Operational Excellence Director

North American Electric Reliability Corporation

11h•Remote

About The Position

The Operational Excellence Director is a newly created role responsible for designing, executing, and scaling NERC’s operational excellence and process improvement capability. This role owns the development, implementation, and measurement of operational excellence practices that improve efficiency, reduce operational risk, and strengthen sustainability across Shared Services, with a long-term goal to scale organization-wide. The Operational Excellence Director partners with NERC leaders to translate strategy into executable improvement initiatives, ensuring efforts are not only well-designed but implemented, adopted, measured, and sustained. This role establishes the frameworks, tools, governance, and performance insights required to drive disciplined execution and continuous improvement. This is both a strategic and hands-on role. The Director serves as thought leader, coach, and practitioner, directly leading execution of select high-priority initiatives while coaching leaders and teams to build durable operational excellence capability.

Requirements

Bachelor's Degree in Business, Engineering, Operations, or a related discipline
Lean Six Sigma Black Belt certification required – demonstrating advanced problem-solving capability and a high level of commitment to continuous improvement and operational excellence
7-10+ years of experience in operational excellence, process improvement, or performance improvement
Experience designing or implementing process frameworks, KPIs, or performance measurement systems
Strong facilitation experience guiding groups through mapping, analysis, and decision-making
Demonstrated ability to coach leaders and teams on OE concepts and tools.
Excellent communication, stakeholder engagement, and influencing skills.
Experience supporting efforts that involve risk reduction, compliance, reliability, and/or quality improvement.
Background working in distributed or hybrid organizations
Strong balance of strategic thinking and hands-on execution.

Responsibilities

Champion, operationalize, and sustain a culture of continuous improvement across NERC.
Promote a culture of continuous improvement through experimentation, learning, and disciplined problem-solving, ensuring learnings translate into implemented improvements.
Pilot, implement, and evaluate new improvement methods, frameworks, and technologies (e.g., automation, analytics, AI-enabled tools), tracking effectiveness and adoption.
Ensure standardization is implemented where appropriate, while monitoring flexibility, adoption, and long-term sustainability.
As a newly created role, establish and mature NERC’s operational excellence and process improvement framework, including core methods, standards, and routines.
Operationalize core methods, standards, tools, and routines for consistent execution.
Develop, deploy, and maintain playbooks, templates, and guidance for organization-wide use.
Establish governance, prioritization, and review routines for improvement efforts focused on consistency, reliability, and risk reduction.
Partner with leaders to define, implement, and maintain KPIs aligned to strategy, Shared Services performance, risk indicators, and reliability expectations.
Monitor, analyze, and report on operational performance against targets and benchmarks.
Use trend analysis and performance data to proactively surface risks, improvement opportunities, and decision points.
Translate performance insights into actionable recommendations and follow through on execution.
Design, implement, and iterate dashboards and scorecards that track performance, emerging risks, and execution progress.
Translate strategic priorities into executable improvement initiatives, complete with timelines, ownership, and success measures.
Lead prioritization and sequencing of high-impact opportunities to ensure capacity is focused on the highest value work.
Drive execution strategies that reinforce accountability, remove barriers, and accelerate adoption.
Track implementation progress and adjust execution plans to ensure delivery of intended outcomes.
Partner with senior leaders and functional heads to co-create, execute, and sustain the Operational Excellence roadmap.
Serve as a strategic execution advisor to the VP of People & Operations and the COO, ensuring OE initiatives are integrated, delivered, and measured.
Facilitate and lead working sessions and workshops that result in clear decisions, executed actions, and measurable improvement.
Coach leaders and teams through execution challenges, reinforcing ownership, accountability, and results.
Lead change enablement efforts, tracking adoption and embedding improvements into daily operations.
Train and mobilize internal OE champions, monitoring capability growth and impact.
Serve as hands-on practitioner on a limited number of critical process improvements.
Conduct process mapping, data analysis, root cause diagnosis, and solution design with an emphasis on risk mitigation and error reduction.
Ensure improvements are documented, implemented, and sustained.
Track and validate improvement results, including risk reduction, cycle time, quality, cost avoidance, and capacity gains.
Build a portfolio of success stories to demonstrate impact and inspire organizational pull.
Share best practices and lessons learned across Shared Services and other business units.