Business Advisor

The Growth Company (GC) Business Support team has several vacancies open for a Leadership Specialist/Advisor to support business leaders through experience and knowledge, within all areas of strategic and personal leadership development.

As a leadership specialist in GM Business Growth Hub, this role requires in-depth experience and understanding of leadership tools/techniques, to develop a leadership strategy for all sizes of business across the Greater Manchester area.

GM Business Growth Hub is a community of specialists with a passion to help businesses across GM to realise their ambitions. Since 2011, GM Business Growth Hub has supported more than 15,000 businesses including start-ups, scale-ups and established businesses, providing finance guidance, creating international links, and paving the way for innovation and people development across the region. We work with the best of public and private partners, offering expert one-to-one and peer-to-peer business support, events, specialist programmes, funding and much more.

**Key Responsibilities**:

- Establish and maintain effective relations with business owners/leaders and internal and external key contacts to promote the work of the Leadership Service and help facilitate high-quality referrals.
- Work with a specialist range of procured suppliers to design and run bespoke leadership support for diverse-led businesses, e.g. diverse ethnic communities, females, over 50's, and/or disability-led businesses.
- Design, develop, and lead the delivery of a range of workshop/cohort programmes aimed at leaders across one organisation, or to individual leaders from a range of businesses.
- Develop and maintain a high-level network of business/professional contacts that generate personal referrals.
- Ensure client enquiries and partner referrals are correctly recorded on the Business Growth Hub’s client relationship management system (CRM), updating progress against agreed actions as plans progress, and ensuring all administration is checked for accuracy, and completed on time against deadlines.
- Ensure that the monitoring and collection of output and impact data is undertaken throughout the project and after each project, in line with funders’ requirements.
- Work with the relevant businesses closely to monitor any outputs including new jobs created, any productivity increases, and other service-specific outputs and outcomes that result from activities undertaken.
- Undertake detailed diagnostics face-to-face at client premises to identify the appropriate starting point of support, followed by a detailed leadership diagnostic of the individual leader/leadership team. This diagnostic should use various tools and methods to capture baseline data and identify client-specific needs. This will involve the analysis and interpretation of business and market data/intelligence to provide recommendations to senior management teams, boards, and shareholders.
- Undertake detailed discussions with clients around complex leadership issues to understand their leadership challenges, make sound recommendations for appropriate actions that will lead to the development of leadership skills and manage the project/intervention to a successful conclusion.
- Deliver bespoke leadership development support through a multi-disciplinary approach, which will involve one-to-one and one-to-many support, utilising a range of modern and traditional leadership and management tools and techniques.

**About you**:

- Proven critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
- Ability to identify opportunities and be innovative.
- Superb communicator who can network effectively.
- Excellent planner and, organiser.
- Ability to work at a senior strategic level, work within tight deadlines and handle challenging situations that leaders may experience.
- Able to challenge leaders of all levels to enable them to develop their personal leadership styles.

**Skills required**:

- Account & time management skills are essential.
- Expertise in coaching, change management, performance analysis and people management are essential.
- Experience of working with and developing the personal skills of SME business leaders.
- In-depth understanding of the leadership development arena across GM is a must.
- Significant and demonstrable experience in completing leadership behavioural assessments.
- At least degree level business education, or degree level qualification with a management body or the relevant business experience to match those.
- Proven track record in managing a range of leadership issues.
- Has technical knowledge in the key leadership developmental areas.
- Excellent presentation skills both written and oral.

GC aims to promote a culture of flexibility and agile working. Going forward we will be transitioning to a culture where full agile working will be a feature of many of our roles. We also recognise that there may be a need for more permanent flexibility in your working arrangements and in