Junior Team Leader - Design & Media

In this role, you will understand and connect with all members of the team by listening effectively to understand who they are and what their needs and aspirations are. You will discover the strengths and passions of each team member to build on for their performance success. By asking intelligent and curious questions to get to know each person, you will foster a two-way relationship where you share things with them, encouraging them to be open with you.

You will support performance management and professional development by practicing effective coaching and mentoring of individual team members for their performance success. This will involve reviewing business impact metrics along with other metrics such as utilization and attendance. You will share these metrics with the team to identify training needs, individual performance development needs, and opportunities for leveraging strengths within the team. You will build on innovative concepts for team performance success and business impact. Regular 1-on-1s (once a month and ad hoc as required) with individual members will allow you to further discuss metrics and together build next steps for greater performance success. You will write performance reviews, calibrate review results with managers and peer team leaders, and have discussions with individual team members to complete review cycles. Guiding individual team members in building their yearly professional development plan and offering support and guidance to help them accomplish their respective goals will be a crucial part of your role. Where required, with low-performing team members, you will build performance improvement plans together with the team member(s) based on the strengths of each person.

You will actively work together with the Operations Manager to achieve strategic alignment and accomplish department objectives. Close collaboration with other members of the leadership team (including peer team leaders, trainers, operations managers, local HR management, creative leadership, and senior leadership) will be expected. You will share information on daily team capacity roadblocks or available capacity to shift to other teams. Thinking strategically for innovative solutions to set the direction of the team and achieve broader department goals will be essential. You will understand the business and impact of growth across service lines and work together with peer team leaders to facilitate the career progression of individual team members. Collaboration with the leadership team for overall team engagement will be a key aspect of your role.

You will work to build a collaborative team environment and be adept at organizing team operations, structuring work, and deploying resources to ensure the productivity of the team. Creating transparency and addressing relevant issues within the team, actively supporting colleagues within and beyond your immediate team, building strong relationships with colleagues around the firm, and acknowledging the strengths of team members and championing their success will be part of your responsibilities.

You will be responsible for the output quality of your paired colleagues or service line. Along with creative leadership, you will be among the first to detect gaps in skill or knowledge and develop actionable plans to fill those gaps, in collaboration with the operations manager and relevant stakeholders. Actively working to maintain high customer satisfaction levels, decreasing transactional feedbacks and reworks by supporting colleagues during the production phase, continually monitoring quality levels of individuals and the service line, and mitigating risks of constructive transactional feedback will be essential. You will run investigations for constructive transactional feedbacks, share learnings with the involved colleague(s), and detect trends.

You are expected to be a role model in soft skills, giving and receiving feedback, communication with users, expected behaviors, and firm values and culture in all decisions and situations, within the work environment and beyond. One of our most important areas of role modeling is safeguarding confidentiality. You must have excellent discretion and feel a strong responsibility towards protecting confidential information, even under pressure from peers. This is a role that demands human sensibility, empathy, and a passion for developing people to achieve their individual success stories. To achieve this, you need to be comfortable with having a variety of conversations (from fun and light to sensitive/difficult) with your team members. You will also need to be comfortable with change and ambiguity. You will face opportunities of continuous change in the team and the business objectives and must be adaptable and open to the challenges of change. Change can happen at various levels, from change in team structure (e.g., churn, attrition), processes, tools, or leadership direction.

Most importantly, you must be highly motivated to truly serve the team through your leadership. This is not a role about control or hierarchy, but a position where you will inspire trust and action from your team as you develop them to reach their potential.

Capabilities