Associate Director, Communications Operations & Center Of Excellence

Johnson Controls•Glendale, CA

3d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Director of Communications Operations & Center of Excellence is a strategic and executional leader responsible for optimizing how the global communications function operates. This role drives governance across channels, embeds AI into workflows, and builds a metrics-driven culture. The leader will also oversee a center of excellence that manages tactical execution of assignments from regional and enterprise strategic communications leaders, ensuring consistency, speed, and quality across deliverables. We are seeking an experienced communications leader to oversee our Communications Operations and Center of Excellence (COE). This role is responsible for ensuring consistency, discipline, and impact across our global communications function. The leader will also oversee a center of excellence that manages delivery of communication work products that supports our enterprise and regional business strategic communications leaders, ensuring consistency, speed, and quality across deliverables. They will serve as the backbone of the function—creating consistency, ensuring operational excellence, and enabling our enterprise and regional strategic communications leaders to focus on high-value strategic outcomes that support the growth of Johnson Controls.

Requirements

8+ years of experience in communications, operations, or related fields.
Exceptional organizational skills and ability to manage competing priorities with speed and discipline.
Strong communicator and collaborator, able to partner effectively across enterprise, regional, and functional teams.
Proven ability to design and manage governance frameworks in a complex, matrixed organization.
Strong knowledge of communications platforms, digital tools, and measurement practices.
Experience managing centralized teams or shared services models.
Excellent stakeholder management and influencing skills.

Nice To Haves

Strategic thinker with operational rigor.
Comfortable navigating ambiguity and driving clarity.
Passionate about enabling others and building scalable systems.
Change management experience is a plus.

Responsibilities

Lead channel governance across internal and external platforms, ensuring alignment with audience personas and business priorities and messaging.
Keeps a strong pulse on external benchmarks and what winning looks like—maintain a keen eye toward emerging channels that should be explored, channels that should be sunset, etc., in line with our colleague personas and audiences we need to engage.
Partner with colleagues in public relations to define and continuously improve best practices, templates, playbooks, and standards that raise the quality and effectiveness of communications delivery enterprise-wide. (e.g. M&A, crisis, RIFs, etc.)
Develop and maintain a measurement strategy that measures content impact, reach, and channel effectiveness aligned to strategic goals. Ensure data-driven insights are integrated into communications planning and tactics.
Manage the selection, adoption, and optimization of communications technologies, platforms, and tools used across the function.
Partner closely with strategic communications leaders to anticipate needs and ensure operational support aligns with business priorities.
Manage the assignment of communications specialists to tactical execution requests submitted by enterprise and regional strategic communications leaders. developing specialist skills and ensuring strong execution capability across channels.
Lead demand planning and capacity management for communications specialists, ensuring optimal resource allocation to delivery requests from enterprise and regional strategic communications leaders.
Proactively forecast workload, balance assignments, and invest in growing the skillsets of the talent pool to maintain strong execution capability and agility across all channels.
Drive continuous professional development to build a versatile, high-performing team that can adapt to evolving business needs. Coach and develop a high-performing team of communications professionals.
Build scalable processes for intake, prioritization, and delivery of communications requests to ensure timely delivery of high-quality communications outputs.
Standardize operational processes and tools to improve delivery speed, quality, and resource efficiency. Serve as a steward of process discipline, enabling scalability and simplification across the communications ecosystem.
Ensure consistent application of brand, messaging, and strategic priorities across all deliverables.