Interim Regional President — Recovery

The decisions that will define the year

Regional presidents in education spend much of their time on calls that look operational and turn out to be strategic. Should a new programme be launched in a market before the existing ones are stable? When a country team asks for an exception to a regional standard, is it protecting learners or protecting habit? When delivery slips, is the plan wrong or is the capacity missing? The Interim Regional President will face these calls repeatedly, and is appointed with the executive authority to settle them.

Reporting to the Board Chair, you will set the region's decision rights and the limits that remain with local leaders. Which measures judge investment, capacity and control across the region is your decision. You decide which commitments carry on, which pause and which stop, and you can block a country proposal that moves its cost or exposure onto a neighbour without that neighbour's consent. You can decline investment where the case overlooks adoption, the operating work it leans on or the consequences of falling short. The regional leadership line-up and the route problems take upward are yours to approve; you also resolve disputes with country heads before any budget changes hands, and set the rhythm on which the board sees delivery progress, exceptions and unresolved choices.

Delivery in education also runs to a calendar that does not move. Intake dates, assessment periods and quality reviews are fixed, so a regional president has to sequence change around them and know which windows cannot be missed.

Twelve months of visible delivery

As the first ninety days end, the regional delivery programme should be scoped, with an accountable leader for each market, agreed decision thresholds and the evidence that will show progress, all settled with the Board Chair. Around month nine the programme should be running to its agreed rhythm, with stalled regional commitments paused or closed and their resources reassigned. By month 12 the programme should be complete or securely in the hands of the region's own leaders, with a regional leadership structure and escalation routes that hold without the interim.

Someone who can tell exception from habit

Your experience covers businesses with revenue of $810 million or more, 4,800 people and three countries, and you can tell a local exception that learners genuinely need from a variation kept alive by habit. Cost transformation, succession and professionalisation make up the record the Board Chair will examine. Strategy formation should sit at level 4, and P&L ownership, operating cadence and risk judgement should each reach level 3. Useful controls survive your review, every exception carries a visible price, and the country leaders you hand back are stronger than those you inherited. No commitment needs a unanimous vote of country heads before you stop it, and the result is yours to own for all 12 months.

A month and a half, four encounters

The first week starts things with the Board Chair, in confidence and over video, focused on the delivery programme and how you would scope it. Then, in week three, comes a working session alongside the Regional President. In the fifth week you meet, in person, a panel of executive leaders from every function of the business. The directors, sitting together as one board, bring the process to its end in week seven. Allow up to five working days after each encounter for our reply in writing.