Article: Operational Leadership — When the Business Cannot Wait

Companies have spent much of the past decade trying to become more agile.

Hierarchies have been reduced, structures have become flatter, responsibilities have shifted closer to the business and permanent functions are increasingly supplemented by project teams, external specialists and temporary capabilities.

The logic is straightforward: organisations need to adapt more quickly to changing markets, technologies and customer requirements.

Yet there is one area where many companies remain surprisingly traditional.

Leadership capacity is still often treated as something that must be built almost entirely through permanent appointments.

When a senior operational leader leaves, the instinct is usually to begin a recruitment process. When performance deteriorates, companies frequently look for a permanent organisational answer.

When a transformation starts to exceed the capacity of the existing leadership team, the response is often to expand the organisation.

The assumption is that an important requirement should ultimately correspond to a permanent role.

Sometimes it should. Permanent executives remain the backbone of any serious organisation. They build teams, develop capabilities, understand the company's history and take responsibility for decisions whose consequences may only become visible years later. No flexible staffing model can replace that continuity.

But operational reality is less tidy than organisational charts suggest.

• A Head of Supply Chain may leave with three months' notice just as service levels begin to deteriorate.

• A Procurement Director may be absent during an important renegotiation with strategic suppliers.
• A manufacturing company may need to stabilise production after a difficult ERP implementation.
• A business may be preparing a carve-out, redesigning its supply network or integrating an acquisition while the existing management team is already working at full capacity.

The company may eventually need a permanent appointment in all of these situations. That does not mean the permanent appointment solves the immediate problem.

Executive recruitment takes time for good reasons. 

A senior appointment deserves a proper definition of the role, a credible search process and enough time for both company and candidate to determine whether the fit is right.

Rushing that process because the organisation has an urgent operational problem usually creates a second problem later.

The difficulty is that the business continues to move while the search takes place.

Suppliers still need decisions. Production still has to run. Employees still expect direction.

Customers do not reduce their expectations because a key management position happens to be vacant.

The absence of a leader may appear on the organisation chart as an empty box, but inside the organisation it is felt through delayed decisions, unclear priorities and responsibilities gradually being redistributed among people who already have other jobs.

Many companies can absorb this for a few weeks. Some can manage for several months.

But the longer the gap continues, the more likely it is that senior executives elsewhere in the business begin to compensate for it.

The COO becomes more involved in supply chain planning. The CFO becomes drawn into procurement decisions. Members of the management team start taking responsibility for issues outside their normal remit.

What initially looked like a vacant position begins to consume leadership capacity throughout the organisation.

This is one of the simplest cases for interim leadership, but also one of the most misunderstood. 

The value of an interim leader is not primarily that somebody is available to occupy the role until a permanent successor arrives. The value lies in being able to bring in someone with enough relevant experience to assume responsibility quickly, make decisions and keep the organisation moving without forcing the company to compromise the permanent recruitment process.

The same logic applies when the problem is performance rather than vacancy.

Operational deterioration rarely announces itself in a single dramatic event. More often, the signals accumulate. Delivery performance becomes less predictable. Inventory begins to rise.

Supplier problems consume more management attention. Production planning becomes increasingly reactive. Savings targets are missed or costs begin moving in the wrong direction.

Meetings multiply because the organisation is trying to coordinate its way around problems that have not been resolved.

In such circumstances, companies understandably reach for analysis.

Consultants may be asked to identify root causes, internal teams are asked to develop improvement plans and management workshops produce new priorities.

Sometimes this is exactly what is needed. But there are also cases where the organisation already has a reasonable understanding of the problem.

The missing ingredient is experienced leadership with enough capacity to take responsibility for fixing it.

This distinction matters particularly in Procurement, Supply Chain and Operations because these functions sit close to the physical performance of the company.

Problems become tangible quickly.

Material arrives late. Inventory occupies cash. Production output falls. Suppliers fail to deliver. Customer commitments become harder to meet.

A company may have a technically sound improvement plan and still struggle because the people expected to implement it are also responsible for keeping the daily operation running.

Experienced interim leaders can be useful in this environment precisely because they are brought in for a situation rather than a career move.

Their mandate can be unusually clear.

They are expected to understand what is happening, establish priorities and produce movement. They do not need to spend their first months building an internal position or preparing for the next promotion.

They can focus on the problem that caused the company to bring them in.

That does not mean they arrive with a universal solution. Experience is only valuable when it is relevant and applied with some humility.

A leader who has stabilised one supply chain cannot simply reproduce the same solution in another company. Industries differ, cultures differ and the causes behind similar symptoms may be entirely different.

What previous experience can provide is pattern recognition. Someone who has been through a comparable situation is often faster at identifying which problems deserve immediate attention and which are merely noise.

They know which questions to ask earlier. They recognise when a planning problem is actually a governance problem, when supplier performance is being damaged by internal behaviour, or when an apparent capacity issue is really the consequence of unstable priorities.

The advantage is not infallibility. It is a shorter learning curve.

The same principle becomes even more relevant in transformation.

Most companies today are involved in several significant changes simultaneously.

• Procurement functions are being centralised or decentralised.

• Supply chains are being redesigned around resilience, regionalisation or new technologies. Manufacturing footprints are changing.
• Digital tools are altering planning and sourcing processes. Acquisitions need to be integrated and divestments separated.
• Organisations are being asked to improve cost, working capital and service at the same time.

The formal structure around these transformations is usually not the difficult part.

Companies know how to establish programmes, steering committees and workstreams.

The challenge begins when the transformation has to coexist with the operating business.

The people expected to redesign tomorrow's organisation are usually also responsible for delivering today's results.

Decisions that looked straightforward in the initial programme become more complicated once their consequences are understood. Stakeholders defend existing responsibilities.

The new process meets legacy systems. The new operating model encounters old incentives. Progress becomes uneven and the transformation gradually loses momentum.

There is a considerable difference between understanding how a transformation should work and having led one through that stage before.

This is why companies sometimes benefit from bringing in a leader whose experience is unusually specific to the situation.

A procurement transformation may require someone who has already moved a function from decentralised buying towards strategic category management.

A supply-chain redesign may require a person who has previously rebuilt planning processes across multiple sites.

A carve-out may need an executive who understands the operational dependencies that tend to be overlooked until separation becomes imminent.

The requirement may be highly important without being permanent.

This is perhaps the part of the interim market that deserves more attention.

Companies are increasingly comfortable using external expertise at one end of the spectrum and permanent executives at the other, while treating the space between them as something of an exception.

Yet many operational challenges sit exactly in that middle ground.

They require more authority and accountability than traditional advisory work, but the company does not necessarily need another permanent management position once the assignment is complete.

A senior specialist may spend nine months rebuilding S&OP, establishing supplier performance management or preparing a major sourcing programme.

An experienced operational executive may lead a manufacturing improvement programme for a year and transfer responsibility back to the permanent organisation once stability has been restored.

Another may oversee an integration until the new organisational structure is functioning and the permanent leadership team can take over.

The question is not whether these activities matter enough to deserve senior people.

Often they matter enormously.

The question is whether the capability needs to remain permanently inside the company after the problem has been solved.

This is where the broader discussion about organisational agility becomes relevant.