Senior Director Change Management, FCS

northwesternmutual; Franklin (WI); On-site; USD 130,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Northwestern Mutual is seeking a seasoned Change Management leader to drive large, cross-functional change programs. You will develop teams, apply structured change methodologies, and provide expert consultation to ensure delivery of business outcomes at enterprise scale.

The role requires deep experience in change management frameworks, risk mitigation, and impactful collaboration with senior leaders across departments. Strong communication and influencing skills are essential.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Business, Human Resources, Communication, or related field.
• Minimum 10 years of relevant experience with increasing responsibility; including leading large, complex change management efforts.
• Experience creating and implementing change management frameworks, methodologies, and tools.
• Experience managing large-scale change efforts.
• Ability to present recommendations aligned to business strategy and challenge conventional practices.

Responsibilities

• Develop and mature a team of change management professionals; foster trust, engagement, and inclusion.
• Applies NM change methodology to deliver the people side of change for business outcomes.
• Analyze people-related risks and resistance; provide insights to leaders about impact on change strategy.
• Lead and align large, complex cross-departmental change initiatives across a broad portfolio.
• Act as a thought leader; develop change plans for execution across complex efforts.

Skills

Change management

Stakeholder engagement

Strategic thinking

Leadership

Communication

Influencing

Education

Bachelor's degree in Business/HR/Comm or related

Job description

Summary

Leads and aligns large, highly complex, cross-functional change management plans across a broad portfolio of initiatives. Provides thought leadership and change management expertise and consultation to the business to meet department, cross-department and enterprise wide goals. Regarded as an expert in developing and implementing change management strategies to address complex and unique business objectives. Influences and contributes to the development of strategic business decisions and leads implementation of change management across the enterprise at all organizational levels.

Primary Duties & Responsibilities

• Develop and mature a team of change management professionals of the future. Create and maintain a team culture of trust, engagement, and inclusion.
• Applies NM change methodology and process to deliver the people side of change that is required to achieve our desired business outcomes.
• Analyze people-related risks and points of resistance; implement specific plans to mitigate or address the concerns. Provide insight to project and senior leaders about the potential impact of decisions on the effectiveness of overall change strategy.
• Accountable for leading and aligning large, highly complex, strategic cross-departmental/ functional change initiatives across a broad portfolio. Responsible for managing impact of changes to people, process, technology, organization, and culture.
• Acts as a thought leader on change management activities; develops change plans and strategies for execution across highly complex efforts which requires significant change to business processes, behavior, and culture change.
• Partner with and influence business leadership across multiple departments and functions and all layers of the organization to design planning and program delivery approaches that promote user centric business solutions and ensure change strategies align with the business strategy and vision. Establishes and maintains strong partnerships across the organization to integrate multiple change efforts to produce integrated delivery.
• Implement efficient change management structures that support an integrated delivery approach and provide direction and oversight to one or more change teams to ensure predictable execution and realization of benefits.
• Develops strong relationships with business clients to manage change delivery expectations and implementation. Provides expert level change management consulting, negotiation and influencing at all levels.
• Aligns all stakeholder leadership on strategy, business priorities, and approach to change delivery. Influences others to take action to change, within and outside of own area.
• Responsible for gathering and delivering metrics and data to drive insight and action plans to continually adjust and pursue goals. Leverage tools and techniques to enable end-to-end value delivery and the best ongoing rollout and ongoing experience.
• Applies extensive business acumen in depth and breadth of industry, company initiatives and strategy, and products, integrates knowledge into change management objectives.
• Uses expert-level knowledge of change management to understand key business drivers and outcomes. Conduct highly complex analysis to identify scope and nature of change management deliverables to solve a department or business need.
• Adopt, integrate, and promote common NM enterprise-wide change process, methodology and language.
• Lead's a team of change practitioners.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Business, Human Resources, Communication, or related field.
• Minimum of 10 years of relevant experience with increasing levels of responsibility; including experience leading large, complex, cross-functional change management efforts.
• Demonstrated experience creating and implementing change management frameworks, methodologies and tools.
• Experience managing large-scale change efforts.
• Ability to present recommendations which are aligned to the business strategy. Ability to articulate an independent point-of-view and comfortable to challenge conventional practices.
• Systems view to bring organization design, people effectiveness and change enablement to drive integration and transformation.
• Demonstrated ability to think strategically and execute. Must be strategically oriented, yet tactically focused on execution of plans.
• Exceptional influencing and relationship skills. Capable of building and sustaining excellent relationships at multiple levels in the organization and/or field to understand business needs and strategically accomplish goals.
• Analytical problem-solving skills to draw insights, assess the organization, recognize potential issues, diagnosis route causes, and craft viable solutions.
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate with business leaders to develop, implement and sustain change interventions that enable transformational shift and achievement of business goals.
• Familiarity with project management approaches, tools and project phase