Turnaround results are documented in metrics. Revenue recovered. ARPU stabilised. Market share reclaimed. NPS moving in the right direction. Those numbers are real, and they matter, to boards, to investors, to the competitive narrative. But the numbers are the last thing that moves. Before them, something else has to shift. And that something is almost never discussed in the same breath as the commercial results. This is about what comes before the numbers.

The pressure of the first 90 days

Every executive entering a turnaround environment faces the same structural reality: the organisation is watching, the leadership team is evaluating, and the expectation is for fast, visible results with very little tolerance for missteps. The first 90 days are genuinely high-stakes, not because of what can be built in that time, but because of what gets signalled. Most leaders respond to that pressure by moving quickly on strategy, pushing their methodology, restructuring teams, setting new targets, and making their presence felt. That instinct is not wrong. Pace matters in turnaround environments. Visible momentum is itself a tool. Quick wins communicate that the business can move differently, and they set a new standard before anyone has fully committed to it. But pace without understanding is how turnarounds create short-term noise that doesn't compound into sustained recovery. The approach I have taken consistently across multiple markets is to run two tracks simultaneously in those first 90 days — one visible, one less so.

Track one: visible impact

The visible track is about identifying the commercial and operational interventions that can produce measurable results quickly — not manufactured wins, but genuine areas where the business is underperforming against its own potential and where the fix is executable without a long lead time. In one market, this meant redesigning the pricing architecture to stop ARPU erosion that was being masked by volume growth. In another, it meant restructuring the sales incentive model so that the channel was rewarded for the right behaviours rather than just transaction volume. These are not transformation initiatives. They are corrections, and they matter because they demonstrate that the new direction is grounded in commercial reality, not theory. The early results create permission. They buy time and credibility for the harder, slower work.

Track two: understanding the team

The less visible track is more important. A turnaround does not belong to the incoming executive. It belongs to the organisation. Without a team that is capable, aligned, and genuinely invested in the outcome, nothing sustains beyond the tenure of the leader who drove it. This is one of the most consistent failure modes in turnaround environments — results that are real but not durable, because the organisational capability was never rebuilt underneath them. In those first 90 days, while the commercial interventions are being executed, the parallel work is to assess the individuals on the team — not just their competence, but their fit, their readiness, and where they have been underutilised by the previous environment. In underperforming organisations, it is rare to find that the people are the primary problem. More often, capable individuals have been badly managed, poorly positioned, or operating without clarity on what is actually expected of them. People cost structures are reviewed annually in most organisations, typically as a budget exercise. The more useful lens is whether the organisational structure is putting the right people in the right focus areas, and whether reduction, where necessary, is targeted at genuine underperformance rather than headcount as a proxy for OPEX savings. In one restructuring, working closely with Finance and HR, the outcome was an organisational redesign that achieved the company's transformation goals and its OPEX targets simultaneously — not by cutting indiscriminately, but by reallocating resources to where the growth priorities actually were.

The direction-dependency problem

One pattern appears in every market, without exception: when a new leader arrives, staff default to waiting for direction. This is a rational response to uncertainty. People do not yet know what the new leader values, how decisions will be made, or what the new standards are. So they wait. The problem is that direction-dependency, if left unaddressed, becomes a permanent operating mode. It creates a bottleneck at the leadership level and fragility everywhere else. Teams that are waiting for instruction cannot respond to market changes, cannot hold each other accountable, and cannot build the institutional momentum that a turnaround requires. The intervention is not motivational. It is structural. What changes the dynamic is giving each person explicit clarity on four things: what their role actually requires of them, what they are personally accountable for delivering, where their work sits in the full commercial pipeline, and why that work matters to the outcome the organisation is trying to achieve. That combination — purpose, accountability, context, and consequence — is what converts a group of talented individuals into a team that operates with genuine autonomy. The behavioural shift that follows is consistent and observable. People start arriving at meetings prepared rather than waiting to be briefed. They organise their own teams without being prompted. They surface problems before they escalate rather than after. And critically, they start holding each other accountable — not because a governance structure requires it, but because they understand how the work connects and they have ownership of their part of it. In one market, this shift was codified through a monthly company-wide town hall — an open forum where each function presented its performance against targets, selected teams presented what they were accountable for, and a live Q&A session fed directly into the executive management team agenda the following week. Every item raised was tracked and resolved transparently. Within a few cycles, the culture of the organisation had changed materially. People were working collaboratively across functions because they could see the full picture and understood where their contribution landed. Employee engagement scores improved by 25 percentage points over the course of the year. That number sits quietly next to the revenue and market share figures in the results. It should probably be listed first.

What healthy looks like

When the organisational work is done properly, a specific dynamic emerges that is distinct from a well-managed steady-state business. Teams are working autonomously within their areas, but they are also actively monitoring each other — not in a surveillance sense, but because they understand the interdependencies and have enough context to know when something upstream or downstream needs attention. This creates a healthy internal competitive ecosystem. Teams want to perform well not just against their own targets but relative to the rest of the organisation. Standards become self-reinforcing. The leader's job shifts from driving performance to maintaining the conditions that allow performance to happen. That dynamic, once established, is what makes commercial results sustainable rather than episodic. The market share gain holds because the team that delivered it understands why it happened and knows how to defend it. The ARPU recovery compounds because the CVM capability is embedded in how the organisation operates, not in the judgement of a single executive.

The numbers follow

Across every turnaround environment, the sequence has been consistent. First, the organisational work — clarity, accountability, structure, and the early signals of a different standard. Then the commercial interventions, which land better because the team executing them is aligned and capable. Then the results, which are durable because the organisation that produced them is genuinely different from the one that existed before. The numbers are the evidence. The people are the explanation.