Executive Director

Sacbar; Northern (KY); On-site; USD 250,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Discretionary bonus

Virtual work model

In-person convenings

Job summary

Ignite Coalition is seeking an Executive Director (ED), a senior strategic leader responsible for guiding the coalition’s evolution into a focused, collaborative entity. The ED operates as a blend of Chief Strategy Officer and Chief of Staff, aligning CEOs and plan leaders on direction, priorities, and value creation while ensuring disciplined execution across priority tracks.

This primarily virtual role, with periodic in-person convenings, reports to the Chair and reinforces a noncompetitive,

Qualifications

• Senior leader with experience leading complex cross-organizational work.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the strategic integrator for the coalition, aligning purpose, vision, and guiding principles across CEOs, boards, and member plans.
• Ensure disciplined execution of 3–5 high-impact strategic tracks, including scoping, resourcing, and tracking measurable progress.
• Facilitate cross-plan collaboration, ensuring shared learning, insight exchange, and problemsolving are consistently delivered.
• Build and maintain the coalition’s operating rhythm, including board meetings, strategy sessions, leadership development forums, and track convenings.
• Lead project management and execution across coalition initiatives, ensuring timelines, deliverables, and communications are clear and executed with excellence.
• Provide strategic architecture and end-to-end accountability for Ignite’s major conferences and in-person convenings, shaping high-quality content and agendas.

Skills

Strategic leadership

Cross-organizational collaboration

Executive stakeholder engagement

Project management

Facilitation

Healthcare transformation

Job description

About the Ignite Coalition

The Ignite Coalition is a multi–Blue Plan collaborative coalition bringing together nonprofit Blue Cross organizations to advance crossplan strategy, learning, and execution. The coalition provides a safe, candid, noncompetitive forum where member plans work together on a focused set of highimpact strategic priorities, rather than operating independently or in silos.

Ignite is a crossorganizational, industryfacing coalition, engaging CEOs, boards, senior leaders, and emerging talent across member plans to accelerate shared learning, align strategic direction, and deliver meaningful outcomes for the Blue system.

Role Overview

The Executive Director (ED) is a fulltime strategic leader responsible for guiding the Ignite Coalition’s evolution into a more focused, collaborative, and strategically aligned entity.

Operating with a unique blend of Chief Strategy Officer and Chief of Staff leadership, the ED serves as the coalition’s strategic guide and integrator, helping CEOs and plan leaders align on direction, priorities, and shared value creation, while also acting as the execution engine that ensures disciplined delivery of priority strategy tracks. The ED translates collective ambition into focused action, maintains momentum across initiatives, and ensures sustained, highquality engagement and outcomes for CEOs, plans, and boards.

This role is designed as a senior leadership position with accountability for building and sustaining coalition strategy, operations, and impact over time. The ED will establish strong foundations, enable effective collaboration across member plans, and ensure continuity, momentum, and longterm value for the coalition.

This is a primarily virtual role, with periodic inperson convenings to support leadership alignment, strategic discussions, and coalition relationshipbuilding. The role reports to the Chair of the Ignite Coalition and reinforces the coalition’s shared purpose and noncompetitive, crossplan orientation.

Key Responsibilities

Strategic Leadership & Alignment

• Serve as the strategic integrator for the coalition, aligning purpose, vision, and guiding principles across CEOs, boards, and member plans.
• Ensure disciplined execution of 3–5 highimpact strategic tracks, including scoping, resourcing, and tracking measurable progress.
• Facilitate crossplan collaboration, ensuring shared learning, insight exchange, and problemsolving are consistently delivered.

Coalition Operations & Execution

• Build and maintain the coalition’s operating rhythm, including board meetings, strategy sessions, leadership development forums, and track convenings.
• Lead project management and execution across coalition initiatives, ensuring timelines, deliverables, and communications are clear and executed with excellence.
• Partner with committee and workgroup leads to operationalize governance, membership criteria, dues structures, and annual reviews.
• Provide strategic architecture and endtoend accountability for Ignite’s major conferences and inperson convenings, setting clear objectives, shaping highquality content and agendas, ensuring strategic coherence across sessions, and partnering with others on logistics and execution.

Leadership & Member Engagement

• Act as a playercoach, enabling member leaders to contribute effectively while balancing diverse perspectives and agendas.
• Develop strong, trusting relationships across all plans and levels, including CEOs, boards, senior leaders, and emerging talent.
• Protect and reinforce the coalition’s safe, candid, noncompetitive environment for strategic dialogue and collaboration.
• Engage directly with multiple plan CEOs to align expectations, resolve tensions, and ensure followthrough while preserving trust and coalition cohesion.
• Operate effectively in high ambiguity and evolving mandates, bringing clarity and direction where none exists.
• Willing and able to lead hard conversations, including direct followups with plan CEOs and senior leaders.

Facilitation & Communication

• Facilitate highquality strategic conversations (virtual and inperson) that support learning, transparency, and insight sharing.
• Communicate progress, expectations, and outcomes with clarity and consistency across the coalition.
• Shape highquality content for leadership and board learning forums (while not owning event planning logistics).

Coalition Development & Sustainability

• Build and maintain infrastructure, tools, and processes that enable the coalition to operate effectively and sustainably over time.
• Ensure continuity of leadership, knowledge, and operating discipline through strong documentation and succession planning.
• Uphold membership criteria and support ongoing assessment of participation, competitive fit, and values alignment.

Qualifications

This role is well suited for an experienced senior leader with a strong track record of leading complex, crossorganizational work and who thrives at the intersection of strategy, execution, and relationship management.

Successful candidates will bring:

• High EQ and exceptional interpersonal skills, with the ability to navigate diverse leaders, perspectives, and agendas with credibility and diplomacy.
• An entrepreneurial, resourceful, and proactive mindset, with the ability to bring clarity and structure to ambiguous or emerging environments.
• Demonstrated experience in healthcare, ideally including transformation initiatives or providerrelated problem spaces.
• A strong track record of leading crossfunctional or crossorganizational initiatives, influencing without direct authority.
• Proven ability to manage complex, multistakeholder collaborations, balancing diverse voices while maintaining focus on shared strategic priorities.
• Strong facilitation, communication, and synthesis skills, including the ability to translate complex discussions into clear direction and action.
• Demonstrated project management and execution discipline, including managing multiple workstreams simultaneously and sustaining momentum over time.
• Willingness to travel up to approximately 25%, aligned to conferences, convenings, and key coalition engagements.

Location: Virtual, but ideally in the contiguous United States (with a preference for Eastern, Central or Mountain time zones).

Compensation: The target salary range is $250,000-300,000, depending on multiple factors, including the Executive Director’s experience and the regional data in the hiring location. There is a 10% discretionary bonus opportunity.