Head of Change & Service Delivery

Job Description

Who are we?

Howden is a collective – a group of talented and passionate people all around the world. Together, we have pushed the boundaries of insurance. We are united by a shared passion and no-limits mind-set, and our strength lies in our ability to collaborate as a powerful international team comprised of 20,000 employees spanning over 100 countries.

Our people are our biggest asset as well as our largest shareholder group and are everything that makes us unique; our inclusive culture, the quality service we offer our clients, and our continued growth, all come from our people-first approach. There’s no such thing as individual success. We all need to play our part, contributing our skills and experience to make a true difference. That’s Howden.

Why work at Howden?

We have always been employee-owned and driven by entrepreneurial spirit. Right from the beginning, we've focused on employing talented individuals and empowering them to make a real difference to the company, whilst building successful and fulfilling careers at the same time. Simply put, we hire talented specialists and give them what they need to make a difference for clients. Always have, always will.

People join Howden for many different reasons, but they stay for the same one: our culture. It’s what sets us apart, and the reason our employees have been turning down disappointed head-hunters for years.Whatever your priorities – work/life balance, career progression, sustainability, volunteering – you’ll find like-minded people driving change at Howden.

What is the role?

We are seeking a dynamic and experienced Head of Change and Service Delivery to build and lead a high-performing operations change and service delivery function. You will be responsible for developing and delivering scalable shared capabilities—including automation, process excellence, service design, and data insights—while embedding resilience, performance, and adoption across the business. A key focus will be the creation of a robust, future-ready change enablement ecosystem, grounded in strong governance, risk awareness, behavioral engagement, and data-driven insight.

You will bring clarity, structure, and empathy to enterprise transformation—making the intangible elements of change, such as culture, mindset, and adaptability, visible, measurable, and actionable. This is an exciting opportunity for a senior leader who views transformation not just as a delivery function, but as a strategic and cultural shift—one that must be owned, enabled, and experienced at every level of the organization.

What will you be doing?

Strategic Service Capability Leadership

• Lead the strategic roadmap for service enabling capabilities—including data visualisation, service management, risk & controls, continuous improvement, and change governance.
• Ensure alignment of investment and strategic ambition.
• Build and scale Centres of Excellence to embed capability uplift across operational and functional domains.
• Ensure shared service capabilities are modular, reusable, and aligned with long-term Corporate Services and enterprise strategy.

Transformation Delivery and Enterprise Enablement

• Translate strategic priorities into structured, resourced, and outcomes-focused transformation programmes.
• Driving process optimization by identifying and anticipating business impacts, issues, and activities, and shaping principles, patterns, standards, processes, plans, and policies accordingly.
• Ensure capability deployment is aligned with user needs, frontline adoption, and business impact.
• Partner with functional leaders to embed new operating models, roles, and practices that support ongoing evolution.
• Provide tangible value transparency of transformation to business goals.
• Drive harmonization of transformation effort towards common outcomes.

Change Management Leadership

• Operationalize an enterprise-grade change enablement function, including:
• A change management framework grounded in behavioral science and best practice.
• Playbooks, methodologies, and self-service toolkits for functional leaders and delivery teams.
• Establish where necessary and work with a federated network of change champions and embedded practitioners across business units.
• Lead enterprise-wide initiatives that build capability and confidence in navigating complexity, disruption, and modernization.
• Align delivery across project, product and operational teams in an efficient and effective manner.

Change Governance and Risk Integration

• The role ensures that business architecture aligns with broader governance frameworks, mitigating risks and assuring corporate services.
• Establish and chair CS change governance forums, creating clear escalation routes, decision-making frameworks, and alignment checkpoints across regions and programmes.
• Integrate risk and issue management into every stage of the transformation lifecycle—embedding scenario planning, readiness assessment, stakeholder impact analysis, and mitigation controls.
• Define and maintain enterprise-wide change risk dashboards, enabling senior leaders to anticipate blockers, monitor friction points, and course-correct proactively.

Insight, Measurement, and Data Visualization

• Design a transformation analytics strategy that captures adoption, sentiment, risk, and value realization in real-time.
• Leverage advanced data visualization tools to make transformation progress clear, credible, and actionable.
• Translate complex transformation data into executive-ready insights—informing investment decisions, people strategies, and strategic pivots.

Stakeholder Engagement & Collaboration

• Operate as a key adviser and thought partner to CS and enterprise leaders—connecting vision to execution and change to value.
• Create high-trust, collaborative relationships with senior stakeholders across all regions and business units.
• Build confidence and clarity through transparent updates, shared metrics, and accessible storytelling of success and lessons learned.

What are we looking for?

Experience

• 10+ years in senior leadership roles across Global Business Services, Enterprise Transformation, Shared Services, or Centre of Excellence leadership.
• Demonstrated success designing and leading enterprise-wide transformation or capability uplift programmes across geographies and functions.
• Experience in building or embedding governance structures, operating models, and change adoption methodologies within complex organizations.
• Demonstrable experience working across complex organizations with diverse stakeholder groups.
• Demonstrable experience of leading integration and/or divestment of businesses for an Enterprise organization.
• Demonstrable experience of building and delivering target organizational design.

Core Competencies

• Deep expertise in change management and organizational enablement.
• Organizational design experience that translated into delivery and benefit realization for firm(s).
• Strategic systems thinker with operational discipline and commercial insight.
• Proven ability to create governance models that balance agility with risk and control.
• Strong analytical acumen—able to translate transformation data into impactful stories, dashboards, and executive insights.
• Highly collaborative, culturally fluent, and emotionally intelligent leader with the ability to influence at C-suite level.
• Business case development and ability to demonstrate organizational benefit over term of initiative to C-suite leadership.

Qualifications

• Degree in Business, Transformation, Organizational Psychology, Systems Thinking, or related field.
• PRINCE2, MSP Change Management certification preferred.
• Familiarity with tools such as Power BI, Tableau, Smartsheet, or ServiceNow dashboards is an advantage.
• Lean Six Sigma certification is beneficial.

What do we offer in return? A career that you define.

Our business succeeds by allowing our people to make a mark in the areas they care about most: personal development, volunteering, and fundraising for charity, or creating new insurance products that address society’s greatest challenges.

And we know that separate home and work lives don't really exist. If you're happy and healthy at home, you're more likely to be happy and fulfilled at work – and vice versa. That's why we do our best to support our people in every aspect of their lives.

Diversity and Inclusion

At Howden we value diversity - there is no one Howden ‘personality type’. Instead, we’re looking for individuals who share the same values as us:

• Our successes have all come from someone brave enough to try something new
• We support each other, in the small everyday moments and the bigger challenges
• We are determined to make a positive difference, at work and beyond

We consider our people our chief competitive advantage and as such we treat colleagues, candidates, clients, and business partners with equality, fairness, and respect – regardless of age, disability, race, religion or belief, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, or family circumstances.

Our sustainability promise

We’re on a life-long journey to become an ever-more sustainable group. It's a commitment to taking care of our people and the world we live in, to doing good business, and to making a positive impact wherever we can. Our governance processes, company policies, and review systems are all geared towards our goal of making a positive impact in the world. You can read more about our sustainability work here.