Strategic Engagement Manager

The role suits someone capable of working closely with diverse stakeholder groups (including with partners and other lawyers) in a fast-paced professional services environment, who can combine structured programme delivery with a practical, sleeves-rolled-up approach: engaging stakeholders, converting feedback into actions, tracking adoption and issues, and supporting engagement, training and continuous improvement across the business., Change adoption and embedding

• Support delivery of the adoption plan for new finance processes and related ways of working across the matter lifecycle.
• Work with business and finance stakeholders to identify adoption risks, pain points and resistance; help design and implement mitigations.
• Gather feedback from users (fee earners, practice support, finance teams and other business services) and translate it into clear actions, priorities and improvements.
• Help define and track adoption measures (e.g. usage, compliance, process adherence, user confidence), escalating issues and recommending interventions.
Stakeholder engagement
• Build credible working relationships with senior stakeholders and day-to-day users across the firm.
• Facilitate workshops, focus groups and check-ins to surface issues, align expectations, and drive decisions on improvements.
• Act as a "bridge" between programme leadership, finance, IT and operational teams to ensure changes are understood and workable in practice.
• Identify and anticipate points of friction between stakeholder groups, proactively engaging with stakeholders to surface concerns, resolve issues and maintain alignment in support of successful delivery and adoption.
Communications and enablement
• Draft and coordinate change communications (updates, FAQs, guidance notes, intranet content) to support awareness and adoption.
• Support training planning and delivery (including briefings, drop-ins, "how to" materials) and help maintain supporting documentation.
• Produce clear, consistent communications and materials, adapting content, format and channels to different stakeholder groups to support effective engagement and participation.
• Work closely with firmwide internal communications team to ensure communications are carefully coordinated
Programme management support
• Responsible for a comprehensive and pragmatic adoption plan.
• Support governance: prepare agendas, minutes, actions and status reporting for relevant working groups and programme board.
• Track dependencies and coordinate across workstreams to keep embedding activities moving at pace.
• Help find solutions to challenges stakeholders may be facing in the adoption or application in new ways of working, or understanding what is expected of their roles
• Practical delivery
• Spot opportunities to improve adoption of new processes and introduce templates and guidance as users begin operating in the new model.
• Issue tracking and triage: triage issues (pragmatically), coordinate resolution, and identify root causes.
• Work flexibly across tasks to meet programme needs, including ad hoc analysis, and drafting of communications, aide memoires and briefing notes.
Key relationships
• Head of Strategic Engagement (to whom this role reports)
• Chief Financial Officer
• Programme leadership (Project Elevate), Finance leadership and operational finance teams
• Practice groups, Partners, and fee earners, matter management stakeholders, secretarial/practice support
• IT / systems teams and the Project Management Office (PMO)
• Communications team
• Other Business Services teams impacted by end-to-end process changes
What success looks like
• Stakeholders are informed, engaged and supported; adoption issues are surfaced early and addressed quickly.
• Embedding activities are delivered reliably (plans, comms, training support, reporting), with clear visibility of progress and risks.
• New finance-related ways of working are becoming "business as usual", with reduced friction and clearer guidance for users.
• Programme leadership has confident oversight of adoption metrics, user feedback themes, and priority improvements.
  
  Demonstrable experience supporting change/transformation initiatives, ideally in a professional services environment (law firm experience strongly preferred).
• Strong programme/project management capability: planning, tracking actions, preparing governance materials, and driving follow-through.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to translate complex process change into clear, practical messages for different audiences.
• Have the confidence and credibility to engage with senior stakeholders (to include delivery of training), while also being effective with front-line users and operational teams. Courage to address issues, engage with stakeholders directly to both listen and manage feedback, and have the judgement to recognise what issues need to be triaged / escalated.
• Highly organised, detail-oriented and dependable, with the ability to manage multiple priorities and deadlines in a fast-moving environment.
• Agile, adaptable and solutions-focused: comfortable with ambiguity, able to "roll sleeves up" and do what's needed to keep delivery moving.
• Pro-active self-starter who is able to 'hit the ground running' with the ability to handle pace.
• Strong facilitation skills (workshops, feedback sessions, briefings) and an ability to handle challenge constructively.
• Good analytical skills: able to synthesise feedback/data into themes, risks and actionable recommendations.
Desirable
• Familiarity with law firm operating models, stakeholder groups, and practical realities of fee earning and practice support workflows.
• Experience supporting training development and delivery, including aide memoires/FAQs and stakeholder readiness activities., Collaborative team player with high personal accountability and a calm, professional manner.
• Discreet and trustworthy, with strong awareness of confidentiality expectations in a law firm environment.
• Proactive, curious and improvement-minded: asks the right questions and follows issues through to resolution.