Interim Chief Executive Officer — Controls (Business Services)

Reading the year backwards from month twelve

A single year is a long time for an interim mandate, which is why this one is easiest to read from its finishing line. By month 12 the organisation should be running one operating agenda on its own rhythm: a single set of priorities, one calendar of reviews, and a leadership team that knows which decisions belong to it without needing the interim chief executive in the room. Whoever leads next should inherit a settled structure and a working cadence, not an argument still in progress.

Around month nine comes the test of whether that agenda is real. Every commitment that survived consolidation should by then have been held against the evidence the Investment Committee agreed to use. The ones that failed should be visibly paused or stopped, with the reasoning written down and their exceptions closed rather than carried forward. A combined plan that still contains every original local promise is not a combined plan, and month nine is when that becomes obvious one way or the other.

The first ninety days are the hardest intellectually. Local plans tend to be internally coherent and collectively impossible, each assuming people and money that the others also claim. The work is to lay them side by side, agree the limits below which local leaders decide alone, and put one accountable person against every control exception so that nothing falls into the gap between two plans.

What the interim chief executive is empowered to decide

The appointment carries executive authority, not an advisory brief. Within the frame the Investment Committee sets, the interim chief executive decides how authority is divided between the centre and local leadership, and which evidence will govern where money, people and management attention go. They decide which inherited commitments survive. They can stop a proposal that quietly lands an expense or an exposure on someone who never accepted it, and refuse an investment whose case is silent on its users, its dependencies or its failure mode. They also sign off who sits on the leadership team, and they settle disputes with the heads of operations while the money is still uncommitted rather than after it has gone out.

Controls deserve a particular kind of attention in an organisation owned by its members. Good interim leadership protects the controls that earn their keep, prices every exception openly, and resists both easy tolerance and process added for its own sake.

Record and temperament

The committee expects you to have led an organisation of at least 1,900 people, turning over $525 million or more, across two countries at minimum. More to the point, you have reset who holds authority, where money goes and how the business keeps time in the middle of M&A buy-side work, when two ways of running a business had to become one. Your joint venture experience matters for a related reason: a joint venture teaches you how to run a shared agenda where no party can simply instruct the other. Professionalisation is the third strand the committee will examine, meaning the move from habit to method without losing what made the business work.

On capability the emphasis falls on strategy formation at level 4; the committee will look for level 3 in each of the other three: running an operating rhythm, judging risk, and owning a P&L. In practice that means you can say which local ambition has to give way and why, take an unresolved gap to the Investment Committee without hiding behind the uncertainty, and hand over a deeper bench of operating leaders than you inherited. If you would need every local leader's agreement before stopping a commitment, or would rather hold influence than twelve months of answerability, this seat will frustrate you.

From the committee's first call to the full board

The Investment Committee makes first contact in week one, privately and over video, to hear how you would approach pulling the local plans into one. The Board Chair follows in week three with a working session on a consolidation problem of the kind this seat will meet. In week five an in-person panel of executive leaders, one from each major function, will want to know whether your agenda would survive contact with their operations. The directors, sitting as a full board, take the final conversation in week seven. You will know how each stage went within two working days.