Wholesale Lending Business Readiness Director

Purpose of the role

To support the organisation achieve its strategic objectives by ensuring the business is ready to receive the agreed change (address business problems and opportunities), ensuring that change initiatives are successfully assessed and implemented to enable them to be embedded in the organisation.  

Accountabilities

• Identification and analysis of business impact and opportunities that require change within the organisation.
• Development of business readiness strategies that will help to ensure the successful implementation of change initiatives.
• Communication with stakeholders, including senior management, project teams, and external partners, to ensure that they are informed about change initiatives and that their needs and expectations are being met.
• Collaboration with Client Readiness, Operational Readiness & Tech Delivery to ensure business, sales, operations, client servicing and functional partners are prepared for a smooth transition of technology delivery into BAU (including Target Operating Model, Training, Communications, Service Agreements).
• Management of resistance to change, ensuring that stakeholders are engaged and that their concerns are addressed.
• Review of business readiness plans and status reports in conjunction with change delivery managers to ensure business readiness activities completed on time including newly identified risks, issues and dependencies.
• Collaboration with project teams to ensure that change initiatives are aligned with project objectives and that change management activities are integrated into project plans.
• Provision of guidance and support to business stakeholders, ensuring that they have the necessary skills and knowledge to implement change initiatives successfully.

Director Expectations

• To manage a business function, providing significant input to function wide strategic initiatives. Contribute to and influence policy and procedures for the function and plan, manage and consult on multiple complex and critical strategic projects, which may be business wide..
• They manage the direction of a large team or sub-function, leading other people managers and embedding a performance culture aligned to the values of the business. Or for an individual contributor, they lead organisation wide projects and act as deep technical expert and thought leader, identifying new ways of working and collaborating cross functionally. They will train, guide and coach less experienced specialists and provide information affecting long term profits, organisational risks and strategic decisions..
• Provide expert advice to senior functional management and committees to influence decisions made outside of own function, offering significant input to function wide strategic initiatives.
• Manage, coordinate and enable resourcing, budgeting and policy creation for a significant sub-function.
• Escalates breaches of policies / procedure appropriately.
• Foster and guide compliance, ensure regulations are observed that relevant processes in place to facilitate adherence.
• Focus on the external environment, regulators, or advocacy groups to both monitor and influence on behalf of Barclays, when appropriate.
• Demonstrate extensive knowledge of how the function integrates with the business division / Group to achieve the overall business objectives.
• Maintain broad and comprehensive knowledge of industry theories and practices within own discipline alongside up-to-date relevant sector / functional knowledge, and insight into external market developments / initiatives.
• Use interpretative thinking and advanced analytical skills to solve problems and design solutions in often complex/ sensitive situations.
• Exercise management authority to make significant decisions and certain strategic decisions or recommendations within own area.
• Negotiate with and influence stakeholders at a senior level both internally and externally.
• Act as principal contact point for key clients and counterparts in other functions/ businesses divisions.
• Mandated as a spokesperson for the function and business division.

All Senior Leaders are expected to demonstrate a clear set of leadership behaviours to create an environment for colleagues to thrive and deliver to a consistently excellent standard. The four LEAD behaviours are: L – Listen and be authentic, E – Energise and inspire, A – Align across the enterprise, D – Develop others.

All colleagues will be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Values of Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence and Stewardship – our moral compass, helping us do what we believe is right. They will also be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Mindset – to Empower, Challenge and Drive – the operating manual for how we behave.

Join us as a Business Readiness Director where you'll drive strategic change within our global lending businesses across Corporate Banking (CB) and Investment Banking (IB). You will lead business readiness activities to support the successful implementation and colleague adoption across our strategic change programmes. Working with subject matter experts (SMEs), you'll oversee the development of colleague communication and training plans to ensure end users are able to maximise the benefits of new tools as they are deployed. In this role, you'll facilitate change, implement improvements, and ensure smooth execution of strategic priorities by communicating a compelling vision for each change initiative.

Essential Skills / Basic Qualifications:

• Strong communication and stakeholder engagement skills
• Strong programme management and organisational skills
• People management and leadership experience
• Proven experience leading colleague and/or client readiness activities to ensure successful deployment and adoption of change
• Ability to help develop training materials and process/procedure updates to support the deployment of new tools, improving how users interact with existing systems
• Proven experience of delivering training to colleagues
• Ability to challenge existing ways of working and drive process improvements
• Ability to monitor adoption of change, course correcting where additional readiness activities are required to increase adoption
• Proven business analysis skills, with the ability to document requirements in a clear and structured way
• Ability to work across multiple issues, products, and processes simultaneously
• Comfortable working in a fast-paced and dynamic environment

Desirable Skills / Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience in lending
• Understanding of UI and UX (User Interface and User Experience) principles