Interim Group Chief Executive Officer — Recovery

Changing who decides while the portfolio keeps moving

Few executive seats ask a leader to change who decides while every building and development keeps moving. Tenants still expect service, financing terms still have to be honoured and development programmes still need someone with the power to sign. Here you rebuild the leadership structure for the group's next ownership chapter without letting any of that stall, and you do it with full executive authority rather than as a commentator.

The calls that rest with the interim chief executive

That authority is concrete. You will decide which calls belong at group level and which limits stay with the leaders who run assets and markets day to day. You will fix the evidence the group relies on before it commits funding, people and approvals, so that every team argues from one set of downside cases rather than several. Inherited commitments will be judged one at a time: some will carry on, some will be paused, some exited. A plan that quietly parks cost or risk on another division stops at your desk until someone named agrees to carry it, as does a development case that cannot say who will take up the change, which other approvals it leans on, or how large the loss could become. You will also name who leads each part of the portfolio and the path a problem takes upward, settle arguments with asset and market leaders while funds and staff are still uncommitted, and build the reporting rhythm that shows the board what has moved, what has slipped and what still awaits a decision.

In real estate the hardest part of this is usually sequencing. A development decision taken in one quarter shapes the balance sheet for years. A strong interim chief executive makes those links visible before the commitment, not in the post-mortem.

Milestones the Board Chair will hold you to

The first ninety days belong to agreement with the Board Chair. By then the group should know who decides what, which limits stay with the people running assets and markets, and what will happen to each inherited commitment. Nothing dramatic needs to have been launched; what matters is that the board can see the whole inventory of promises it has inherited and the verdict on each.

Around month nine the new structure should be working in practice, problems should be finding their way upward along a known path, and disagreements with asset and market leaders should be closing before capital or staff are tied up, not after. By month 24 the board should be reviewing progress, exceptions and pending decisions through a steady rhythm that belongs to the new leadership team, not to the interim who designed it.

A group leader with joint-venture experience

The smallest business you have run still had $390 million in revenue and 1,200 people, spread over two or more countries. You can tell local judgement the business genuinely needs from variation that survives only because no one has challenged it. Joint venture, integration and value creation experience will all be examined, as will strategy formation at level 4, with level 3 sought in running a P&L, in judging risk and in setting an operating cadence. You can set out an unresolved gap for the Board Chair and still recommend a course of action. This is the wrong seat for anyone who would let a single dissenting country head keep a failing commitment alive, or who wants a say in the portfolio without answering for it across all 24 months.

During week one the Board Chair speaks with you confidentially over video about what this ownership chapter demands and where you would draw lines of authority. Two weeks later, in week three, you sit down with the Audit Committee Chair to test the evidence behind funding and control decisions. In the fifth week you sit in person with a panel of executive leaders drawn from each function of the group, who will press on how your choices would land in property operations, and the full board's directors meet you in the seventh week to close the process. You will know how each stage went within three working days.