Director, Change Management

Manulife • Toronto, ON

2d • CA$145,130 - CA$195,130 • Hybrid

About The Position

The Director, Change Management, Wealth acts as lead and primary contributor to the Wealth Change Management Office’s mandate, partnering across Manulife Wealth and Manulife Private Wealth business areas to drive outcomes through robust change management practices, including cross-portfolio visibility, collision mitigation, and team readiness. The role is primarily Canadian in scope, with cross-border exposure through the US Wealth/Personal Investing business under Manulife John Hancock. The Director, Change Management will lead overall change coordination and governance at the top of the house and will also provide structured change management enablement and delivery support for high complexity initiatives. The role drives change and business outcomes for our Wealth business.

Requirements

• 10+ years of change management experience, including 5+ years leading enterprise-scale or multi-LOB change in financial services or wealth management.
• Experience operating in an investment dealer environment supporting independent advisors preferred.
• Demonstrated ability to chair and run multi-stakeholder governance forums, or similar decisioning body, and drive decisions to closure.
• Experience conducting organizational and stakeholder impact assessments and managing senior stakeholders.
• Experience producing and maintaining a portfolio-health readout for executive sponsors.
• Experience driving and delivering initiative-level change management to drive adoption and reduce delivery risk, with cross-functional business partners

Nice To Haves

• Partners effectively with cross-functional and virtual teams; demonstrates collaboration, adaptability, and influence; facilitates best-practice exchange and provides technical expertise.
• Comfort operating with named sponsors at AVP / VP level, including in escalation moments.
• Self-regulating; demonstrates coping mechanisms with pressures & setbacks
• Identifies escalation items early and produces options for resolution; engages in discussions and moves others towards a position
• Applies organizational savvy and business expertise to present and defend issues that have a direct and significant impact to the business
• Ability to influence without direct authority
• Effective negotiation and collaboration skills

Responsibilities

• Chairs and runs the Advisor Change Governance Forum - owning the agenda, portfolio sequencing, collision calls, and decisions of record.
• Owns the intake-to-decision workflow and applies the OCM Change Assessment methodology to every advisor-impacting initiative.
• Maintains the single advisor change view across initiatives, recurring activities (newsletters, calls), and compliance cycles, in partnership with business teams and Advisor Communications.
• Owns the portfolio-level sequencing view across all advisor-impacting initiatives; identifies collisions and capacity risks at the Governance Forum; recommends defer / sequence / reshape decisions and records them as the system of record.
• Supports high impact and high complexity initiatives; accountable for the development and execution of change plans across the organization.
• Actively oversees all assigned change management activities, monitors progress, and communicates results.
• Acts as an internal consultant and trusted advisor to ensure a structured change management approach and methodology is applied across all aspects of change.
• Executes specific change mitigation strategies and action plans to engage impacted stakeholders, increase understanding, build support for change, and ensure smooth transitions with minimal business disruption.
• Manages initiative-level change management roadmaps and dependencies.
• Supports quarterly planning at the initiative level and ensures alignment with strategic planning.
• Analyzes large amounts of qualitative and quantitative data (e.g., survey results) to gain insight into thematic change trends across a specific segment or function, and understands the business value, financial acumen, and customer lifecycle for the line of business.
• Partners with business lines to help teams understand the larger implications of an initiative — and the needed change beyond the core initiative deliverables.
• Drives shared change practices and leads change adoption, advocates for the people side of change outcomes, and is accountable to partnering with program leads for the realization of benefits and outcomes as defined for the initiative.
• Proactively identifies risks to successful change adoption and works collaboratively to develop and implement appropriate responses.

Benefits

• health, dental, mental health, vision, short- and long-term disability, life and AD&D insurance coverage, adoption/surrogacy and wellness benefits, and employee/family assistance plans.
• various retirement savings plans (including pension and a global share ownership plan with employer matching contributions) and financial education and counseling resources.
• generous paid time off program in Canada includes holidays, vacation, personal, and sick days, and we offer the full range of statutory leaves of absence.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director
• Education Level: No Education Listed