Director, Head of Culture Evolution – UK Corporate

Job Description:

The Head of Culture Evolution for UK Corporate plays a pivotal role in the success of enterprise-wide agile Ways of Working transformation initiatives. This leader is responsible for shaping, guiding, and accelerating the cultural evolution required for an organisation to realise the full benefits of agility. By championing the values and behaviours essential for an agile mindset, the Culture Pillar Lead ensures that teams and leaders alike embrace the transformative journey, fostering an environment where innovation, collaboration, and continuous improvement can thrive.

Key Responsibilities

• Vision & Strategy: Build on defined culture priorities of agility, innovation, and belief & aspiration. Articulate the cultural priorities that underpin the agile transformation, ensuring alignment with the organisation’s strategic objectives and values.
• Change Leadership: Inspire and mobilise leadership and team members at all levels to adopt and champion agile values, principles, and practices. Act as an agent of change, addressing resistance constructively and celebrating cultural milestones.
• Assessment & Measurement: Develop and implement tools and frameworks for assessing current culture maturity. Establish relevant metrics to track progress, gather insights, and continuously refine the transformation roadmap.
• Learning & Enablement: Create and facilitate workshops, training programmes, and learning journeys focused on agile behaviours, psychological safety, growth mindset, and cross-functional collaboration.
• Coaching & Mentoring: Provide expert coaching to leaders, managers, and teams to internalise agile values and practices. Develop a community of culture ambassadors to extend the reach of culture change initiatives.
• Stakeholder Engagement: Build strong relationships with key stakeholders across business units, ensuring open dialogue, shared understanding, and co-creation of solutions that support cultural agility.
• Storytelling & Communication: Craft compelling narratives that articulate the 'why' behind the culture evolution, sharing success stories and lessons learned through multiple channels to build belief and sustain momentum.
• Barrier Removal: Identify and address systemic and behavioural obstacles that impede culture change, collaborating with leadership to redesign policies, processes, and structures where necessary.
• Continuous Improvement: Promote an environment of experimentation, feedback, and learning. Encourage teams to inspect and adapt, celebrating incremental progress and innovative practices.
• Inclusion & Opportunity: Champion an inclusive culture that values varied perspectives, psychological safety, and equitable participation for all team members.

Stakeholder Management and Leadership

• Build strong and productive relationships with critical partners across the Corporate Bank and broader BX business area
• Build strong and productive front to back relationships within BX and functional partners including HR, Finance and Corporate Communications
• Ensure effective development and understanding of the business’ plans across stakeholder groups
• Create a shared understanding and sense of urgency and excitement around the targeted culture as well as targeted business results via digital and technology strategies – taking strong action when necessary to ensure individual actions, processes and practices are aligned to what the business needs from stakeholders around the Corporate Bank
• Resource, develop and retain a motivated high performing team committed to delivering agreed objectives successfully, through each other and in partnership with colleagues within the business and across the Corporate Bank
• Agree appropriately stretching performance and development objectives for all direct reports, providing regular feedback and coaching to ensure their maximum potential is achieved
• Be a role model for our people demonstrating advanced leadership behaviours, excellent communications skills and a team working approach to delivering results

Risk and Control Objective

Ensure that all activities and duties are carried out in full compliance with regulatory requirements, Enterprise-Wide Risk Management Framework and internal Barclays Policies and Policy Standards.

Qualifications & Experience

• Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in organisational development, human resources, business administration, psychology, or related field.
• Experience: Minimum 8-10 years’ experience in organisational change, culture transformation, or leadership roles—preferably within agile or digital transformation programmes.
• Agile Expertise: Understanding of agile frameworks (e.g., Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, LeSS) and their cultural implications.
• Coaching & Facilitation: Proven ability to coach and mentor senior leaders as well as teams; skilled at designing and facilitating workshops and interventions.
• Change Management: Solid grounding in change management methodologies (e.g., ADKAR, Kotter) and practical experience leading large-scale culture shifts.
• Stakeholder Management: Exceptional influencing, negotiation, and relationship-building skills across all organisational levels.
• Communication: Outstanding verbal and written communication abilities, with a flair for storytelling and message tailoring.
• Analytical Skills: Ability to analyse cultural assessments, behavioural data, and feedback to inform actionable insights.
• Certifications: Relevant certifications in agile coaching (e.g., ICP-ACC, Certified Agile Leadership) or change management are highly desirable.

Essential Skills

• Visionary Leadership: Inspires others toward a shared purpose and models the desired culture.
• Emotional Intelligence: Demonstrates empathy, active listening, and skilful navigation of complex interpersonal dynamics.
• Resilience & Adaptability: Maintains focus, energy, and optimism amidst ambiguity and rapid change.
• Collaboration: Builds bridges across functions and fosters a spirit of partnership.
• Results Orientation: Delivers outcomes aligned to the agile transformation’s strategic goals.
• Learning Agility: Embraces curiosity, experimentation, and personal growth.

Success Measures

• Increased organisational agility and speed of value delivery.
• Higher employee engagement and adoption of agile mindsets and behaviours.
• Clear improvement in cross-functional collaboration, psychological safety, and innovation levels.
• Positive feedback from leadership and teams regarding the transformation journey.

Why Join Us?

As the Culture Pillar Lead, you will shape the very fabric of our organisation’s future. If you are motivated by catalysing culture shifts, nurturing high-performing teams, and making a lasting impact through agile values, we invite you to bring your expertise, vision, and passion to our transformation journey

Purpose of the role

To support the organisation, achieve its strategic objectives  by ensuring the business is ready to receive the agreed change (address business problems and opportunities), ensuring that change initiatives are successfully assessed and implemented to enable them to be embedded in the organisation.  

Accountabilities

• Identification and analysis of business impact and opportunities that require change within the organisation.
• Development of business readiness strategies that will help to ensure the successful implementation of change initiatives.
• Communication with stakeholders, including senior management, project teams, and external partners, to ensure that they are informed about change initiatives and that their needs and expectations are being met.
• Collaboration with Client Readiness, Operational Readiness & Tech Delivery to ensure business, sales, operations, client servicing and functional partners are prepared for a smooth transition of technology delivery into BAU (including Target Operating Model, Training, Communications, Service Agreements.) .
• Management of resistance to change, ensuring that stakeholders are engaged and that their concerns are addressed.
• Review of business readiness plans and status reports in conjunction with change delivery managers to ensure business readiness activities completed on time including newly identified risks, issues and dependencies.
• Collaboration with project teams to ensure that change initiatives are aligned with project objectives and that change management activities are integrated into project plans.
• Provision of guidance and support to business stakeholders, ensuring that they have the necessary skills and knowledge to implement change initiatives successfully.

Director Expectations

• To manage a business function, providing significant input to function wide strategic initiatives. Contribute to and influence policy and procedures for the function and plan, manage and consult on multiple complex and critical strategic projects, which may be business wide..
• They manage the direction of a large team or sub-function, leading other people managers and embedding a performance culture aligned to the values of the business. Or for an individual contributor, they lead organisation wide projects and act as deep technical expert and thought leader, identifying new ways of working and collaborating cross functionally. They will train, guide and coach less experienced specialists and provide information affecting long term profits, organisational risks and strategic decisions..
• Provide expert advice to senior functional management and committees to influence decisions made outside of own function, offering significant input to function wide strategic initiatives.
• Manage, coordinate and enable resourcing, budgeting and policy creation for a significant sub-function.
• Escalates breaches of policies / procedure appropriately.
• Foster and guide compliance, ensure regulations are observed that relevant processes in place to facilitate adherence.
• Focus on the external environment, regulators, or advocacy groups to both monitor and influence on behalf of Barclays, when appropriate.
• Demonstrate extensive knowledge of how the function integrates with the business division / Group to achieve the overall business objectives.
• Maintain broad and comprehensive knowledge of industry theories and practices within own discipline alongside up-to-date relevant sector / functional knowledge, and insight into external market developments / initiatives.
• Use interpretative thinking and advanced analytical skills to solve problems and design solutions in often complex/ sensitive situations.
• Exercise management authority to make significant decisions and certain strategic decisions or recommendations within own area.
• Negotiate with and influence stakeholders at a senior level both internally and externally.
• Act as principal contact point for key clients and counterparts in other functions/ businesses divisions.
• Mandated as a spokesperson for the function and business division.

All Senior Leaders are expected to demonstrate a clear set of leadership behaviours to create an environment for colleagues to thrive and deliver to a consistently excellent standard. The four LEAD behaviours are: L – Listen and be authentic, E – Energise and inspire, A – Align across the enterprise, D – Develop others.

All colleagues will be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Values of Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence and Stewardship – our moral compass, helping us do what we believe is right. They will also be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Mindset – to Empower, Challenge and Drive – the operating manual for how we behave.