Strategic-Priority Overload Recovery Leader

The mandate

The group labels forty-eight initiatives strategic, including channel expansion, pricing, loyalty, data, procurement, shared operations and regulatory programmes. Each has a sponsor and budget, yet many require the same six executives, customer data and technology releases. Steering meetings track traffic-light status rather than choices, and underperforming work persists because stopping carries more political cost than delay. The role was created to reduce the load and establish clearer prioritisation before annual planning repeats the pattern.

The first twenty days require an outcome-and-capacity census covering strategic hypothesis, measurable result, decision owner, executive time, scarce capabilities, funding, technology dependency, customer disruption, regulatory obligation and reversibility. By day fifty, the leader must expose duplicated outcomes, unfunded prerequisites, false mandates and initiatives whose value has expired. The ninety-day window must stop, combine, sequence or reset enough work to protect a small number of enterprise outcomes and core operating decisions.

Decision rights include chairing the enterprise priority room, requiring evidence, releasing shared capacity, pausing initiatives inside delegated thresholds and escalating stop or funding decisions reserved to the board. The interim may reject status reporting that lacks outcome and dependency facts. Statutory programmes, capital approval, business-unit accountability, employment decisions, product commitments and strategic choices above agreed thresholds remain with executives and directors.

The assignment must create a repeatable system rather than one dramatic portfolio cut. The leader will appoint or prepare the permanent strategy execution head, establish quarterly entry and exit gates and observe the successor lead two enterprise reviews plus one annual-planning cycle. Handover will identify protected outcomes, stopped commitments, unresolved sponsor disputes, shared-resource constraints, external obligations and indicators showing when initiative load again exceeds decision capacity.

The remit excludes setting group strategy, operating business units, managing every project, cancelling statutory obligations, choosing technology architecture and using portfolio decisions as covert performance action. The leader cannot protect sponsor reputation by relabelling failed work, or remove initiatives solely to improve dashboard colour. Business executives own outcomes, functions own capacity and the board retains material allocation and strategic decisions.

Why this seat is open

The departure occurred after governance had become a reporting mechanism rather than a place to make choices. Sponsors benefit from keeping work alive, while no single function owns the cumulative burden on shared leaders and systems. A temporary executive can force bounded stop-and-sequence decisions now and transfer a durable priority discipline to permanent ownership.

What you will own

• Build the outcome-and-capacity census across hypothesis, result, owner, spend, executive time, skills, systems and obligations.
• Expose duplicated outcomes, hidden prerequisites, shared-resource collisions, false mandates and expired strategic assumptions.
• Chair evidence-based continue, combine, pause, stop, fund and sequence decisions inside delegated authority.
• Establish entry gates for outcome clarity, sponsorship, capacity, dependency, reversibility, customer impact and decision readiness.
• Replace traffic-light reporting with outcome, leading evidence, constraint, decision, consequence and learning views.
• Protect regulatory and safety obligations while challenging discretionary work incorrectly described as mandatory.
• Transfer the portfolio rhythm, decision rights, stop log, capacity indicators and observed reviews to the successor.

Candidate qualifications

• Has held enterprise portfolio authority across multiple businesses during severe initiative and leadership-capacity overload.
• Can distinguish strategy, obligation, project activity, dependency and sunk-cost defence using decision evidence.
• Has stopped and combined sponsored programmes without destabilising statutory, customer or operating commitments.
• Understands executive time, scarce skills, technology release capacity, funding and change saturation as finite resources.
• Brings credible challenge with chief executives, business presidents, boards, finance, technology and risk leaders.
• Has handed strategic-priority governance through enterprise reviews and annual planning to a permanent executive.