A ninety-day executive advisory engagement needs a specific problem to work on. Improving presence is too broad to evaluate on its own. Reducing the decisions that wait more than a week for the CEO is a clearer starting point.
Before beginning, agree on what is being assessed, how progress will be observed and what the engagement can reasonably influence.
Establish the starting point
Use recent work rather than memory alone. Review delayed decisions, repeated escalations, meeting records or feedback from the people involved. Choose measures that relate to the executive's role and can be collected without creating a separate reporting burden.
A proprietary questionnaire can organize discussion, but its score should not be mistaken for an independently validated clinical measurement. If a guarantee refers to a score, the scoring method and conditions need to be clear.
Change one working arrangement at a time
The first intervention might be a delegation agreement, a new preparation brief or a change to the weekly operating review. Specify who will do what differently and when the first review will occur.
Check implementation before judging the result. If the new decision rule was never used, the team has learned about the difficulty of adopting it, not about its effect.
Later reviews should compare the same measures with the starting point and examine alternative explanations. A quieter trading period, a new hire or a postponed project may account for part of the improvement.
At ninety days, decide which changes to keep, which to revise and whether further support has a defined purpose. A useful engagement leaves the executive with working practices they can sustain, together with an honest account of what improved and what remains unresolved.
