Interim Group Chief Operating Officer — Recovery

Which practices earn the right to spread

Every operation that spans several countries develops its own ways of working, and some of them are genuinely better than the rest. The difficulty is telling which. A practice that works well in one country may depend on a particular team, a particular asset base or a particular regulator, and spreading it elsewhere can do more harm than good. Equally, a practice that looks like local eccentricity may be the reason one country's safety or reliability record is stronger. The Interim Group Chief Operating Officer is appointed to make those distinctions with evidence and then to act on them, scaling what has proven itself and retiring what has not.

The role carries interim executive authority and reports to the Country Managing Director. You will draw the operations decision rights and the limits local leaders keep, and set the operating evidence that investment, capacity and control choices in each country must rest on. You decide which inherited commitments proceed, wait or end. You can stop any change that drops cost or risk on a team that has not accepted it, and decline investment where the case misses take-up, the work it depends on or the downside. You sign off the operations leadership design and how safety and service issues escalate, and resolve disputes with country operations heads before resources are released. Throughout, quality and safety controls have to hold through every change: in energy and utility services, a practice is retired carefully or not at all.

Twenty-four months of scaling and retiring

Within ninety days there should be an assessment of operating practices across countries, with the criteria for scaling or retiring each one agreed with the Country Managing Director. Around month nine the first practices should have been scaled or retired on evidence, with quality and safety controls held through each transition. By month 24 a single set of proven operating practices should be in use across the countries, the retired ones properly closed out, and an operations bench in place to run them.

An operator who keeps safety intact

You should have led operations in a business with $380 million or more in revenue, 900 people and six countries, and you can tell a local practice the operation genuinely needs from one kept alive by habit. You have acted on partial operating evidence with a decision you could undo, then firmed it up as better facts arrived. The Country Managing Director will examine buy-side M&A, integration and digital transformation in your record. Operating cadence matters most, at level 4; operating model, network footprint, and quality and safety are each needed at level 3. You build successors alongside the new operating practices, so they run without you. An operations commitment can be stopped before every country operation agrees, and the outcome through the full 24 months is yours to own.

Should this practice spread?

Every stage turns on that question. The Country Managing Director asks it first, on a confidential call by video during week 1. In week three you work through it in a session with the Regional President. Function heads at executive level, many of whom run the practices in question, sit with you face to face in week five, and a meeting of the whole board of directors closes things in week seven. Our written response arrives within five working days of each stage.