Head - Coaching & Transformation

Guardian Life

Job Description:

The Head - Coaching & Transformation for India is responsible for scaling and sustaining enterprise-wide adoption of BTOM-aligned ways of working by leading a large team of coaches and ensuring consistent, high-quality coaching practices across all value streams.

This role acts as the operational steward of the Coaching & Transformation CoE in India, ensuring that:

Coaching practices are standardized, scalable, and effective
Value streams operate with clarity, discipline, and continuous improvement mindset
Teams are enabled to deliver predictable, high-quality outcomes through strong ways of working
This leader ensures that teams operate effectively, so those outcomes become possible

Key Responsibilities

CoE Stewardship & Governance (India)

Act as the primary steward of Coaching & Transformation CoE standards across India.

Ensure all Team Coaches:

Consistently apply approved frameworks, playbooks, and engagement models
Operate within defined quality and outcome expectations

Establish governance mechanisms to track:

Coaching effectiveness
Adoption of ways-of-working standards
Consistency across value streams

Coaching Practice Quality, Compliance & Consistency

Monitor and reinforce adherence to:

Coaching playbooks
Value stream engagement models
Transformation metrics

Identify inconsistency patterns across coaches, teams, or value streams and:

Drive targeted interventions
Standardize best practices

Ensure coaching quality does not vary by individual coach—build a “CoE-certified” standard

Leadership & Capability Development of Coaches

Lead, mentor, and manage 25+ Team Coaches including various Manager - Team Coaches across multiple business lines.

Provide day-to-day leadership, feedback, and coaching to coaches to:

Improve coaching effectiveness
Build depth in facilitation, system thinking, and value stream optimization

Establish structured development programs:

Coaching maturity journey
Coaching playbooks, learning paths and Capability models / trainings
This role builds coaching capability as a competitive advantage, not just a support function.
Value Stream Alignment
Partner with Senior Value Stream Coaches to ensure:

Coaching aligns with value stream goals and context
Teams operate cohesively across the value stream

Ensure alignment between:

BTOM operating model
Team-level ways of working

Resolve friction between team coaches, teams within a Value stream
Two-Way Leadership Interface (India Global CoE)
Act as a strategic conduit between:

Global Coaching & Transformation CoE Lead
India-based coaches and value streams

Surface:

Risks, adoption challenges, and systemic issues from India
Insights, innovations, and improvement opportunities

Translate global CoE direction into practical, executable guidance for India teams
Coach Onboarding & Continuous Enablement
Design and institutionalize:

Structured onboarding model for new coaches
Shadowing, certification, and ramp-up mechanisms

Continuously upskill coaches on:

BTOM principles
Lean/agile practices
Value stream thinking
Facilitation and stakeholder management
Contribute to scaling the CoE by:

Refining playbooks, templates, and engagement approaches
Codifying India-specific learnings into reusable artifacts
Sharing best practices across value streams

Ensure CoE evolves based on real execution insights, not theory
Outcome & OKR rigor: Define and govern OKR/metrics discipline for coaching outcomes (lead/lag), ensuring numerical targets and value realization are explicit. Drive the team with routine outcome reviews and proactive feedback
Engineering productivity & excellence: Drive coaching-led improvements in developer productivity, modern engineering practices, and workflow efficiency aligned to BTOM priorities
Visibility, recognition, and career pathways: Build mechanisms to make coaching impact visible and recognized; strengthen structured career growth conversations and development pathways.
Advocacy & influence: Represent coaching realities in global decisions and ensure feedback loops translate into systemic action
Transformation Insights
Provide leadership visibility into:

Ways-of-working adoption maturity
Coaching effectiveness trends
Organizational friction points impacting team effectiveness

Partner with Delivery Excellence to ensure:

Insights are translated into system-level improvements

Assessments

Team assessments to understand the gaps and opportunities
Team coach assessments to help the coaches progress and career pathing

Required Skills & Experience

Must Have

15+ years of experience in Agile transformation, coaching, and enterprise transformation roles
Proven experience managing large coaching organizations (20+ coaches) across multiple domains
Deep expertise in:

Agile/Lean methodologies (Scaled environments preferred)
Value stream thinking and flow-based delivery models
Organizational change and transformation at scale

Strong ability to work with global stakeholders and influence without authority across senior stakeholders and teams
Experience working in complex, global enterprise environments with distributed teams

Nice to Have

Experience in insurance, financial services, or regulated industries
Exposure to BTOM or similar product/value stream operating models
SAFe/Agile certifications, but mindset matters more than certification

Leadership & Behavioral Competencies

Enterprise mindset: Thinks in systems, not teams
Consistency enforcer: Drives standardization without rigidity
Capability builder: Develops people, not just processes
Thought process: Ability to bring new ideas on to the table and execute them
Pragmatic transformer: Balances frameworks with real-world constraints
Executive communicator: Comfortable communicating, presenting and influencing CXO-level stakeholders
High standards & detail orientation: Never satisfied with status quo; drives continuous improvement

Location:

This position can be based in any of the following locations:

Chennai

Current Guardian Colleagues: Please apply through the internal Jobs Hub in Workday