Interim Chief Operating Officer — Integration (Consumer and Retail)

An editor with a builder's credibility

Some operating leaders are builders, and some are editors. This seat calls for an editor with a builder's credibility: someone who can look across a set of inherited practices, recognise the ones worth spreading, and retire the rest without losing the trust of the people who use them. You will have led operations for a business with 1,000 people in two countries and revenue of $410 million or more. Your record in value creation, platform pivots and succession will be explored in depth. Value creation is the anchor, and specifically your ability to keep the story told to a board consistent with what the operating evidence shows.

Operating cadence is required at level 4, because whether a practice scales well depends on the rhythm of review around it. Operating model, network footprint, and quality and safety are required at level 3 each. Your baselines have been pulled apart by senior leadership and by the people running daily operations, and have held. You protect controls that earn their keep, make the cost of every exception visible, and leave behind a stronger operating bench than you found.

What the chief operating officer decides

The Interim Chief Operating Officer holds executive authority under the Country Managing Director. At the heart of the role is a recurring decision: which operating practices scale, and which end. Making it well requires a clear sense of who decides what. The officer sets how operating decisions are made and how far local leaders may go on their own, and determines what proof a practice needs before it attracts spending, capacity or a change in controls. They rule on inherited commitments and practices alike. Proposals that drop cost or risk onto a function without its acceptance will be stopped; investment cases that cannot show who will adopt the practice, what it depends on and how badly it could go wrong will be declined. The officer approves the leadership structure and the steps an issue climbs before it reaches the Country Managing Director, referees disagreements between the Country Managing Director and operating leaders, and fixes how often the board looks at progress and open decisions.

The arc of 24 months

The first ninety days are for cataloguing and criteria. With the Country Managing Director, the officer should have listed the inherited operating practices and agreed the criteria by which each will be scaled or ended. Doing it in that order matters: criteria agreed before individual practices are judged are far harder to dispute later. Around month nine the practices that meet the criteria should be scaling and those that do not should be retired, each decision with an accountable leader attached. By month 24 one integrated set of operating practices should be in use, governed through agreed thresholds and a settled board cadence.

Four sittings, controls in focus

Selection has four stages. You begin in week one, over confidential video, with the Country Managing Director. Week three belongs to the Audit Committee Chair, who is likely to concentrate on the controls that must survive as practices are retired. Week five brings you in person before the executives who lead each function, and the final stage, in the seventh week, is with the full board. Our response in writing will follow within three working days of each stage.