Director - Delivery

We are looking to appoint a Director to lead the delivery team and build out the structure and processes to enable us to scale our delivery effectively without compromising on quality.

All our work is bespoke to our clients’ needs, but we leverage tested methodologies and frameworks to ensure we deliver forward-looking and actionable value to our clients. Whilst we draw heavily on our network of experts to inform client-specific insights, the core delivery team are critical to managing, collating and finalising the advice for clients. The Director Delivery will be responsible for coordinating that effort and managing the delivery function for the business.

The Director Delivery will be expected to work as part of the Gatehouse leadership team and be responsible for the management of resources across the delivery team, the quality of outputs and adherence to Gatehouse methodologies and style, and the professional development of team members.

We are looking for a leader that can connect an acute understanding of geostrategic risk in a business context with high degrees of comfort with intelligence methodologies and excellent people and team management skills.

This role is about enabling a team of talented associates and consultants to grow professionally whilst maintaining a finely tuned delivery function that provides work of the highest quality in a timely manner. We are therefore looking for people with:

• Extensive experience managing and developing teams. A passion for finding and nurturing people’s strengths and teaming them up to create outputs that deliver more than the sum of its parts.

• A deep understanding of intelligence methods and approaches. Significant exposure to and familiarity with intelligence methods, including requirement mapping, indicator identification and collection planning. We tend to answer highly specific questions for our clients that require careful calibration of insight – the ability to leverage an intelligence approach and help the wider team embed the same will be critical to success in this role.

• Expertise in geopolitical risk. The core of our advisory is identifying the geopolitical dynamics and issues that will affect specific client exposures and strategies going forward. A deep understanding of how geopolitics plays into the success of businesses and the key issues shaping geopolitics today will be an essential baseline for the Director. 

• Experience working with private sector clients. Businesses operate differently to the public sector and an understanding of how private companies operate, the key stakeholders and risk/opportunity owners within a business, and how external pressures impact them will be important in this role. You may have worked with businesses as an advisor, or inside a business as part of an internal analysis team or function. 

• A collaborative team-worker that thrives on leveraging expertise that is not your own. You are excited to go beyond your own repertoire with the help of others and love intellectual challenge and co-creation of solutions.

• A credible senior leader. You can hold your own with senior executives to navigate discussions effectively and with confidence.

• Resource management and planning: Overseeing and planning resourcing for client and internal projects, identifying and allocating resources from across the team in an efficient and synergistic manner. The team is composed of associates, senior associates, managing associates and consultants who form client and project specific delivery teams. Ensuring team members are used to best effect to enable smooth and timely delivery will be a critical part of the Director’s responsibilities. The Director will be expected to work closely with other senior leaders in the business to understand pipelines of potential work as well as requirements for the delivery team to support business development activities. The Director will also be expected to maintain visibility over Client account strategies and implications for resource allocation.

• Methodology oversight: We apply an intelligence approach to interrogating and addressing our clients’ requirements and the Director will be responsible for embedding and enhancing that approach within the team. This will likely include oversight of the development and application of collection plans for specific requirements, guidance and mentoring of team members in intelligence methods and approaches, and strategic build-out of systems and processes to support their use.

• Quality assurance: Ultimate responsibility for the quality of outputs from the delivery team, including adherence to Gatehouse USP, formats and style. Working closely with other senior leaders to steer analytical direction and capture feedback on output, constantly striving to improve the relevance of outputs for our clients.

• Team development: Take responsibility for the team’s professional development to ensure individual team members are progressing as planned, developing new knowledge and skills as appropriate, and allocating roles and responsibilities in support of this. The Director should be actively involved with the team’s development and championing team members to grow in the business. The Director is expected to work closely with other leaders in the business to achieve this, in particular the Head of People, but also other Directors. Where appropriate, the Director will also be responsible for performance improvement plans for team members that are not performing to expectation.

• Advisory delivery: In addition to managing the wider delivery team, the Director is expected to support delivery directly as appropriate. In particular, we would expect the Director to work closely with Senior Directors and Account Managers to help manage the requirements-setting process with clients to ensure all engagements are tailored to deliver the Gatehouse value(s). This may include working with both client, internal delivery team and the expert network to design agendas, identify appropriate geostrategic issues and questions to answer, and chair delivery roundtables. 

• Business development support: Similarly to engaging directly in advisory with clients, the Director will be expected to support business development efforts as appropriate to map requirements against geopolitical issues, scope projects and represent the in-house delivery expertise of the business.

• Strategic planning: Within the first year the Director will be expected to review and assess the structure of the delivery team against the strategic growth plan of the business and work closely with other leaders in the business to identify any changes required.