Interim Chief Business Officer — Leadership Structure

Designing the structure a business will grow into

Leadership structures tend to be inherited rather than designed. Roles accumulate around people, reporting lines follow history, and decision rights settle wherever the last argument left them. The Interim Chief Business Officer is appointed to design the structure deliberately, for the next ownership chapter rather than the last one, and then to put leaders into it and make it work.

The judgement involved is less about organisation charts than about decisions. A good structure starts from the calls that must be made, at what level and by whom, and works outward to roles. Where a role exists mainly to protect a historic arrangement, it should be questioned. Where a decision has no natural home, one should be created. In a logistics and infrastructure business, the sequence also matters: some commercial investment cannot move until obligations elsewhere are met, and a structure that ignores that order will produce leaders with authority they cannot use.

The Group Chief Executive Officer is your reporting line, and the authority is executive. You will set the rules for who decides what, including the decisions market heads keep for themselves, and set the standard investment, resourcing and control requests must meet across markets. Inherited commitments continue, pause or stop on your decision, and proposals that load cost or risk onto teams that never took it on stop with you. You will decline investment cases that omit take-up, dependencies or downside. You will sign off the structure itself and the way issues rise, settle disputes between market heads and the centre before budgets are fixed, and decide how often progress, breaches and pending choices are reported.

From proposal to a structure that stands on its own

Within three months, a leadership structure for the next ownership chapter should be proposed, with decision rights and the routes for raising issues agreed. Around month nine, leaders should be appointed into the new structure, and inherited commitments should have been assigned to accountable owners or brought to an end. By month 24 the structure should be working without interim support, with successors identified for each critical role.

Who fits, and how we will meet

Your general management responsibility has extended to organisations with revenue of $345 million or more and 1,600 or more people working across seven or more countries. Your cost transformation, professionalisation and regulatory remediation work will be weighed, and so will strategy formation at level 4 and level 3 in operating cadence, in P&L ownership and in risk judgement. You can tell a local exception that genuinely serves customers from one kept alive by habit, and you are at ease if your first real result is a role or commitment removed rather than added, with evidence to defend it. Anyone who would delay a stop decision until each national head consents should not apply.

First comes the Group Chief Executive Officer, by confidential video in week one. The Audit Committee Chair follows in week three, testing your thinking on a live structural question. In week five you will spend time in person with executives who each lead a function, and in week seven with the full board. A written reply follows each stage within three working days.