Director, Capabilities Pillar Lead

Colleague Capabilities Lead will be accountable for defining and executing the Capabilities Pillar within Barclays’ Corporate Bank-wide transformation. This senior leadership role will focus on enabling the organisation with the skills, capabilities, and technology tools required to accelerate the pace and quality of change delivery. As part of the Transformation Leadership Team, the Director will partner closely with the Heads of Ways of Working and Transformation Office to ensure that colleagues across the bank are equipped to deliver consistently, adopt modern practices, and leverage innovative tools at scale.

Key Responsibilities

• Enterprise Capability Strategy
  • Define and lead the Capabilities Pillar strategy aligned with Barclays’ transformation agenda.
  • Partner with senior executives to embed capability building as a core enabler of pace, quality, and client outcomes.
  • Drive alignment between skills development, tooling adoption, and business transformation priorities.
• Skills Transformation
  • Establish a front to back comprehensive skills transformation framework (to include gap analysis and learning pathways), identifying critical capabilities for the future of banking for both job families and specific role-based expertise requirements.
  • Oversee the design and rollout of enterprise-wide training and certification programmes, including Product Owner, Agile, and Leadership enablement.
  • Partner with HR, Learning & Development, and business leaders to track skill progression and ensure investment delivers measurable outcomes.
• Technology & Tools Enablement
  • Lead the adoption of modern technology platforms and tools (e.g., Jira/Confluence, DevOps toolchains, collaboration platforms) to support agile ways of working.
  • Ensure tools are configured, scaled, and embedded consistently across the organisation.
  • Partner with CIO and platform leads to align tool strategy with enterprise architecture and engineering standards.
• Change Leadership & Adoption
  • Act as a senior change leader, engaging executives and leaders to role-model behaviours that accelerate adoption.
  • Establish “train-the-trainer” and change champion networks to embed skills and tools sustainably.
  • Support cultural change by reinforcing Barclays’ values and driving accountability for new ways of working.
• Measurement & Outcomes
  • Define and track capability KPIs (e.g., % certified, backlog readiness, tool adoption rates, quality of execution).
  • Report progress and impact to the Transformation Leadership Team, ExCo, and Board as required.
  • Link capability investments to tangible improvements in pace, quality, and client delivery.

Essential Skills

• Setting up and governing Agile collaboration tools such as Jira, Confluence, Miro, and Slack/Teams to enable backlog, sprint, and PI planning 
• Establishing engineering foundations, including source control (Git), CI/CD pipelines, code quality, and security scanning 
• Implementing testing frameworks (unit, integration, regression, performance) and ensuring test data and environments are production-ready 
• Aligning product and platform backlogs with MVP scope, value streams, dependencies, and outcome-driven metrics 
• Proven leadership experience in enterprise-scale transformation in a global, complex organisation.
• Deep expertise in skills transformation, talent development, and learning enablement.
• Strong knowledge of agile delivery models, DevOps tooling, and collaboration platforms.
• Ability to design and execute strategy that connects training, tools, and measurable delivery outcomes.
• Exceptional stakeholder engagement and influencing skills, with experience working at MD/ExCo level.

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 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

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.