This is a completely independent, executive-adjacent function designed to sit entirely outside of traditional departmental boundaries. It does not sit within HR, nor does it sit within Finance. Reporting directly to group leadership, you will have the only truly holistic, cross-functional view of how the group is performing across all business entities, acquisitions, portfolio investments, and leadership layers.

Responsibilities

- Build and maintain a holistic performance view across all group entities — business units, acquisitions, and functions

- Track whether acquired companies are delivering on the reasons they were acquired — integration, revenue targets, product delivery, embedment into the group

- Identify whether business units are integrating into the group or operating as lone wolves

- Determine what is not working across the group — whether the issue is people, management, structure, or embedment — and surface it clearly to leadership

- Track synergies across group entities — are they collaborating, where are the gaps, where are the redundancies

- Hold regular conversations up and down the organisation at all levels to build a picture no single stakeholder can see from where they sit

- Feed findings to leadership so interventions can be made — through people, strategy, structure, or resource decisions

- Be the early warning system — by the time something becomes a crisis it should already have been flagged

Requirements

1. Experience spanning both commercial operations and people — not one or the other, genuinely both
2. Has worked in a group, holding company, portfolio, or multi-entity environment where they had oversight above individual business units
3. Has sat close to a CEO or CFO office, chief of staff function, or group strategy function
4. Has built or run a cross-functional performance framework — not just departmental KPIs
5. Has experience tracking whether acquired or invested companies delivered post-close
6. Deeply people-oriented — can walk into any room at any level and make people feel heard, not assessed. Non-negotiable.
7. Very pleasant and outward-facing — goes to people, does not wait for people to come to them
8. Commercially driven — understands how businesses make decisions, not just how people behave. This is not a pure people role.
9. A connector — takes inputs from finance, people, and commercial and synthesises them into one clear picture that is more useful than any of those inputs alone
10. Can surface difficult truths — will know uncomfortable things about the organisation and must be able to bring them to leadership in a way that lands and can be acted on

WHAT THIS PERSON IS NOT

1. Purely HR background — will default to people metrics and miss the commercial dimension
2. Purely finance background — will default to numbers and cannot do the relationship layer
3. Has only ever worked inside one function or one business unit
4. Conflict-averse — there will be moments requiring uncomfortable truths told upward
5. Needs a defined process to operate — this function is being built from scratch

STRUCTURE

1. Reports directly to group leadership
2. Completely independent — not within any existing department
3. No direct reports initially
4. People Operations is a stakeholder and point of contact on people-related matters