Director of Strategic Planning
🔍 United States, Nebraska, Omaha
At HDR, our employee-owners are fully engaged in creating a welcoming environment where each of us is valued and respected, a place where everyone is empowered to bring their authentic selves and novel ideas to work every day. As we work to weave diversity, equity, and inclusion into our work and foster a sense of belonging throughout the company and within our communities, we constantly ask ourselves: What is our impact on the world?
Every role throughout our organization makes a difference in our ability to change the world for the better. Read further to learn how you could help make great things possible not only in your community, but around the world.
As our Director of Strategic Planning, you will be part of an organization that is 100-percent employee owned, that supports and creates opportunities for you to advance, succeed, and fulfill your career aspirations.
About You: We are looking for someone who can work closely alongside executive-level leadership, enjoys working collaboratively across disciplines, can establish excellent working rapport within diverse teams, is able to excel under pressure, and can manage a varied workload across our broad business while staying focused on big-picture strategy priorities. You will direct and focus multiple teams and build strong relationships within critical cross-functional aspects of the business in order to accomplish a common goal, challenging yourself and HDR to know what we want to become so we make the present count.
Position Overview: As the Director of Strategic Planning, reporting to the Chief Strategy Officer you will operate under the theme of preparing a company for the future: protecting the resources needed to keep the company relevant, finding a unique position, and aligning and executing activities profitably around that position. The Strategic Planning Director will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of our organization. This position is responsible for overseeing enterprise-wide strategic planning, incorporating Risk-based strategic planning into our strategy process, and integrating our corporate sustainability program into our long-range strategy planning. The ideal candidate will possess a strong background in strategic planning, enterprise level facilitation, strategic plan development, and strategy implementation. Knowledge of enterprise risk management and corporate sustainability with an eye towards integrating these activities into long-range planning is preferred. The Strategic Planning Director will be working closely with the Executive Leadership Team and other key leadership to direct, drive, and maximize market research, discovery, and analysis, competitive intelligence, visioning, strategy development and implementation.
Key Responsibilities:
Responsible for strategy implementation by driving, leading, and coordinating the implementation of growth plans; scoping, budgeting, and scheduling initiatives; leading teams; championing initiatives through substantial completion; operationalizing change brought forth from initiative implementation; leading change management effort; tracking and communicating progress. Additionally,
- Strategic Planning:
- Collaborate with executive and senior leadership to align strategic initiatives with organizational goals.
- Monitor industry trends and competitive landscape to identify opportunities and threats.
- Facilitate strategic planning sessions and workshops at national and local levels.
- Implement long-range strategic planning key actions.
- Lead a dynamic planning process with a rolling strategy that is constantly monitoring market activities and helping to adjust key priorities.
- Following brand building activity and services growth
- Enterprise Risk Management Activities and Leadership Integration: Work to understand, assess, and prioritize enterprise risks in alignment with strategic planning activities. Align risk mitigation strategies with strategic planning efforts.
- Enterprise Strategy Focus
- Competitive intelligence: Assessing competitors and anticipating next moves, Identifying points of differentiation. Inventorying competitor revenue streams (e.g., service, product) and market diversification. Knowing competitor strategic partnerships. Seeing patterns in mergers and acquisitions. Following earnings reports, stock prices, and forecasts for public peers. Tracking market share gains and losses.
- Market research, discovery, and analysis: Working with existing HDR resources and developing and implementing new approaches to understanding and monitoring trends and drivers and evaluating how they might affect our industry, company, and clients. Knowing where our existing and future markets are in their cycles. Using internal and external data sets to build an analytics program.
- Strategy development: Developing multi-year strategic, tactical, and operational growth plans for company, business unit, sector, subsector, geographic, and service line expansion. Cascading enterprise plans through business and creating alignment across business units. Working with impacted groups (in acquisition company and within HDR) during acquisition implementation to optimize the strategic value of our purchase; and developing strategic plan for growth and change.
- Visioning: Routinely looking ahead 10, 20, 30 years. Evaluating our relevancy and performance in imagined, but plausible future scenarios. Setting a moon-shot goal. Identifying market triggers that signal a change in direction. Developing horizons blueprints that map current, emerging, and future profit generation. Potential for scenario planning, R&D, and innovation incubation.
- Corporate Sustainability:
- Ensure the corporate sustainability program activities are integrated into the long-range planning activities.
- Promote sustainable practices across all business operations through strategic planning activities.
Preferred Qualifications:
- 20+ years’ experience in leadership and management of strategic planning activities
- Strong understanding of HDR’s business operations and employee-ownership model.
- Experienced in supporting organizational change.
- Demonstrated experience working cooperatively across Market Sector Directors, Business Class Directors, Regional Business Group Directors, Area Business Group Managers, Area Business Group Business Development Managers, Managing Principles, and Area Managers.
- Experience in decision analysis. Modeling financial futures based on strategic decisions. Using economic and financial decision tools to understand the cost of entry into new services, sectors, and geographies. Financial modeling and data analytics for divestiture decisions.
Required Qualifications
- 15+ years’ experience in leadership and management of strategic planning activities
- Experienced in development and management of strategic planning activities.
- Bachelor's degree in communications/ marketing/ change management/ engineering/ architecture/ business/ or similar
- Broad (global) A-E industry experience especially related to industry trends, strategic planning activities, and strategy implementation.
- Understanding of Enterprise Risk and Sustainability Programs at a Corporate Level.
- Consensus building, collaborative leadership-style. Entrepreneurial mindset.
- Dynamic communication skills to present new ideas, challenge norms, build trust, and collaborate across the global enterprise.
- This is an in-office position. Preference given to candidates whose location aligns with an established larger HDR office.
- 40% travel
What We Believe
HDR is our company. Together, we build on each other's life experiences and perspectives to make great things possible every day. This shapes our collaborative culture, encourages organizational trust and connects us closer to the clients and communities we serve.
Our Commitment
As employee owners, we all have a role in creating an inclusive environment where each of us is welcomed, valued, respected and empowered to bring our authentic selves to work every day.
Our eight Employee Network Groups (Asian Pacific, Black, Hispanic/Latino(a), LGBTQ+, People with Disabilities, Veterans, Women, Young Professionals) help create a sense of belonging and foster a supportive environment where everyone is empowered to engage and contribute. Each group has an executive sponsor and is open to all employees.
