CIO — Global Healthcare practice (based India)

Position overview

Gladwin International Leadership Advisors is representing a confidential organisation in Healthcare & Life Sciences on a senior CIO leadership mandate anchored in India. The remit explicitly spans Africa, Malaysia, Singapore.

This is a country CEO / MD-class mandate with board- and headquarters-facing accountability for strategy execution, regulatory relationships, and brand in-market.

This is a role for someone who has already led through at least one major inflection: restructuring, M&A, regulatory reset, or category shift.

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Context you will inherit

• Market & sector: Managing the talent pipeline of clinically trained managers (MDs with MBAs, nursing administrators) who are chronically scarce in India
• Geographic spine: Primary hub India with explicit corridor responsibility across Africa, Malaysia, Singapore.
• Organisation stage: ESG and conduct expectations from owners and regulators are now hard constraints on how growth is pursued.
• Stakeholders: Owners may include PE operating partners, a promoter family office, or public-market investors — each with different tempo and KPIs.
• Secondary lens: ESG and social impact reporting — particularly for health systems receiving PE backing with ESG mandates

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The mandate (12–24 month arc)

1. Digital workplace: Improve employee-facing tools, support model, and productivity for hybrid work.
2. Data platforms: Enable self-service analytics within guardrails; reduce ad-hoc extracts and shadow IT.
3. Integration: Tackle spaghetti interfaces between legacy and modern stacks — prioritise by revenue or risk impact.
4. Agile at scale: Where adopted, make delivery model work with compliance and audit — not despite them.
5. Budget transparency: Give business units clear view of run vs. change spend; challenge duplicate demand.
6. Leadership team: Upgrade managers who can run hybrid supplier / internal teams with outcomes, not activity metrics.

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Responsibilities (representative)

• Improve IT demand management and portfolio governance with the executive committee.
• Upgrade vendor management — SLAs, penalties, and outcome-based contracts.
• Sponsor integration discipline post-M&A for systems and data.
• Build IT financial transparency — chargeback or showback where helpful.
• Develop IT leadership team with mix of supplier management and internal delivery strength.

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Leadership profile

• Judgment: High signal-to-noise under pressure; ethical clarity; willingness to halt initiatives that break risk appetite.
• Education: Strong undergraduate grounding; MBA / advanced degree / professional qualification common at this level.
• Service leadership: IT organisation trusted for reliability, cost transparency, and partnership.
• Communication: Executive presence in English; additional languages valued where market-relevant.
• Geographic muscle: Comfort operating from India with regular engagement across Africa, Malaysia.

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Team & culture

The organisation runs hot — ambitious targets and thin buffers. You need to channel energy into sustainable rhythms: predictable planning, honest risk surfacing, and recovery time for teams after major pushes.

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Success measures (examples)

• Financial: Revenue and margin vs. plan; cash conversion; capital efficiency.
• Strategic: Share in priority segments; customer retention in anchor accounts; milestone delivery on transformation.
• People: Engagement trends; regrettable attrition in critical roles; diversity of succession slate.
• Risk: Audit and regulatory outcomes; conduct events; operational resilience metrics.

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First 90 days (orientation arc)

• Days 1–30: Shadow key customer journeys or operations — paper over slides where reality diverges.
• Days 30–60: Cut or pause low-value projects freeing capacity for strategic work.
• Days 60–90: Publish first integrated forecast or plan under your ownership — even if directional.
• Build trust with risk, legal, and audit through transparency — surprises erode licence to move fast.
• Pick one cultural signal (e.g. meeting hygiene, promotion criteria) and model it relentlessly.

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Stakeholder map (illustrative)

• Internal: Matrix of global product houses and local P&L; tension is normal — your role is to broker trade-offs with data.
• External: Customers who influence reference deals; government or industry bodies in regulated sectors.
• Capital providers: Banks, sponsors, or minority investors — each needs a slightly different narrative on risk.

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Travel & mobility

Travel weighted to priority markets and quarterly global or regional forums; flexibility for crisis windows.

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Compensation

Competitive CIO compensation for Healthcare & Life Sciences leadership: cash, incentive, benefits, and potential equity or carry (case-dependent). Discussed with finalists only.

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Application process

Gladwin International is managing this search confidentially. Shortlisted candidates will engage in structured conversations with the firm’s partners before client introduction. Please apply through the careers portal with a concise note on why this geography, sector, and remit fit your trajectory.

We review every submission personally; unsolicited outreach to the end client is discouraged and may disqualify candidacy.

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Reference: healthcare-life-sciences · CIO · India · Gladwin International Leadership Advisors