Interim President, International Markets — Recovery

Designing the leadership a network will live with

Most interim presidents are judged on what they decide. This one will also be judged on who decides after them. Over 24 months, reporting to the Board Chair, the Interim President, International Markets will set the leadership structure for the organisation's next phase across its international markets, while carrying full executive authority in the meantime.

That authority reaches the design of decision-making itself: how much a country head can commit without asking, and what must come to the international leadership. It covers the evidence the organisation will use to govern investment, clinical capacity and control. It includes ruling whether each commitment continues, waits or ends; refusing plans that would leave a country team or partner holding exposure it never accepted; and declining investment whose case is silent on who adopts the change, what it leans on and what failure would mean. The president signs off the leadership team and the escalation route, resolves disputes between the Board Chair and the heads of country operations, and decides how often the board sees progress, overruns and undecided questions.

Where the state has a stake in a healthcare provider, how leadership is designed becomes a public matter. Clinical services, research support and evidence functions cannot pause while authority moves between people. Structures are therefore changed in an order that keeps someone clearly accountable for patient-facing work at every step, and successors are tested in real decisions before they are confirmed rather than after. Some variation between countries reflects genuine differences in regulation, payers or clinical practice; some is simply inherited. Telling the two apart, and writing the boundary down, is a large part of the job.

Three checkpoints across two years

As the first ninety days finish, the Board Chair and the president should have agreed the recovery priorities for international markets and the leadership roles the next phase will need. Around month nine the international leadership structure should be confirmed, with successors identified for the critical roles and every recovery commitment ruled on. By month 24 the new international leadership team should be taking recovery decisions through an agreed route for raising and resolving issues, confident enough in its own authority that the interim president's departure changes nothing material.

The leader, and the conversations that test the fit

Your career includes a business with revenue of at least $605 million and no fewer than 3,400 people working in seven or more countries, and you have led through crisis response, a platform pivot and an integration. Your judgement has been tested in a setting where an operating network could not stop while authority changed. The appointment wants strategy formation at level 4, then P&L ownership, operating cadence and risk judgement, all at level 3. You can tell a board chair what is still unresolved without sheltering behind it, and you will end a commitment without first collecting agreement from every country head. You expect to stay accountable for all 24 months.

Your first conversation is with the Board Chair, by video and in confidence during week one, about the leadership the next phase needs. Two weeks on, the Risk Committee Chair uses week three to work through with you how continuity would be kept intact as structures change. In week five you meet face to face with executives representing each function of the business, and week seven ends the process with the full board. Every conversation is followed by our assessment, in writing, inside four working days.