Director, Commercial Excellence and Capability

At AstraZeneca, we pride ourselves on crafting a collaborative culture that champions knowledge-sharing, ambitious thinking and innovation - ultimately providing employees with the opportunity to work across teams, functions and even the globe.

Our dedication to sustainability is also central to our culture and part of what makes AstraZeneca a great place to work. We know the health of people, the planet and our business are interconnected which is why we’re taking ambitious action to tackle some of the biggest challenges of our time, from climate change to access to healthcare and disease prevention.

Reporting to the VP of IBEX & IT (Innovation, Business Excellence & Information Technology), you will lead the local AZ Canada Commercial Excellence and Capability Development team as the thought leader that translates the enterprise ambition, strategy and priorities into your team’s priorities and mobilizes actions and impact in your team’s key accountabilities. You will drive overall team planning and management of the team of 15 people supporting them to uphold their accountabilities and achieve success as a team. This role is accountable for three core areas - Sales Training, Commercial Operations and Commercial Innovation/Systems.

**Responsibilities**:

- Attracts and mentors the best talent and team creating an inspiring purpose. Recruits, leads, coaches, develops and motivates staff to ensure the accountabilities are clear and objectives are delivered to a consistent high level of quality, performance and creativity. Creates a climate that enables everyone to contribute to performance and continuous improvement objectives. Ensures the right resources (FTE, $$) are set for the team and the planning period to ensure the team can deliver its mandate.
- Accountable to ensure strong enterprise strategy and delivery of all aspects of AZC Sales Manager and Representative Training aka “Capability Development”. Ensures that the Cap Dev team develops a comprehensive Sales training roadmap and staffs and maintains the Cap Dev team to partner across the BUs and key brands.
- Accountable to uphold and run a robust Commercial/Sales Operations team that develop, run and optimize key enterprise operational processes and systems. This includes oversight of all 3rd party vendors that support such processes. Examples of such are the meeting planning process, tool and 3rd party vendors, the Field HCP meetings outsourced logistics group, a Fair Market Value process, Samples process and 3rd party vendor.
- Accountable as overall enterprise lead for Commercial Innovation acting as change leaders and “product owners” for technologies such as the Veeva CRM system and pulling through any new systems that have high complexity and change for the Sales teams eg CyberGrant, Contract 2 Pay etc.
- Serve as the enterprise lead for all Sales Rewards and Recognition programs ensuring they motivated strong business results, adhere to all internal and external policies and are fair and equitable across the Business Units.
- Acts as the leader and facilitator of ‘Cross-BU’ discussions and alignment for the major projects and timelines that impact all BUs and should be done in one AZ way.
- Acts as single point of accountability for AZ Canada within the EUCAN and Global ecosystem staying current on new systems and processes and policies. Expert relationship builder that partners with global colleagues to understand long term direction, influence and shape the global roadmap, and adopt and embed relevant pull-through capabilities. Ensures the market is well represented above market and also ensures local relevance and alignment to core global strategies.
- Acts as the champion for Compliance across the key processes run by the team while partnering closely with Procurement, Privacy, Compliance. Ensures strong control and audit readiness Team is process owner for Sales Rewards, tbd.

**Qualifications/Competencies;**
- Sales Expertise - Experience in the pharmaceutical/healthcare industry is a must with a strong track record in Sales preferably both as a rep and as a front line sales manager.
- Business Acumen - Demonstrated evidence in leading, driving and delivering cross-organization change programs, processes and services that have a major impact within the organization. Strong change leadership ideally at enterprise level is an important skill.
- People Management - Proven people manager and leader with demonstrated ability to manage to team and individual outcomes, foster cross-functional collaboration and develop a team of diverse employees
- Collaboration - Highly skilled at generating a common agenda across Sales teams and BUs, identifying the common needs and creating the ability to align and move forward in the best interest on the ‘one AZ way’.
- Stakeholder Management - Strong interpersonal skills with respect to relationship building, influencing, negotiating and teamwork across multiple stakeholder groups