Europe Regional Director

Job description

Our Purpose and Work in Europe

Our purpose in Europe is to support people displaced by the war in Ukraine. The Alight response seeks to support displaced people in western Ukraine, Poland and beyond to meet them by:

• Doing the doable by meeting acute and practical needs with quick impact projects to serve single individuals and entire communities. All team members should have the permission and tools to respond to need directly and by identifying other organization whose work we can amplify.
• Providing guides to orient and connect displaced people to the best available resources. Ukrainian guides are now working in 5 cities, remotely, and through the online guide (www.Alightguides.org). Guides are currently booking Airbnb stays but will transition to other kinds of support by fall.
• Transforming spaces and services, to create and support dignified safe havens providing short- and medium-term housing.
• Working with the US team to create a seamless user experience for displaced choosing to move from Ukraine to the United States.

The Ukraine response is dynamic and is expected to meet displaced people where they are in their journey. The Regional Director is responsible to ensure program implementation is high quality and dynamic to changing needs in Poland, Ukraine and beyond.  

Requirements

The Europe Regional Director is expected to be ambitious in their commitment to better serve staff and displaced people. You will lead and manage a brand-new program, still an emergency response in many ways.

Alight Directors serve as enterprise managers responsible for the impact, financial health, and timely delivery of services.  They are Alight leaders ensuring the purpose, values, and strategy of the organization live inside all the work.  Directors and programs are surrounded by partnership and support from the global team and colleagues in other country programs.

This is a shared journey; continuous communication with all co-creators and stakeholders will be key. As a leader inside Alight, the Director must embrace the potential of all people to help. The most important stakeholder is the people served and the Director must ensure that the team is grounding the work in customer feedback.  Alight is also part of universe of responders, and we want to be sure to honor and support the work of partners. The Polish government is the primary host and it’s critical to not only maintain strong relationships but also align program strategy to national strategy. The Europe Response works closely with Alight partner organizations Kuja Kuja (working together to actively capture feedback from new arrivals) and ORAM (direct support to LGBTQ displaced, based in Berlin).

The Director is responsible for growing and retaining a team that is focused on a human-centered response, co-creating with partners and colleagues in the region and beyond, the financial health of the response, and quality implementation of work. You will ensure the team is equipped and supported to do their work, sensitive always to the needs of Ukrainian staff coping with the very personal impact of war. Promoting and making space for belonging and co-creation inside the team is required.

As this is a shared journey and has meaning and consequence globally, the Director must share and nurture a vision of change and inspire staff at every level of the organization to participate in building customer-centered and co-created programs. The Director must also work with all stakeholders to share the vision and invite co-creation. Sharing ownership is not only important philosophically to Alight, it’s often the key to successful and lasting innovation. This role not only requires an openness to people and ideas, but also a commitment to spending the time necessary to communicate and harmonize with all stakeholders. Regular communication with the Europe-based team, the global team, and to audiences outside Alight is required. 

Country Program Leadership 

• Serve as the enterprise leader of the Europe Program (currently including Poland and Western Ukraine), responsible for the quality programming, employee belonging and well-being, financial health, compliance, and timely delivery of services, reports, and other critical deliverables.
• Ensure that the Europe enterprise is Alight and the mission, values, and strategies of the organization are alive inside the team and the work.
• Create a place of belonging for staff, volunteers, and partners - ensure there is dignified space, employees are seen and heard, and that there are growth opportunities. Follow policies and contribute to organizational goals to ensure diversity, inclusion and equity in the workplace and services.
• Fully participate as a member of the global leadership team, responsible for driving refugee-led service improvement across the whole of Alight and beyond. Support and guide the Europe and global team to be refugee-centered and co-creative in their work 
• Strategically lead the Europe team to provide exemplary displaced/refugee-led service and become a beacon inside Alight and beyond.
• Build and lead a stellar Europe-based senior management team to meet and exceed expectations of customers, donors, and partners.
• Harmonize with diverse stakeholders who make Alight possible. Work in a measurable and accountable way towards shared purpose and goals.

Leading Equity and Belonging

The Europe Regional Director is responsible to understand the barriers and frictions to belonging in their programming. With this understanding, they must design new structures, communications, budgets, policies, and recommendations to evolve the country program. The Director must work to create a service-based culture and collaborative decision-making structure. Compensation and growth opportunities must be addressed across the country program. And management training prioritized to ensure supportive supervision exists.

Customer Accountability and Co-creation 

Customer accountability is core to the emergent Europe program and to the work of Alight. In this role, you will be expected to lead a team to collect evolve core refugee settlement services through managing to customer satisfaction and implementing customer ideas.

Alight and Kuja Kuja co-designed and developed a customer feedback service and tool. The Alight guides in Europe have been actively collecting data in Poland in March and digitally across Europe since April. The Europe program has the potential to lead the way by sharing data-driven insight and co-designing and co-implementing customer ideas.

The team is responsible to make space to identify and grapple with hard questions and to raise them inside Alight and beyond. A customer-led approach will raise big questions about our existing services and about what more needs to be done.  It will be your responsibility to make space for these discussions, refine important questions, and share them for others to join the conversation. It’s likely that this questioning will lead to new partnerships and design. 

Qualities top candidates will possess

To be successful in this role, you must have the humility to truly listen to and trust refugee customers with decision making and design. This role requires leadership experience, deep empathy and connection to service provision, desire for equity and opportunity for teammates, and a strong orientation to transformation. The right person will be focused but also know that lasting change requires going wide and working right alongside colleagues, partners, service providers and customers. Great patience and kindness is expected – especially when leading teams to embrace new ways of working. The mandate is ambitious and will only be advanced by someone willing to believe transformation is both possible and necessary.

Skills and experience we’re seeking

• Industry experience - leadership, program design and management, and front-line direct service provision desired
• Meaningful experience in serving displaced communities and demonstrated success at improving the status quo
• Belief in the Alight mission and values and a desire to activate these to unleash our own teams and the people we serve
• Experience in trauma recovery, economic stability, emergency response, or community-led reconstruction highly valued but not required
• Strong commitment to building culture and policies of well-being and belonging. Passion and experience in making INGOs equitable and empowering places to work.
• Proven ability to work with diverse partners to make great things happen – most important is experience designing with customers but the ability to harmonize and co-create with national governments, bi-lateral and multi-lateral donors, local organizations, private donors, host communities, local businesses, and global teams is also critical to success
• Patience, curiosity, and openness to try new things and to iterate and refine solutions
• Ability to build and lead a strong team who fully contribute to success 
• Experience leading transformation and innovation inside an organization
• Ability to communicate powerfully about your work to both small and large groups
• Fluent English is required; Polish, Ukrainian, or Romanian language a plus

Benefits

Borderless Team of 2,500 staff worldwide that sees possibility, celebrates moments of abundance, shares new ideas, and strives to do a better thing every day.

Learning & Development – Access thousands of free online learning courses to take at your own pace and tailor to your professional goals.

Health, dental, and MedEvac Insurance – We strive to offer the best-in-class healthcare plans to our staff each year.  We cover 100% of the cost for your health premium and 75% of the cost for coverage for your spouse/dependents. 

Retirement – We contribute 6% of your salary regardless of your contribution amount, after one year of service. 

Generous Leave Time – Between vacation days, personal leave days, and holidays, you have ample opportunity to take time off when you need it.