Leadership Development Executive
Salary: Competitive Plus Benefits
Location: London Store Support Centre and Home, London, EC1M 6HA
Contract type: Permanent
Business area: Group HR
Closing date: 29 December 2025
Requisition ID: 400038890
We’d all like amazing work to do, and real work-life balance. That’s waiting for you at Sainsbury’s. We’re the first to say we do HR differently here. For a start, we work as business partners and specialists. That’s whether we’re making sure that nearly 180,000 colleagues are paid on time, or that our strategy is helping us attract the right people, put them in the right place, and unlock their talent. This is a fast-moving business and our policies and rewards keep up too. That’s why we’re as flexible as we can be about where and when you work. We’re also flexible about your future. There’s always room to move up or across, if that’s what you want. We really value different perspectives so there’s no one opinion, no single path, and yours is important. What’s certain is that you’ll be joining one of the happiest, most engaged teams in the business.
In a nutshell
This role ensures the smooth running of our Leadership Development proposition and products. Provides SME support to the team to enable design, development and deployment of a wide range of executive leadership development interventions across Sainsbury’s.
What I am accountable for
- Support the Head of Exec Development and Exec Leadership Specialists in working with range of stakeholders across the organisation to understand requirements aligned to strategic priorities and validate content of proposed offers and products.
- Support the broader Leadership Development and Talent & Performance teams in setting up and managing our talent pools so that we have full visibility of development plans across DD/SM and pivotal roles.
- Research and carry out benchmarking activities of external market leadership development propositions contributing insight to support impactful design and development decisions.
- Co-ordinate coaching activities in support of Head of Exec Leadership Development; including managing a tracker that details who is receiving coaching, who our Master Coaches are coaching, as well as the total expenditure.
- Be the point of contact and main co-ordinator for any external ESG talent offers e.g. NED, Governors for Schools, including managing a tracker that details who is receiving the offers etc.
- Be the point of contact and main co-ordinator for DEI initiatives as they relate to our leadership and talent offers e.g. WiHTL/DIR.
- Provide support for bespoke Exec HiPO Talent interventions / programmes.
- Act as a first point of contact for all Exec Leadership Development queries. Work with relevant team members across TC&D to respond promptly providing the appropriate advice to the end user.
- Responsible for supporting the Head of Exec Leadership Development and Head of Talent and Performance with any people data and reporting requirements.
- Administer evaluation methods across programmes providing periodic updates to stakeholders on evaluation metrics and attendance.
- Administer of learning assessment and third-party tools in support of programmes delivery.
- Work flexibly across a portfolio of projects, managing multiple timelines and switching priorities as needed to respond to evolving business needs.
- Administration, logistics and general facilitator support for any Exec Leadership programmes as required.
- Manage Our Sainsbury’s content pages across Talent, Performance and Development teams.
What I need to know
Essential
- Ownership: Drive and ownership to deliver against plan resolving issues and making sound decisions.
- Agility: Ability to work well under pressure; managing within tight deadlines, ambiguity and changing priorities. Can think long-term and act proactively to deliver long-term, sustainable outcomes.
- Project/Programme Management: Handles a project or portfolio of projects as they progress through the typical stages of the project lifecycle including initiation, planning, execution and closure.
- Communication: Excellent verbal and written communication skills with the ability to confidently present.
- Stakeholder Management: Ability to work and influence a range of stakeholders across the organisation to ensure seamless execution of products and programs.
- Relationship Building: Connects with others and forming positive relationships across the People function and with other key internal / external stakeholders.
- Continuous Improvement: Continuously strives to improve products, services, or processes. Role-model continuous professional development and demonstrate ability to learn from and share feedback.
- Risk Management: Identifies, evaluates and manages risks by developing and implementing strategies, frameworks, policies, procedures and practices.
- Commercial acumen: can clearly articulate the current business performance and leverage the people levers to enhance performance or productivity
- Strong analytical skills to assimilate data and new information quickly and effectively, can collect and interpret data to uncover patterns and trends.
- Confident, experienced user of Microsoft Office
Desirable
- Project management qualification (Prince2, Agile etc)
- Background in leadership development, talent management or programme management
What I need to show
All people colleagues should be consistently driving all four Leadership Performance Expectations, all the time. The Leadership Performance Expectations are:
Obsessed with the customer
You must:
- Use data and insight to understand customer needs and solve customer problems
- Use our Purpose to support decision making everyday
- Role model living our customer commitments and guide teams to do the same
Obsessed with performance
You must:
- Know and be accountable for your part to play, delivering it brilliantly
- Align team goals and ruthlessly prioritise resources to deliver our Customer Commitments
- Assign clear accountabilities, hold people accountable (in your team and out) and act on performance both good and bad
Lead beyond boundaries
You must:
- Actively share and seek to understand the big picture, both internal and external
- Story tell our Next Level Sainsbury’s strategy to drive end-to-end thinking
- Build productive partnership inside and outside our organisation
Lead fearless teams
You must:
- Create the environment for diverse perspective and challenge, where we are always looking to raise the bar
- Grow everyone around you (up, down and across) through adult-to-adult feedback and coaching
- Know yourself (strengths, weaknesses and impact on others) and continuously develop
We are committed to being a truly inclusive retailer so you’ll be welcomed whoever you are and wherever you work. Around here, there’s always the chance to try something new — whether that’s as part of an evolving team or somewhere else across the business - and we take development seriously and promise to support you. We also recognise and celebrate colleagues when they go the extra mile and, where possible, offer flexible working. When you join our team, we’ll also offer you an amazing range of benefits. Here are some of them: Starting off with colleague discount, you'll be able to save 10% on your shopping online and instore at Sainsbury's, Argos, TU and Habitat, and we regularly increase the discount to 15% at points during the year. We've also got you covered for your future with our pensions scheme and life cover. You'll also be able to share in our success as you may be eligible for a performance-related bonus of up to 10% of salary, depending on how we perform. Your wellbeing is important to us too. You'll receive an annual holiday allowance and you can buy up to an additional week's holiday. We also offer other benefits that will help your money go further such as season ticket loans, cycle to work scheme, health cash plans, salary advance (where you can access some of your pay before pay day) as well access to a great range of discounts from hundreds of other retailers. And if you ever need it there is also an employee assistance programme. Moments that matter are as important to us as they are to you which is why we give up to 26 weeks’ pay for maternity or adoption leave and up to 4 weeks’ pay for paternity leave. Please see www.sainsburys.jobs for a range of our benefits (note, length of service and eligibility criteria may apply).
