Role Summary

Corporate Real Estate & Services (CRES) is part of our Strategy and Talent (S&T) function. With an annual budget of circa USD0.8bn, the CRES function manages a portfolio of nearly 1,200 buildings worldwide, spanning headquarter locations, branches, and offices across over 50 unique markets. CRES is a globally managed function, integrating individual country CRES teams, together with specialist groups covering Workplace, Asset Management, Technology, Data & Analytics and Sustainability.

The CRES function focuses on supporting the needs of the Group’s businesses, through managing a diverse portfolio and delivering superior services every day for the Group’s colleagues, clients and communities. Services provided by the function are broad in nature reflecting the key role that CRES plays across all Group businesses in its markets – spanning areas such as security, health and safety and wellness through to workplace experience and effectiveness, resiliency of data centres and delivery of the Group’s sustainability commitments. 

Within CRES, the Head of Major Initiatives will work as a key member of the Asset Management team which ensures that our global portfolio of assets, products and services continues to meet the needs of our business to deliver on our strategy. This team is accountable for driving strategic planning to enable business growth and transformation across our asset classes, maximising the value of our real estate portfolio and remaining agile and flexible to deliver on the evolving needs of the organisation. 

The role holder manages a critical book of work across the most strategic transformation programs and enterprise-wide initiatives in the Bank. This significant role orchestrates the efforts from a cohort of professionals and stakeholders to achieve the desired objectives, highlighting opportunities and risks, and agreeing priorities to formulate and maintain the portfolio and project roadmap. Working across our matrix structure, and leveraging our supply partner relationships, the Head of Major Initiatives illustrates visible and program leadership, drives enterprise alignment with senior management, objectively drives the right outcomes, and maintains a clear and end to end course of action He/she will hold stakeholders accountable on key deliverables to assure the success of these critical programs and update progress with senior leaders of the Bank. This role will also produce executive narratives and drive project steering committees and working groups (if necessary) that enable timely and informed decision-making.

Role Responsibilities

Strategy

• Accountable for key bank-wide strategic programs and initiatives, including Project Vantage, Top 8 income market metroplans, sensitive and critical projects, and NDA programs. 
• Orchestrate our efforts across the function in developing and driving the Bank’s real estate portfolio strategy to capture optimisation and support targeted growth opportunities, enabling delivery of sustainably higher returns.
• Build the pre-deal due diligence team comprising different subject matter experts and serve as a primary point of contact with the steering committee, stakeholders, and advisors
• Determine, define and manage project scope and objectives, and assist in building the right team needed to reach objectives and managing resources in an effective and efficient manner
• Prepare scenarios and other relevant analyses and make recommendations to the steering committee,  internal boards and governance bodies for advancing the project or securing key decisions
• Partner with colleagues within CRES, our Supply Partners as well as cross-functional SMEs; aligning organisational capacity to anticipate and meet demand for execution

Business & Processes

• Lead enterprise-wide and transformation initiatives within the portfolio, ensuring that the strategy remains responsive to internal and external change (org restructuring/business model shifts/technology advancements impacting or advancing business strategy and delivery).
• Optimise the Bank’s real estate portfolio to provide best-in-class colleague and client experience, keeping focused on cost to support targeted re-investment, and to continue to grow the priority business areas.
• Facilitate cross-functional collaboration by aligning stakeholders demand across different departments/teams, breaking siloes, de-conflicting and driving decisions. 
• Partner with colleagues within the function to agree a stakeholder engagement plan, which ensures that the Portfolio Strategy continues to anticipate and adapt to evolving client needs, efficiently and effectively.
• Contribute, influence, and manage issues related to the programs through direct oversight of associated project lead.
• Lead and oversee various portfolio strategy related processes including but not limited to project, design, experience, technology, finance, data & insights, risk management are interlinked and connected to provide an end-to-end delivery model to ensure procedure, and standards are effectively implemented across CRES. 
• Manage strategy exemptions including evolution/update of established standards 
• Challenge milestones and key deliverables against existing standards, principles and market best practice identifying risks and opportunities and ensuring compliant and best in class planning is adhered

People & Talent

• Lead, inspire and motivate project leadership and teams, ensuring the delivery of the collective agenda.
• Lead through influence with peer and partner teams to drive required outcomes, including setting and prioritising execution activity in internal Property and Supply Partner teams 
• Promote risk awareness and compliance culture. Lead through example and build the appropriate Conduct culture and values.
• Strengthen the performance culture and reinforcement of accountabilities.
• Provide strategic thought leadership, coaching, recognition and motivation through positive reinforcements and frequent feedback sessions.

Risk Management & Governance

• Responsible for the risk management of the strategy delivery end-to-end (close partnership to achieve effective governance and risk management for delivery).
• Improve risk mitigation capability, to understand their needs and challenges, enabling earlier anticipation of execution risk or scope risk.
• Identify and report key risks and ensure where outside of risk appetite, that these are escalated to the appropriate body for risk acceptance.
• Adhere to the Bank and CRES’ governance frameworks including quarterly performance review.
• Responsible to ensure Supply Partner governance standards are met and performance of supply partners is meeting agreed service level standards in view of office strategy and planning.

Key stakeholders

• Accountable for developing strong partnerships, proactive discovery of upcoming projects that impact the Country spend, while creating value by influencing stakeholders to make decisions when considering the wider business. 
• Key stakeholder interactions including business and functional senior leaders.
• CRES Leadership Team.

Role Requirements

• Preferably a bachelor’s degree in real estate, Finance, engineering or other business-related discipline preferred. 
• Banking, finance or project/programme professional position 8+years ideally in Real Estate or Corporate Real Estate related fields with strong background on planning, design and delivery.
• Previous experience leading planning and delivery of large-scale office transformation programmes in a matrix organisation.
• Essential skills include stakeholder influence, client management, change management, financial acumen, real estate development knowledge, and strong communication, analytical, and purpose driven leadership abilities. 
• Bank training i.e. mandatory and developmental – role specific, and regulatory/compliance bank wide and role specific.    
• MEMBERSHIP: Active membership or chartership with an industry recognised professional association is preferred
• Languages: Business Communication, other languages is a plus 

Role Specific Technical Competencies

•    Influencing Through Expertise
•    Effective Communications
•    Business Intelligence and Analytics
•    Budget Management
•    Risk Management
•    Supply Partner Management
•    Design and Project Management
•    Lease and Asset Management
•    Facilities Management 

About Standard Chartered

We're an international bank, nimble enough to act, big enough for impact. For more than 170 years, we've worked to make a positive difference for our clients, communities, and each other. We question the status quo, love a challenge and enjoy finding new opportunities to grow and do better than before. If you're looking for a career with purpose and you want to work for a bank making a difference, we want to hear from you. You can count on us to celebrate your unique talents and we can't wait to see the talents you can bring us.

Our purpose, to drive commerce and prosperity through our unique diversity, together with our brand promise, to be here for good are achieved by how we each live our valued behaviours. When you work with us, you'll see how we value difference and advocate inclusion.

Together we:

• Do the right thing and are assertive, challenge one another, and live with integrity, while putting the client at the heart of what we do
• Never settle, continuously striving to improve and innovate, keeping things simple and learning from doing well, and not so well
• Are better together, we can be ourselves, be inclusive, see more good in others, and work collectively to build for the long term

What we offer

In line with our Fair Pay Charter, we offer a competitive salary and benefits to support your mental, physical, financial and social wellbeing.

• Core bank funding for retirement savings, medical and life insurance, with flexible and voluntary benefits available in some locations.
• Time-off including annual leave, parental/maternity (20 weeks), sabbatical (12 months maximum) and volunteering leave (3 days), along with minimum global standards for annual and public holiday, which is combined to 30 days minimum.
• Flexible working options based around home and office locations, with flexible working patterns.
• Proactive wellbeing support through Unmind, a market-leading digital wellbeing platform, development courses for resilience and other human skills, global Employee Assistance Programme, sick leave, mental health first-aiders and all sorts of self-help toolkits
• A continuous learning culture to support your growth, with opportunities to reskill and upskill and access to physical, virtual and digital learning.
• Being part of an inclusive and values driven organisation, one that embraces and celebrates our unique diversity, across our teams, business functions and geographies - everyone feels respected and can realise their full potential.