Customer Director

Pivotal leadership role, where you'll inspire, coach, and support an experienced and high performing team to grow New Zealand exporters.

• Excellent leadership opportunity in a purpose, progressive and innovative organisation. 
• We offer hybrid working that enables work life balance and 5 weeks annual leave. 
• We are focused on holistic wellbeing to support you to be your best self. 

Who we are - Ko Te Taurapa Tūhono tēnei

New Zealand Trade and Enterprise (NZTE) is the country's international business development agency. We help businesses grow internationally for the benefit of New Zealand. We provide our export companies with support and services that help with strategy, performance improvement, go-to-market plans and building global networks for business development.   

With an exciting new mandate to double exports by value in the next ten years, the Export Customers teams have a unique opportunity to supercharge our delivery for greater impact to customers.  We have an amazing opportunity to lead a team executing on this ambitious strategy!

What you'll be doing - Te whakamahere

In this pivotal leadership role, you’ll inspire, coach, and support a team of experienced, ambitious and high performing team members to grow New Zealand exporters across a variety of sectors.  You’ll be a true champion of best practice, innovation and customer experience; utilising our operating model to engage and empower your team with purpose and clarity.

Collaborative and results focused, you’ll work with your team to strategically manage their multi-sector portfolios and set ambitious goals, ensuring plans deliver on the strategies and priorities of both the exporters and NZTE.  You’ll possess a strong commercial understanding and be able to work directly with customers (New Zealand export businesses) to drive meaningful outcomes. 

You will utilise your experience and understanding of exporting and innovation in the commercial world, along with relevant sector knowledge and connections to help our customers identify how to navigate challenges and seize opportunities. The work you do will directly contribute to the success of our customers, and you will have scope to work at pace and take an adventurous, innovative approach, leading your team to deliver outstanding results!

What you'll need to be successful - Ō Pūkenga 

Leadership is key and you will be able to demonstrate how you lead with authenticity, inspiring and motivating others, confidently channeling this to your team and bringing out the best in them. Highly engaged with well-developed leadership and coaching skills, influencing and developing people will be your happy place.  You possess strong critical thinking skills and a keen focus on development to further build on this high functioning team’s performance and passion.  You lean into challenges and difficult conversations to ensure your team is achieving success and continuing to grow.

You’ll be passionate about growing New Zealand companies and possess substantial knowledge of the challenges and opportunities of company growth stages, as well as international business export models.  You will be ambitious, great at influencing and be skilled at working within and across commercial eco-systems both in New Zealand and internationally.  You will have grown your exporting knowledge ideally across multiple sectors and be able to provide expert guidance to your team and a variety of export businesses, collaborating with them to identify how to position themselves in market and achieve their growth goals.

Why you'll love working here - Nau mai ki Te Taurapa Tūhono

You’ll love this role because your passion for our purpose and your ambition for New Zealand and our export customers will be highly valued.  Skilled at nurturing and growing a high performing team, you will operate to influence NZTE strategy, culture and priorities through your strong understanding of kiwi export businesses and market sectors, as well as the empathy and ambition you carry for their journey.  

NZTE is a truly global organisation, giving you a wonderful experience of working with different cultures with over a hundred countries as part of our everyday. We know that life is not all about work and flexible working at NZTE is standard practice. We will give you the right technology to allow you to work anywhere and balance your time. On top of this, we also offer 5 weeks annual leave so you can have that extra time in the year to enjoy what you love doing!

What's next - Te ara ki tua

We are looking for an agile leader, with a commercial mind set and track record in delivering great results.  If that’s you, then we want to hear from you!

Please apply online attaching a resume and cover letter by 11:59pm Tuesday 30 April NZST. 

For more detail, please review the position description Customer_Director_-_PD.

We believe New Zealand is good for the World.  New Zealand Trade and Enterprise (NZTE) is an equal opportunity employer.  At NZTE it is all about our people and we seek diversity of though; we welcome and encourage you to apply regardless of ethnicity, gender, religion, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, neurodiversity or disability.  If we need to make specific accommodations in any part of the interview process, please note this in your application or discuss with the recruiter.