Operational Risk and Resiliency Program Director

About Northern Trust:

Northern Trust, a Fortune 500 company, is a globally recognized, award-winning financial institution that has been in continuous operation since 1889.  

Northern Trust is proud to provide innovative financial services and guidance to the world’s most successful individuals, families, and institutions by remaining true to our enduring principles of service, expertise, and integrity. With more than 130 years of financial experience and over 22,000 partners, we serve the world’s most sophisticated clients using leading technology and exceptional service.

The Global Regulatory Affairs Office (GRAO) is responsible for overseeing the enhancement of our risk management and controls, remediation of regulatory and audit findings and the administration of regulatory affairs.

This Program Director role reports to the Head of Global Regulatory Program Management and is responsible for management of a team of program and project managers in support of large scale, enterprise-wide Programs with multiple projects and work streams. These Programs involve delivery of critical strategic enterprise capabilities or regulatory changes that impact multiple business units or disciplines that execute the GRAO strategy.  

The role holder will be accountable for coordinating with partners across the lines of defense and critical business units and geographies to implement a comprehensive plan and resulting changes, and as such will have strong presentation, engagement and emotional intelligence.  These role holders will partner with senior leaders across the organization to deliver timely outcomes, and will be comfortable managing issues, escalations, and driving resolution in a complex environment.  They will be fluent in the issues associated with enterprise, operational or financial risk management for a large financial institution and will have the ability to blend a solution-focused, strategic mindset with the requirements of delivering day-to-day program deliverables.  They will directly manage one or more team members including program and project managers.

The key responsibilities of the role include:

• Applying a deep understanding of the relevant risk area to the execution of an established program through effective evaluation, oversight and management of a team of program managers and delivery subject matter experts
• Understanding, assessing and managing delivery of program outcomes across a portfolio of programs
• Partnering with senior executives to anticipate and clear key program hurdles before they become barriers to delivery
• Providing subject matter insight to ensure seamless initiation, execution and completion of required deliverables
• Managing a team of project managers and support staff to ensure meaningful status reporting consumable by a variety of stakeholders
• Managing and clearly articulate progress, risks and issues at a detailed and summary level, and to collaborate and drive solutions across a range of stakeholders
• Establishing forward-looking routines and approaches for the program to reliably forecast and hire appropriate resources in support of execution
• Managing and maintaining progress across a portfolio of work, and to continuously manage program risks, issues and escalations as needed.
• Liaising effectively between cross-functional stakeholders to align around common objectives.
• Continuously improving and optimizing the engagement and delivery model for programs to promote efficiency, productivity and meet quality standards.
• Overseeing all necessary resource requests in advance of actual needs
• Engaging, supervising and ensuring coordination of third party support, including oversight of forecast and budget variance
• Managing direct report team members, providing development opportunities, feedback and supervision appropriate to professional expertise

The successful candidate will benefit from having:

• A College or University degree
• 10+ years in financial, operational or enterprise risk management, with at least five in a process or functional leadership role within a large financial services institution in the United States or United Kingdom
• Experience leading functional or enterprise transformation programs, or large process changes in the area of expertise
• Experience with project management and portfolio management tools, techniques and methods (i.e., what good looks like), change management principles and how to build high-performing teams
• Technical skills: Outlook, Teams, Microsoft Office 365 suite required (advanced with Excel, Word, SharePoint, PowerPoint, MS Project).
• Excellent oral and written communication skills including experience solutioning, engaging and navigating change with senior executi