Director of Highways and Transport

About the role

The Director of Highways and Transport is a critical role at Lancashire County Council, designed to develop, implement, and promote effective policy, strategies, and interventions for the efficient and cost-effective delivery of a range of critical infrastructure, operations, and service provision, including managing and developing the council's highways asset network.

The Director will develop strategic policies, lead, and embed change and deliver value for money for the communities of Lancashire.

This position requires a visionary leader who can guide the highways and transport function towards achieving exceptional results while embodying the council's core values of being Supportive, Innovative, Respectful, and Collaborative. The successful candidate will demonstrate a commitment to the 'Leading Lancashire' leadership framework, ensuring excellence in highways and transport management.

The position reports to the Executive Director of Growth, Environment, Transport and Health and is a member of the Directorate Leadership Team. The role requires a high level of operational and/or technical knowledge and experience gained through broad and deep experience and academic study. The job holder will select, develop, and assess the applicability of methodology and practice using both their theoretical and conceptual understanding and their substantial experience and expertise within their service area.

What we are looking for

Ambition and passion

You will be ambitious for the diverse communities that we serve and how we can maximise all the opportunities available to us to make a tangible difference to people’s lives. You will be passionate about change, development, and the efficient utilisation of our resources, plus the creation of others, and about challenge, whether that’s policy, process or practice, anywhere that improvements can be made and have a significant impact. You will be leading your areas, inspiring your teams and developing innovative, and affordable, models of delivery.

Values-driven

Supportive, innovative, respectful and collaborative – our values are embedded into the way we interact with our peers, partners, and communities we serve. Just as importantly, they’re key to our behaviours and essential to this role. We want people who live and breathe the values, really understand and make them live in their daily lives both personally and professionally, people who appreciate the transformational difference they can bring to how we operate.

Inspirational leadership

You will have both a professional and politically sensitive leadership approach with the ability to communicate confidently with all levels in the organisation whether that’s building strong, impactful relationships with councillors and colleagues or influencing wider partners. You will support a talented and dedicated team, inspiring them and other colleagues to model your behaviours and standards and will champion their ongoing development. A key driver for success in this role will be your passion for people, both those you work with and the individuals we support.

Collaboration and communication

You will be a team player, passionate about working collaboratively across the whole organisation to deliver our objectives and adept at understanding the relationship between strategic engagement, goals and objectives, realising that we can’t deliver our ambitions for Lancashire in isolation. We expect you to bring excellent communication and influencing skills, that secure a level of confidence that specialist, tacit knowledge provides and the ability to share information across all levels, tailoring your communication as required.