Advisory Chair — Operating Model and Recovery (Hospitality)

Patch by patch, plan by plan

Local plans are written by people who know their own patch. That is their strength and their limit. Put side by side, they tend to overlap, compete for the same resources and assume the centre will absorb whatever does not fit. The Advisory Chair is appointed to help turn a collection of local plans into a single operating agenda that someone is accountable for, within 12 months.

An advisory seat that persuades rather than directs

The seat is advisory. The Advisory Chair offers counsel; the decisions belong to leadership. The chair's leverage is the clarity of the recommendations and the willingness to say what others would rather leave unsaid.

Where the advice will land

The chair helps agree a single allocation of decisions, making explicit what local leadership keeps, and advises on which measures should govern investment, capacity and control across markets. They recommend which inherited commitments should be kept, paused or closed. They push back on any proposal that would load cost or risk onto a team that has not consented to it, and question value cases that say nothing of uptake, dependence on other projects or the downside. They advise on how the leadership team is arranged and how problems rise, and help the Group Chief Executive Officer and operating leaders settle conflicts while money is still uncommitted.

The year, from comparison to adoption

Once ninety days have passed, the local plans should have been laid side by side and a single operating agenda, owners attached, put to the chief executive as a recommendation. Around month nine those plans should have been folded into the single agenda, with overlapping or conflicting commitments resolved rather than quietly tolerated. By month 12 one accountable operating agenda should be adopted and reviewed quarterly by leadership, without advisory support.

An adviser fluent in separation and succession

Your experience should come from organisations at or above $530 million in revenue, 4,200 people and four countries. Experience of carve-out, succession and professionalisation will count most, because each forces an organisation to decide what is shared and what is local. One agenda needs a strategist, so strategy formation is weighted at level 4; at level 3 apiece we look for command of operating cadence, judgement of risk, and ownership of a P&L.

You can separate local judgement that is genuinely needed from variation that persists only out of habit. Before an exception was allowed to run on, you have made someone accept its cost; you have said no to money for plans that could not say who would use them or what could go wrong, and then rebuilt the missing capability. You can tell a chief executive that two local plans cannot both be funded, and say which one you would back and why.

Meeting the people who wrote the plans

Week 1 is a confidential discussion with the Group Chief Executive Officer over video; week 3 is time with the Board Chair on how a single agenda should be governed. Week 5 brings, in person, the executives heading each function, many of whom wrote the local plans. The directors, as a full board, make the final assessment in week 7. Within two working days of each stage, we will let you know in writing where you stand.