Interim Regional Operations Director — Operations Recovery

Growth is not the brief

Operations leaders are usually hired to add capacity, extend reach or absorb more volume. The Interim Regional Operations Director is being asked to do something less common and harder to defend: to put dependable service first and let volume wait until it can be carried well. Nor is this a quality-assurance post sitting alongside the operation. The director runs the operation, with executive authority for 18 months.

Recovering reliability with real authority

Which operational decisions local leaders keep across the region is for the director to settle, along with the measures by which investment, capacity and control are governed. Inherited commitments are reviewed and either carried on, paused or closed, and growth commitments are held back where they would put dependable service at risk. A proposal that quietly hands its cost or risk to another team is blocked, as is any investment case that ignores uptake, what it relies on, or the price of failure. How operations leadership is arranged and how problems travel upward are for the director to approve; so is the settling of disagreements between the Country Managing Director and operating leaders, and the regular review at which service progress and unresolved choices are laid out.

The practical work is root-cause work. A service failure fixed at the surface returns; one traced to the handoff, the capacity assumption or the control that failed tends to stay fixed. In non-profit services the cost of unreliability tends to fall directly on the people the organisation exists to serve, and the director's discipline should reflect that.

The operator who chooses reliability over applause

Operations you have led should reach $635 million in revenue, 1,500 people and five countries at a minimum, and you can tell a local exception that is genuinely necessary from variation that history has merely protected. Crisis response, joint venture and turnaround experience will count most. Recovery lives or dies on rhythm, which is why operating cadence is wanted at level 4; operating model, network footprint and quality and safety are each needed at level 3.

You protect the controls that genuinely prevent failures, put a price tag on every exception, and hand over an operations team stronger than the one you inherited. You can hold a growth commitment back against the wishes of the people who championed it, and remain answerable for the whole programme, not only its first months.

Eighteen months, measured in service

The first ninety days should give the region an agreed, measurable definition of reliable service, settled recovery priorities, and a pause on growth commitments wherever they threaten that standard. Around month nine recovery actions should be owned market by market, with service failures traced to their root cause and closed rather than patched. By month 18 dependable service should be sustained across the region, with criteria agreed in advance for when volume growth may resume, so the decision to grow again is made on evidence rather than impatience.

A short process, closely spaced

The stages sit a week apart. The Country Managing Director speaks with you confidentially by video in week 1. The following week, week 2, you take a live case to the Board Chair and show how you would sequence recovery against growth. By week 3 you are meeting the Executive committee in person. You will know how each stage went, in writing, within four working days.