Interim Country Managing Director — Value Agenda (Hospitality)

Neither a steady hand nor a growth evangelist

An interim country head is often expected either to keep things steady or to arrive with an ambitious growth story. The Interim Country Managing Director is asked for neither. The task is to build a growth plan that respects what the operation can actually carry, and to lead the country to it, with executive authority for 12 months.

Planning growth inside honest limits

In hospitality, the limits on growth are usually physical and human before they are financial: rooms that need refurbishment before they can be sold at a higher rate, teams that cannot stretch across another opening, service promises that some properties can keep and others cannot. A plan that ignores these will look good in the board pack and disappoint in the guest experience. The country managing director's job is to map the constraints first and plan inside them.

The authority to do it is real. The director sets how decisions are allocated within the country, including the limits local leaders keep, and decides which measures will govern investment, capacity and control. Inherited commitments are reviewed and either kept, held or closed. A proposal that hands its cost or risk to someone further down the line is stopped, and investment cases that ignore uptake, reliance on other work or what could go wrong are declined. The director signs off how the leadership team is built and the way problems travel upward, settles clashes between the Group Chief Executive Officer and operating leaders, and decides how often progress against the plan, departures from it and decisions still pending come into view.

A country leader who has restructured and kept running

The businesses you have run should have brought in at least $265 million and employed 1,900 people or more across six countries, and you should have lived through restructuring, integration and professionalisation. Strategy formation at level 4 is what turns a constraint map into a plan; at level 3 apiece, operating cadence, a firm hold on the P&L and sound risk judgement are what make the plan deliverable.

You have carried a restructuring that was felt in the boardroom and on the guest-facing floor alike, and you have kept guests served through a period when authority was changing hands. You remain answerable after a decision is taken, including for the dull work of closing out exceptions. You are as willing to tell the Group Chief Executive Officer that a growth target cannot be met within the constraints as you are to deliver one that can.

Constraints first, then the plan, then delivery

The first ninety days are for mapping the country's operating constraints and agreeing them, so that growth is planned inside known limits. Around month nine a growth plan should be approved that sequences property, guest and service commitments within those limits, rather than promising everything at once. By month 12 growth initiatives should be delivering to that plan, with the constraints reviewed and the plan rolled forward by local leaders who now own it.

Four stages to a decision

In week 1 the Group Chief Executive Officer meets you by video, in confidence, to talk through the constraints you would look for first. Week 3 puts you with the Board Chair to show how you would sequence growth against constraint. Week 5 is in person, with senior executives representing every function, and week 7 is with the full board. Feedback on each stage reaches you in writing within two working days.