Creative Operations DIrector

Creative Operations Director

Salary: £80,000 - £85,000 per annum, plus company benefits

Location: London

Contract: Full Time

Shifts: 37.5 hours per week, Monday – Friday, 9am until 5:30pm with 1 hours unpaid lunch break

Work model: Hybrid

Williams Lea seeks a Creative Operations Director to join our team!

Williams Lea is the leading global provider of tech-enabled business and marketing services helping clients manage and transform processes through resilient, scalable 24/7 operations. We combine deep expertise, agentic AI-imbedded workflows, and a global delivery model into a tech-enabled, seamless human expert-in-the-loop experience that helps clients achieve superior business outcomes.

Built on a strong heritage and great client relationships, we harness deep industry expertise, emerging technology and our global “Optishore™” delivery model to plan, build, execute and measure business processes, driving operational agility and digital transformation at speed and scale.

Williams Lea, an RRD company, serves clients in 20 countries across four continents and has 15,000 employees worldwide.

Purpose of role 

The Creative Operations Director is is a strategic and operations leader who will connect creative ambition with operational excellence, communicating a vision for how Williams Lea best serves our clients across our multiple service offerings, and who empowers and enables their team to bring that vision to life.  They would be responsible for maintaining excellent day to day communications with clients.  The role focuses on aligning creative delivery across broad campaigns and business objectives, with oversight of delivering operational excellence, implementing optimised cost to serve models, applying continuous improvement initiatives, and team growth and development.

The ideal candidate will have a creative background including design, motion graphics, and film and photography alongside strong leadership, organisational and communication skills and a proven track record of project management delivery. Client management skills will be critical as we define and build new operating models and key stakeholder engagement will assist Williams Lea in shaping a service delivery team that is fit for the emerging business changes and growth plan.

The Williams Lea business supports a wide network of clients, with a dedicated team and is supported by the wider Williams Lea EMEA senior management team.  The scope of services currently delivered, combined with the support of Williams Lea leadership engagement enables the account management team to truly take ownership in running their business, driving innovation and best practise, while delivering a world class business support service.    

Key responsibilities 

• Gather and analyse client feedback to inform creative process improvements
• Partner with client leads to identify growth opportunities and improve delivery
• Responsible for strategic planning across the account
• Identity new services and manage those from sale through to implementation and management
• Implement tools and systems to improve team efficiency and visibility
• Responsible for Operational Excellence and client satisfaction
• Oversee the creative workflow highlighting potential risks to the client
• Analyses data and reports that give insight into how to adjust to improve the service
• Proven experience in growing services and identifying new ones
• Track Williams Lea and client budgets and POs across all creative projects
• Work on month-end activities and invoicing
• Responsible for contractual governance

Personal attributes

• Strategic thinker
• Must be personable and maintain attentive and positive body language at all times
• Good listener, inquisitive and inwardly questioning – searches for underlying truth – questions if unsure
• Confident speaker – happy to lead a conversation
• Inspirational leadership attributes – the post holder will need to lead their teams through challenging and busy times whilst maintaining the Williams Lea values

Essential skills

• Experienced Creative Account Manager ready for next step into a demanding role
• Pragmatic adopter and approach to AI
• Capable of developing and implementing strategic objectives
• Strong commercial awareness, ability to plan and negotiate
• Detail-orientated outlook
• Self motivated, able to work autonomously
• Understands Williams Lea company values and business objectives and is able to deliver against them
• Able to manage, motivate and develop a diverse team

Key Competencies

• Proven project management and delivery skills
• Fluency across the marketing ops stack - creative production and campaign delivery
• Quality communication at all levels
• Client Focus
• Leading the Team
• Planning and Organising
• Delivering against strategic objectives

Using AI in your application

We’re happy for you to use AI tools to research us, polish your cv/cover letter, and practice interviews. Please make sure everything you submit reflects your authentic skills and experience.

To keep things fair, please don’t use AI to invent or exaggerate achievements, complete assessments (unless we say it’s allowed), or to generate live interview answers.

Rewards and Benefits

We believe in supporting our employees in both their professional and personal lives. As part of our commitment to your well-being, we offer a comprehensive benefits package, including but not limited to:

• 25 days holiday, plus bank holidays(pro-rata for part time or fixed term roles)
• Salary sacrifice schemes, retail vouchers – including our TechScheme which can be used on a range of gadgets such as Smart TV’s, laptops and computers or household appliances.
• Life Assurance
• Private Medical Insurance
• Dental Insurance
• Health Assessments
• Cycle-to-work scheme
• Discounted gym memberships
• Referral Scheme

You will also have the opportunity to work for a global employer who is dedicated to offering each and every employee an enjoyable, challenging and rewarding career with future career development prospects!

Equality and Diversity

The Company values the differences that a diverse workforce brings to the organisation and will not discriminate because of age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race (which includes colour, nationality and ethnic or national origins), religion or belief, sex or sexual orientation (each of these being a “protected characteristic” in discrimination law). It will not discriminate because of any other irrelevant factor and will build a culture that values openness, fairness and transparency.

If you have a disability and would prefer to apply in a different format or would like to make a reasonable adjustment to enable you to make an interview please contact us at [email protected](we do not accept applications to this email address).

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