People Director - Level Shoes

Role Overview

People Director for Level Shoes at Chalhoub Group. This is a global role responsible for People and Culture strategy across the organization.

Company Overview

Chalhoub Group is a luxury retail leader in the Middle East with over seven decades of heritage. The Group operates a portfolio of over 10 owned brands and distributes over 400 international names across luxury fashion, beauty, jewellery, watches, eyewear, and art de vivre. It delivers seamless omnichannel experiences across more than 950 stores, online platforms, and mobile apps. The Group employs over 16,000 talented professionals across eight countries in the Middle East with presence in LATAM. Chalhoub Group holds Great Place to Work® certification in several markets and is committed to sustainability as a member of the United Nations Global Compact, a signatory of the Women's Empowerment Principles, and pledged to reach Net Zero by 2040. The Group fosters a people-at-heart culture rooted in diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Role Purpose

Own the People and Culture strategy for Level Shoes on a global scale, ensuring the organization has the leadership, capability, structure, and culture required to deliver growth and diversification ambitions. Drive the talent, performance, and change agenda to achieve this. Act as the CEO's and Level leadership's closest partner and most honest challenger on every decision involving people.

Key Responsibilities

People Strategy and Business Partnering

• Translate Level's commercial strategy into a people strategy with clear priorities, milestones, and measures, and own its delivery.
• Act as trusted advisor and challenger to the CEO and the leadership team on all people, organization, and culture matters.
• Contribute to commercial decisions and their people consequences.

Talent, Succession and Workforce Planning

• Build the workforce plan for the business including roles, capabilities, and numbers required over short and long term, aligned to business ambitions and expansion plans.
• Own talent identification, assessment, development, and succession for all leadership and critical roles.
• Drive hiring of senior and business-critical roles in partnership with Group Talent Acquisition and executive search when needed; hold quality-of-hire to world-class standard.
• Design and sponsor the development of talent; build visible career paths and make internal mobility real rather than aspirational.
• Own the people cost line and strategic budgeting for the business in partnership with Finance and Commercial heads.

Performance Management and Reward Partnering

• Own the performance management agenda for the division: goal setting aligned to commercial targets, honest performance dialogue, calibration, and consequence for both strong and underperforming performers.
• Ensure Level Shoes maintains reputation as a high-performing team and talent incubator.
• Partner with Group Rewards on the reward and incentive architecture for the division.
• Ensure pay, grading, and benefits remain externally competitive and internally coherent.
• Ensure store and head office incentives drive the right behaviors and support omnichannel rather than channel conflict.

Organization Design and Effectiveness

• Lead organization design and effectiveness across the division globally including structures, spans, layers, role clarity, and ways of working.
• Size the organization for where the business is heading.
• Continuously and proactively evaluate evolving capability and structural requirements in line with business strategy.
• Build and optimize global versus HQ ways of working, structures, and accountabilities, especially between the US and HQ in UAE.

Change Management and Transformation

• Lead the people side of major changes such as market expansion, private label growth, omnichannel and digital transformation, new systems implementations, and restructuring.
• Build change capability of the leadership team.
• Ensure change is communicated, sequenced, and landed rather than announced.
• Anticipate and manage organizational risk in periods of rapid growth including capability gaps, span overload, key-person dependency, and employee burnout.

Culture and Engagement

• Continue to uphold and implement the culture of Level including authenticity, agility, growth mindset, entrepreneurial spirit, continuous innovation, and genuine accountability across all markets and functions as a key competitive advantage.
• Own people engagement measurement and the action that follows it.
• Hold leaders accountable for the engagement of their teams.
• Design both total and functional engagement strategies.
• Shape the employee experience across the lifecycle including onboarding, recognition, career progression, and retention.

Employee Relations, Data and Workforce Planning

• Ensure compliance with employment laws and regulatory requirements across markets.
• Partner with the HR Operations team on employee relations matters and investigations with fairness and control.
• Utilize data to maximize the diversity and inclusion agenda of Level Shoes across all factors.
• Drive both the Nationalization and POD inclusivity strategy and successful integration.
• Establish the people data and reporting framework for the division including headcount, cost, turnover, organizational health metrics, and productivity.
• Use data to make decisions and drive actions.
• Drive equity and fairness in all decisions from exits to hiring, promotions, recognition, and talent assessment.

Qualifications & Experience

• 12–15 years in HR with substantial time as a senior business partner to executive leadership.
• Experience in retail, fashion, and luxury with solid understanding of a multi-brand environment.
• In-depth understanding of all ecommerce functions.
• Experience in omnichannel and digital transformation.
• Proven track record in organization design, workforce planning, and leading change through periods of rapid growth.
• Hands-on experience building talent, succession, and leadership development agendas.
• Experience managing and dealing with multi-cultural teams.
• International or global expansion experience, with exposure to the US preferable.
• Stays ahead of global and regional competitor and industry trends across retail, ecommerce, tech, private label, creative and marketing, and logistics to continuously provide strategic people advice that provides competitive advantage opportunities.

Skills & Competencies

• Strong commercial acumen; ability to read a P&L and frame people decisions in business terms.
• Ability to advise and challenge the leadership team when needed.
• Strategic ability and innovative mindset crucial; ability to connect overarching people strategy to short and medium-term business strategy and vision.
• Strong on data; able to build and use people analytics to make decisions.
• Skilled coach to senior leaders with the judgment to know when to support and when to challenge.
• Highly independent and willing to take an unpopular position with a strong commercial leadership team.
• High personal credibility and discretion; trusted with sensitive matters at the top of the business.

Additional Information

Education

• Degree in HR, Business, or a related field.
• Master's degree, CIPD, or equivalent professional qualification are a plus.