The touring CI lead — why most global transformation roles fail before they start

A field note for any operations leader who has wondered why their global CI programme is not landing.

Last week I read five LinkedIn ads for what is essentially the same role.

Different companies. Different sectors. Same phrasing, same expectations, same hidden flaw.

The pattern

A global manufacturer posts a Global Director of Continuous Improvement — or Global Lean Lead, or Global Operational Excellence Director, or Global Transformation Director. The brief says the role will own CI across the entire network. Usually twenty to fifty sites in ten to forty countries. Deploy a diagnostic toolkit. Roll out a corporate Way. Train local teams. Deliver three to five percent cost savings, year on year. Travel: minimum fifty percent. Direct reports: usually zero.

Pick five recent ads almost at random:

• Catalent — Global Director, Continuous Improvement. Covers 40+ sites globally, no direct reports, expected to deliver 3-5% COGS YOY, minimum fifty percent travel.
• Harman — Global Lean Director (Continuous Improvement). Owns lean across Harman Professional Solutions globally. Willingness to travel worldwide.
• Itron — Global Director of Lean Manufacturing & Continuous Improvement. Expected to manage multiple global operations, ten plus years required.
• TechnipFMC — Global Operations Continuous Improvement Lead. Same shape on an even larger asset base.
• LEGO — Continuous Improvement Director. Group-level scope, multiple regional teams.

The five ads are not unusual. Pick almost any large pharmaceutical, automotive, consumer goods, or industrial company and the role exists almost word for word. The structure is the industry default.

Now run the maths

Fifty percent travel against forty sites is roughly five working days per site per year. Five days. Then the touring CI lead boards another plane, and the manager at the site they just left has the same kaizen board, the same training deck, and the same set of executive expectations — but no continuing presence to enforce or coach.

Three weeks later the routine slips. Six months later the dashboard shows no movement. The C-suite reviews the dashboard and concludes that CI does not work for them.

It is not that CI does not work for them. It is that CI does not work like this.

Why this structure cannot succeed

Continuous improvement is a site-level discipline. The actual work of CI happens in a daily huddle, on a shop floor, in a one-to-one between a team lead and a process owner. The work is conversational, repetitive, slow to land. It is not deployable in a five-day visit.

The touring lead can show up, run a workshop, leave behind a perfectly designed A3 template, and depart. The template is now an artefact, not a habit. The site team has not yet had the eight weeks of repeated practice in which the template becomes the way work is done. So the template gets filed.

Three structural failures sit underneath every variation of this role.

One. No continuing line of sight at the site. Phone calls and dashboards do not replace presence. The local team picks up its old habits within two weeks because nobody in the room is reminding them not to.

Two. No executive sponsorship at the site. Site general managers report to regional VPs, not to the touring CI lead. When the touring lead asks for time on the production calendar, they are competing with the GM's own quarterly priorities. They lose every time.

Three. Network-level metrics that nobody can attribute. Three to five percent of cost of goods sold across forty sites is a vast number, generated by hundreds of small actions taken by thousands of people, most of whom have never met the touring lead. The metric is impossible to attribute. The C-suite reads it as either noise or unproven correlation, and trust erodes within two reporting cycles.

What actually works

Three conditions, all of which the touring model violates.

One. Continuous improvement happens at the site, by people who work at the site, every working week. The role of any group-level CI function is to give site teams the patterns, tools, and coaching they need to make this work easier — never to do the work themselves.

Two. Site-level CI requires sponsorship from the site's own leadership, not from a touring corporate function. The site GM has to want the change, has to defend the calendar time, has to attend the daily huddle, has to sit in the kaizen readouts. Without the site GM in the room, no amount of corporate energy will fix the cadence.

Three. The transition from no CI to mature CI takes years, not quarters. The Stormholt five Shifts framework names the sequence: cadence first, then visibility, then problem-solving, then prioritisation, then improvement. Each Shift takes around six months to land for a team that is doing the work itself. A team that is being visited five days a year does not even start Shift One.

What the C-suite is really asking for

When the C-suite signs off a touring CI lead role, the implicit ask is “give us global transformation without giving up local autonomy and without changing the operating model.” It is an answer designed to avoid the conversation about who actually owns CI on each site.

The honest answer is that CI is owned by the site GM. The group CI function exists to make the site GM's job easier. The right group structure is two or three CI architects who set the framework, design the tools, run the cohort programmes, and coach the site GMs themselves — not the site CI engineers. The site CI engineers report into the site GM. The site GM is measured on whether they hit the cadence, not on whether they hit the savings. Savings come out of cadence in year two.

This is harder to sell to a board than a single charismatic touring leader who promises forty sites of transformation in twelve months. It is also the only version that works.

Two notes to close

If you are reading this and your title is some flavour of Global CI Lead — the role is not your fault. The structure is what is broken. The most useful thing you can do is bring this article to your CEO and have the conversation that the job description avoided.

If you are reading this and you are the CEO, the most useful question to ask is: who owns CI on each site, and what would it take to make them able to own it well? Stormholt is built around answering exactly that question.

For the framework, see the 5 Shifts Manager Preview.

For the structured one-hour version of this conversation, see the Architecture Session.

—
Jeroen van Koesveld
Founder, Stormholt — stormholt.org