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Job Description:
The Impact You Will Make
Regional Strategy & Operational Leadership
- Provide strategic leadership and overall direction for Customer Operations across the assigned region, ensuring alignment with global strategy, business priorities, and customer expectations.
- Translate enterprise and global Customer Operations strategies into clear regional priorities, operating plans, performance objectives, and measurable outcomes.
- Own regional operational performance across key measures including service levels, customer experience, quality, productivity, efficiency, backlog, responsiveness, and other critical business metrics.
- Establish strong operating rhythms, performance governance, and accountability mechanisms across countries, teams, and service areas.
- Identify emerging operational challenges and opportunities and take timely action to protect customer experience and business performance.
- Balance global process consistency with appropriate regional flexibility based on customer, market, regulatory, and business requirements.
Customer Experience & Service Excellence
- Champion a customer-first operating culture and ensure customer experience remains central to operational decision-making.
- Leverage customer insights, operational analytics, trends, and voice-of-customer feedback to identify root causes and drive sustainable improvements.
- Lead the resolution of complex, high-impact, and executive-level customer issues and ensure systemic issues are addressed beyond immediate resolution.
- Partner with commercial and business leaders to understand changing customer expectations and translate them into operational capabilities.
- Drive continuous improvement in customer satisfaction, loyalty, accessibility, responsiveness, and overall service experience.
Operational Excellence & Transformation
- Lead regional transformation initiatives focused on simplifying processes, improving service delivery, increasing productivity, and enhancing customer experience.
- Champion adoption of digital capabilities, automation, analytics, self-service solutions, and emerging technologies that improve scalability and effectiveness.
- Drive process standardization and continuous improvement while ensuring solutions remain appropriate for regional business requirements.
- Identify structural, process, technology, and capability gaps and develop strategies to address them.
- Lead significant organizational and operational change, ensuring effective stakeholder engagement, adoption, and sustained business results.
- Build a culture of continuous improvement, innovation, disciplined execution, and data-driven decision-making.
People & Organizational Leadership
- Lead, develop, and inspire a diverse organization of leaders and teams across multiple countries, locations, and cultures.
- Build strong leadership capability and establish clear expectations for performance, accountability, collaboration, and customer focus.
- Develop succession pipelines and strengthen organizational capability through talent development, coaching, and strategic workforce planning.
- Partner with HR and business leadership on organization design, workforce strategy, capability development, and succession planning.
- Create an inclusive environment that enables teams to perform at their best and effectively collaborate across geographic and functional boundaries.
Workforce, Capacity & Resource Management
- Ensure regional workforce and capacity strategies are aligned with customer demand, service expectations, business growth, and productivity objectives.
- Provide leadership over resource planning, demand forecasting, capacity management, and organizational requirements.
- Anticipate changes in customer demand and business priorities and ensure the organization has the appropriate capabilities and capacity to respond.
- Drive responsible management of resources and identify opportunities to improve productivity, scalability, and cost-to-serve.
- Partner with Finance and business leaders on operational planning, resource requirements, investment priorities, and productivity opportunities.
Executive & Cross-Functional Leadership
- Represent Customer Operations in regional and global leadership forums, business reviews, strategic planning sessions, and executive discussions.
- Serve as a trusted advisor and strategic partner to senior leaders on customer operations, service performance, organizational capability, and transformation.
- Partner across functions including Commercial, Supply Chain, Finance, IT/Digital, Quality, HR, and other enterprise teams to resolve complex issues and improve end-to-end customer outcomes.
- Influence across organizational boundaries and drive alignment where accountability, priorities, and stakeholders span multiple functions and geographies.
- Build strong relationships with regional and global stakeholders and ensure transparent communication regarding performance, risks, opportunities, and strategic priorities.
Governance, Risk & Business Continuity
- Ensure Customer Operations comply with applicable company policies, regulatory requirements, quality standards, internal controls, and risk-management expectations.
- Establish appropriate governance and escalation mechanisms for operational risks and critical customer issues.
- Ensure effective business continuity and operational resilience plans are established and maintained across the region.
- Proactively identify operational, organizational, customer, and service-delivery risks and ensure appropriate mitigation strategies are implemented.
Your Skills and Expertise
To be successful in this role, candidates must demonstrate the following qualifications and experience:
- Bachelor's degree or higher from an accredited institution.
- 10+ years of progressive leadership experience in Customer Operations, Customer Service, Shared Services, Business Services, Service Delivery, Supply Chain Customer Operations, or a comparable complex operational environment.
- Significant experience leading large-scale and/or multi-country operations, preferably within a global, matrixed organization.
- Demonstrated experience leading leaders and geographically distributed teams, with accountability for organizational performance, talent development, and succession.
- Proven ownership of complex operational performance, including KPIs, service levels, customer experience, quality, productivity, capacity, and continuous improvement.
- Demonstrated success leading significant business transformation, operational excellence, process improvement, or organizational change initiatives.
- Strong experience operating within complex global or regional environments involving multiple business groups, markets, countries, and stakeholders.
- Demonstrated ability to translate enterprise strategy into executable operational plans and measurable business outcomes.
- Strong executive presence with demonstrated ability to influence, challenge, and collaborate effectively with senior leaders and cross-functional stakeholders.
- Strong analytical and business acumen with the ability to interpret complex operational information, identify trends and root causes, and make sound data-driven decisions.
- Demonstrated ability to operate effectively in ambiguity, manage competing priorities, and lead organizations through significant change.
- Excellent communication, stakeholder management, problem-solving, and decision-making capabilities.
- Ability to work effectively across cultures, geographies, organizational boundaries, and time zones.
Additional Qualifications That Could Help You Succeed Even Further
- Master's degree in Business Administration, Operations Management, Supply Chain, or a related discipline.
- Experience leading Customer Operations or Shared Services across Americas, APAC, EMEA, or another similarly complex multi-country environment.
- Experience in a multinational manufacturing, industrial, healthcare, technology, shared-services, or similarly complex global organization.
- Experience with global business services, shared-service centers, centers of excellence, or regional service-delivery models.
- Demonstrated experience with digital transformation, automation, AI-enabled operations, analytics, and customer self-service capabilities.
- Experience driving Lean, Six Sigma, Agile, or other operational-excellence methodologies.
- Professional certifications such as Lean Six Sigma, PMP, or equivalent.
- Experience working with enterprise platforms such as SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, or comparable ERP/CRM technologies.
- Experience managing significant organizational transformation, process migration, operating-model redesign, or service centralization.
- Additional language capabilities and demonstrated experience working across diverse cultural environments are advantageous.
Leadership Profile
- Enterprise Thinking - Makes decisions based on broader business and customer outcomes rather than functional priorities alone.
- Customer Leadership - Keeps the customer at the center of operational strategy and decision-making.
- Execution Excellence - Converts strategy into measurable results and creates strong accountability for delivery.
- Transformation Leadership - Challenges existing ways of working and successfully leads organizations through complex change.
- People Leadership - Builds high-performing leadership teams, develops talent, and creates sustainable organizational capability.
- Commercial & Financial Acumen - Understands the relationship between customer experience, operational performance, productivity, cost, and business value.
- Data-Driven Decision Making - Uses analytics and insights to identify issues, challenge assumptions, and make informed decisions.
- Executive Influence - Communicates with credibility and effectively influences senior stakeholders across functions and geographies.
- Cultural Agility - Leads effectively across diverse markets, cultures, business environments, and ways of working.
- Strategic Agility - Anticipates future needs, navigates ambiguity, and adjusts direction as business and customer requirements evolve.
Regional Scope
This position will be responsible for one of the following regional portfolios: Americas | Asia Pacific (APAC) | Europe, Middle East & Africa (EMEA).
While each Director will have primary accountability for their assigned region, all three leaders will operate as part of a broader global Customer Operations leadership team and will be expected to collaborate across regions, share best practices, drive global consistency, and collectively advance enterprise Customer Operations strategy.
The leadership and quality bar will remain consistent across all three positions, while the complexity, market dynamics, customer requirements, and operating environment of each region will inform the experience and regional expertise considered during selection.
This role follows an on-site working model, requiring the employee to work at least four days a week in the office.
Travel: May include up to 20% domestic/international
Relocation Assistance: Not authorized
Must be legally authorized to work in country of employment without sponsorship for employment visa status (e.g., H1B status).
Supporting Your Well-being
3M offers many programs to help you live your best life – both physically and financially. To ensure competitive pay and benefits, 3M regularly benchmarks with other companies that are comparable in size and scope.
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Please note: your application may not be considered if you do not provide your education and work history, either by: 1) uploading a resume, or 2) entering the information into the application fields directly.
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