready now' tells directors very little unless they know what the person has actually done, at what scale, under what pressure, and with what result. The interim chief human resources officer is appointed with executive authority to change that, so the board can make succession decisions on evidence it would be comfortable defending.

To do so, the officer agrees which people decisions sit with the centre and which are kept locally, and defines the evidence the board will see when people, money and controls are at stake. Development programmes and appointments that cannot show their worth can be paused or brought to a close. Proposals that hand their cost to a colleague who never took it on are stopped, and funding is withheld from any case that is vague about uptake, its dependencies, or what could go wrong. The officer settles the make-up of the leadership and the escalation route, works through disagreements between the Board Chair and the heads of operations, and decides how regularly the board sees succession progress, gaps and pending calls.

Eighteen months from opinion to evidence

Inside ninety days the officer and the Board Chair should have fixed the standard of evidence for succession decisions, covering readiness, performance and development. By around month nine succession slates for critical roles should be presented to the board on that evidence, with each gap owned and given a date. By month 18 succession evidence should be used routinely in board decisions, with people decision rights and escalation settled.

Chair, committee chair, investment committee

The Board Chair speaks with you first, over a private video link, during week one. A succession case from the Audit Committee Chair follows in week two. Week three is an in-person discussion with the investment committee. Our response follows each stage within four working days.