Interim Regional President — Delivery

A leader comfortable choosing where not to compete

Most regional leaders are measured by what they add. This appointment asks for someone equally comfortable with what they take away. You will have made general management decisions in banking or financial services where delay carried a real cost, in a business with at least $335 million in revenue and 700 or more people working across six countries. Your record should include succession, a platform pivot and a turnaround, and you should have stayed accountable after the decision was taken, through the unglamorous work of closing out exceptions. The capability profile calls for strategy formation at level 4 and, at level 3, judgement of risk, an operating cadence that holds, and ownership of a P&L. You can also separate a local exception that is genuinely needed from one that persists only because of history. Leaders who do this well tend to be precise about the reason for each exit: a business that cannot earn its cost of capital is a different problem from one that simply falls outside where the organisation wants to be, and members deserve to know which is which.

Authority to compete, and to withdraw

Under the Group Chief Executive Officer, the Interim Regional President holds executive authority for 18 months over where the regional business competes and where it steps back. You will set a regional decision framework with defined thresholds for local leaders, choose which facts govern investment, capacity and controls, and rule on whether each inherited commitment continues, pauses or ends. Proposals that shift cost or risk with nobody accountable will stop with you, as will investment missing take-up, operating dependencies or downside; you will also approve how leaders are organised and how issues escalate, and work through conflicts with operating leaders before money changes hands.

For a cooperative or mutual, stepping back from an activity carries member consequences that a shareholder-owned bank might weigh differently. A good leader makes the case for each withdrawal in terms members would recognise, and manages the exit so that customers are treated fairly from the first announcement to the last account transferred.

Eighteen months from choice to focus

Within ninety days, you and the Group Chief Executive Officer should agree a proposal on where the regional business competes and where it withdraws. Around month nine withdrawal from the chosen activities should be under way, with each exception owned and tracked to closure. By month 18 the regional business should be competing only where it agreed to, under a leadership structure that continues without the interim president.

A short route of three weeks

Things open in week one with a confidential exchange over video with the Group Chief Executive Officer. The second week is a working case with the Regional President, and the third an in-person discussion with the investment committee. Two working days after each, you receive a response in writing.