Business Change Lead

Business Change Lead
Location: Manchester (Hybrid)
Contract: Permanent
Level: Senior/Leadership

The Opportunity
A large, complex organisation is seeking an experienced Business Change Lead to shape and embed an enterprise-wide change capability across a broad transformation portfolio.
This is a senior role with real influence, responsible for setting change strategy, governing delivery, and ensuring that large-scale change lands effectively across the organisation. You will lead a team of change professionals and work closely with senior leaders to manage change risk, readiness, adoption, and benefits realisation.

Key Responsibilities
Change Strategy & Leadership

• Lead and embed a consistent, enterprise-wide business change framework aligned to the organisation's operating model and transformation strategy
• Own and continuously improve change methodologies, standards, and governance
• Act as a trusted advisor to senior leaders on change risk, organisational impact, and readiness

Portfolio Change Planning & Delivery

• Oversee portfolio-level change planning, actively managing capacity and change saturation
• Provide direction and challenge on initiative-level change plans to ensure quality and consistency
• Champion robust approaches to impact assessment, business readiness, adoption, and benefits tracking
• Establish clear and effective change reporting for senior stakeholders

Stakeholder Engagement & Communication

• Lead the enterprise approach to stakeholder engagement for change
• Ensure consistent, high-quality change and communication strategies across initiatives
• Act as an escalation point for complex stakeholder issues and resistance
• Promote transparency, engagement, and accountability throughout change delivery

Team Leadership & Capability

• Lead, coach, and develop a team of Business Change Managers and Analysts
• Define clear roles, responsibilities, and ways of working across the change function
• Build organisational change capability and foster a high-performing, collaborative team culture

Experience Required

• Extensive experience leading business change at portfolio or enterprise level
• Strong understanding of business architecture/operating model change
• Proven experience establishing and embedding change frameworks and governance
• (eg Prosci, ADKAR, Kotter, McKinsey or equivalent)
• Demonstrable experience leading and developing high-performing teams
• Background in large, matrixed organisations, ideally multi-site, retail, healthcare, or similarly complex environments
• Strong track record partnering with senior leaders and delivery teams
• Experience in the Healthcare or Retail experience would be highly advantageous

Skills & Attributes

• Excellent senior stakeholder management and influencing capability
• Strong strategic planning, prioritisation, and dependency management skills
• Exceptional written and verbal communication
• Calm, credible, and authoritative leadership style
• Pragmatic, outcomes-focused, and comfortable operating with ambiguity
• Politically astute, resilient, and adaptable
• Passionate about people-centred change

Why This Role?
This role offers the chance to:

• Shape how change is delivered at enterprise scale
• Influence senior leadership decisions
• Build and mature a permanent change capability
• Lead meaningful, organisation-wide transformation