Associate Strategy Director

Description:

We are a dynamic and nimble agency so you must feel comfortable stretching your skills across the full range of strategic and creative services that we offer. This could be anything from defining a business’ north star purpose to embedding it through culture change and employee engagement, developing a sustainability or social impact strategy, or helping develop corporate or brand level communications or activations that bring it to life in the real world through campaigns, marketing, brand experience or innovation.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Client leadership

• You’ll provide leadership and direction to junior colleagues and be accountable for delivering exceptional quality work to clients
• You’ll be responsible or play a leading role on at least 2-3 key client accounts and grow the value of these accounts year on year along with members of our client team
• Build strong, healthy relationships with clients and an understanding of their business
• Be a trusted point of contact for your clients’ projects

Project direction & delivery

• You’ll lead strategic thinking on projects, supporting the team to produce quality, insightful, and relevant recommendations
• You’ll bring a confident and well articulated perspective on projects, offering challenge and solutions to better our work
• Lead and be responsible for all client facing deliverables, helping to ensure that outputs deliver on the Given standards of excellence and deliver real world and business impact
• Create insightful and client ready outputs and give clear briefs to colleagues who contribute to and help shape our response to client challenges and briefs
• Lead large purpose-led strategy projects with Director or Exec sponsorship and support
• Lead or support others to complete interviews and research gathering tasks
• Run co-creation workshops independently, or with director support depending on attendees;

Offer development, thought leadership and new business

• You’ll contribute to evolution of our offer and also to related thought leadership, articles, blogs etc along with other members of the team
• You’ll also play a role in creating and responding to new business and briefs across the full range of our offer, in particular playing a leading role on proposals and pitches.
• Help grow revenue by upselling to existing clients and sourcing new opportunities
• Proactively bring new business into the business and leverage your own network

Managing people & teams and playing a role in agency culture

• You will be a part of the strategy leadership team, along with our other strategy directors and ADs;
• All of our Directors and Associate Directors in the Strategy team manage a small team (of usually 2-4) people, usually related to their core offer area / area of expertise;
• You will also be playing a leading role in leading & managing project teams, collaborating across strategy, client and creative teams.
• Play an active role in the agency culture
• Have performance and development responsibilities for direct report within the purpose practice

ABOUT YOU

Your background and experience might be from a strategic consultancy, client side or from a brand strategy or purpose-led agency. You’ll be motivated by the purpose opportunity and work, and understand the world of strategy, culture change, brand or corporate communications.

As an Associate Director you will need to have acted as a project lead on large client briefs, working independently, with responsibility for the insight and direction of the project, leading the thinking and having oversight of the full project team.

You’ll report into the Chief Strategy Officer, who oversees the strategy team, but you will also be, working closely with other Exec team members and members of our strategy, client and creative teams to build our offering, bringing your own point of view of what it means to be purpose driven in today’s world and ensure the ongoing growth of Given.

You will have some line management responsibilities for more junior team members, and work closely with others to deliver positive experiences and progression opportunities for direct reports.