Amex GBT is a place where colleagues find inspiration in travel as a force for good and – through their work – can make an impact on our industry. We’re here to help our colleagues achieve success and offer an inclusive and collaborative culture where your voice is valued.
The Operational Manager – Nordics leads and optimizes event operations across four countries, ensuring high-quality delivery, strong team performance, and operational excellence at scale.
This role blends people leadership, organizational design, and change management with a strong focus on client satisfaction, delivery efficiency, and operational consistency. As part of a global agency, the Operational Manager plays a key role in connecting regional teams with global standards and best practices, while partnering closely with peers and business stakeholders worldwide.
What you'll do
1. Operational Leadership & Excellence
- Oversee end-to-end event operations across the Nordic region, ensuring consistent, high-quality delivery aligned with agency and global standards
- Drive operational excellence by defining, implementing, and continuously improving processes, tools, and ways of working
- Lead capacity planning, resource allocation, and workload balancing across countries
- Monitor and act on performance metrics (profitability, delivery quality, timelines, utilization rates)
- Ensure risk management, compliance, and quality standards are applied across all projects and markets
- Bring strong event industry knowledge to ensure operational decisions are grounded in the realities of event production and delivery
- Knows how to manage a P&L
2. Team Leadership & Organizational Effectiveness
- Lead, coach, and develop Team Leaders, enabling them to effectively manage and grow their teams
- Indirectly oversee a team of approximately 70 event planners across the region
- Design and evolve team structures, roles, and responsibilities to support scalability and performance
- Foster a high-performance culture focused on accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement
- Support recruitment, workforce planning, and talent development in partnership with HR and leadership
- Communicate with all teams in the right way to deliver strategy information, motive teams
3. Change Management & Transformation
- Act as a key driver of organizational change to improve efficiency, collaboration, and operational maturity
- Lead transformation initiatives such as process harmonization, new tools implementation, and new ways of working
- Ensure adoption of new processes and systems through structured change management, communication, and training
- Promote a mindset of agility, innovation, and continuous improvement across all teams
4. Client Relationship & Delivery Oversight
- Partner closely with Sales / Account teams to ensure operational delivery aligns with client expectations and contractual commitments
- Intervene in complex, strategic, or high-risk projects to ensure successful execution
- Contribute to client satisfaction and retention through operational excellence and solution-oriented leadership
- Participate in key client meetings when senior operational input or escalation management is required
5. Global & Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Work closely with multiple internal business partners across the global organization (e.g., Client Services, Sales, Creative, Production, Finance, HR, Legal…) to ensure aligned and integrated delivery
- Act as the Nordic operational representative in global forums, contributing to the development and alignment of global standards, tools, and best practices
- Partner with operational peers in other countries and regions to share learnings, align ways of working, and support international or multi-market projects
- Ensure strong alignment and collaboration between the four Nordic countries while respecting local market specificities
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
- Operational efficiency and team utilization rates
- Project delivery quality and on-time performance
- Employee engagement and retention within operational teams
- Successful implementation of transformation and process improvement initiatives
- Client satisfaction related to operational delivery
- Profitability and cost control on projects (in collaboration with Finance & Client teams) – P&L management
What we're looking for
- 8–12+ years of experience in event operations, production, or agency project delivery, ideally within a B2B environment
- Strong, hands-on understanding of event delivery and production workflows
- Proven experience managing managers/team leaders and leading large, multi-layered teams
- Experience overseeing operations across multiple countries or regions
- Demonstrated track record in organizational change, process improvement, and transformation initiatives
- Experience working within a global or matrix organization is a strong plus
- Strong people leadership and coaching capabilities
- Excellent organizational and operational management skills
- Solid understanding of event budgeting, planning cycles, and resource management
- Strong stakeholder and business partner management across functions and geographies
- Ability to balance strategic thinking with hands-on operational oversight
- Data-driven mindset with the ability to use KPIs to guide decisions
- Structured, solution-oriented, and resilient under pressure
- Strong communicator able to align diverse teams across geographies and cultures
- Collaborative leadership style with high emotional intelligence
- Comfortable leading through change and ambiguity
- Fluent in English (additional Nordic languages are a plus)
- Willingness to travel regularly within the Nordic region and occasionally internationally
Location
Stockholm, Sweden
The #TeamGBT Experience
Work and life: Find your happy medium at Amex GBT.
Flexible benefits are tailored to each country and start the day you do. These include health and welfare insurance plans, retirement programs, parental leave, adoption assistance, and wellbeing resources to support you and your immediate family.
Travel perks: get a choice of deals each week from major travel providers on everything from flights to hotels to cruises and car rentals.
Develop the skills you want when the time is right for you, with access to over 20,000 courses on our learning platform, leadership courses, and new job openings available to internal candidates first.
We strive to champion Inclusion in every aspect of our business at Amex GBT. You can connect with colleagues through our global INclusion Groups, centered around common identities or initiatives, to discuss challenges, obstacles, achievements, and drive company awareness and action.
And much more!
All applicants will receive equal consideration for employment without regard to age, sex, gender (and characteristics related to sex and gender), pregnancy (and related medical conditions), race, color, citizenship, religion, disability, or any other class or characteristic protected by law.
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Furthermore, we are committed to providing reasonable accommodation to qualified individuals with disabilities. Please let your recruiter know if you need an accommodation at any point during the hiring process. For details regarding how we protect your data, please consult the Amex GBT Recruitment Privacy Statement.
What if I don’t meet every requirement? If you’re passionate about our mission and believe you’d be a phenomenal addition to our team, don’t worry about “checking every box;" please apply anyway. You may be exactly the person we’re looking for!