Air Operations Manager

Air Operations Manager    The opportunity: The role of the Air Operations Manager is a critical part of making Flexport’s mission to make global trade easy for everyone a reality. Flexport today connects almost 10,000 clients and suppliers across 109 countries. Your work directly supports Flexport’s end customers in achieving their logistics goals. Most importantly, you will play a pivotal role in building the next operational model at Flexport: allowing us to effectively scale to achieve our mission of making global trade easier for everyone.   This role is designed to train, and develop a team of motivated operations experts while strategically leading them through the complex world of freight forwarding.  You will work cross-functionally to navigate ambiguous challenges and establish a world-class operating team. At this stage in Flexport's journey, we understand that great leadership is what will help us achieve our goal. We also understand that great leaders have to learn how to balance tactical and adaptive responsibilities. A leader who is too tactical will squelch the creativity and motivation of their teams. A leader who is too adaptive will create a lot of wasted time and effort, which will also squelch the motivation of their teams. Your job as a leader is to create balance for those you manage.   Tactical Responsibilities: As an Air operations manager, you are an expert in executing the end-to-end movement of shipments within a regional network including Air imports and exports. You will coach and develop an 8-10 person team (including FTE and BPO) responsible for the end-to-end movement of Airfreight shipments within a regional network (both imports and exports), including intermodal movements. You will personally represent Flexport’s value proposition by recommending supply chain solutions for new clients and opportunities to the account management team. You will guard the “front line” in ensuring the highest standard of Flexport quality: the right processes and metrics are in place for shipments to move “on-time” and exceptions resolved quickly and appropriately. You will be responsible for meeting internal KPIs and SLAs that demonstrate quality delivery. You will design scalable operational infrastructure and procedures to ensure your team is delivering the highest levels of efficiency and productivity for your customers. If they are not, you will look for opportunities to improve them. As an Air operations manager, you will: Monitor regional vendor (e.g. contractor, trucker, warehouse, brokers, etc) performance and partner with Procurement on performance management initiatives. You will serve as the primary relationship manager for internal and external partners in your region such as terminals, agents,, and warehouses, the Air TLM team and Account Management team. You will be the primary point of contact for second-level internal and external escalations. Adaptive Responsibilities: You will work with gateway and global management to ensure the right metrics and data are in place to empower your regional team to deliver great performance. You will be responsible for monitoring and improving overall cost-to-serve while maintaining a high level of client satisfaction. You will help design and implement operational infrastructure and procedures in the team you oversee while constantly identifying and executing on opportunities to realize optimal efficiency and productivity. You will empower your team to prioritize and align on key initiatives, experiment with the best ways to drive growth and maintain high on-the-job motivation. You will be an active student, learning the skills of leadership which Flexport will strive to apprentice. You will work with Account Management to design and iterate on effective feedback loops to ensure client needs are met. You will act as a strategic consultant to your global counterparts, product & engineering and the operations excellence team. Scope of Duties: 2nd escalation point of shipment execution exceptions; Neurons of the Global Network; 2nd escalation point of all operations incident, coordinate and adjust operation plan in case of incident reported from overseas. (likelihood 24x7x365 operations) Bridging Supply and Demand; track demand volume projection and cooperate with procurement team & Trade Lane Management Network traffic controller; Decide cargo uplift priority without compromising end-to-end transit time commitment and with optimized cost-to-serve in mind   What you will need:   Experience: BA/BS degree Minimum 5+ years of experience in logistics, freight forwarding, supply chain, Airfreight operations, or Airfreight planning and procurement.  Mindset:  We’re looking for folks that have: Excitement to manage relations and create a best-in-class operational structure Demonstrated ability to lead teams in day-to-day execution and process improvement Hands-on, process-oriented, structured thinker with strong problem-solving capabilities  Strategic vision and ground floor execution Excellent communication, interpersonal and organizational skills Client service mindset - obsessed with client and squad happiness A mastery of internal and external communication Courage to challenge the status quo when logic and reason require it. See something broken? Fix it! The desire to lead, train and develop up and coming industry talent Skills: Coaching your colleagues Encouraging your team to improve how the team works Helping your team learn from their performance outcomes Inspiring your team Engaging a customer with empathy and without bias Pressure testing qualitative and quantitative work Building strategy through a customer viability lens Designing processes Leading difficult conversations  Forming hypothesis and developing experiments Communicating with structure (“A mastery of (internal) communication”) Managing time and commitments (“Next-level attention to detail”) Investigating and troubleshooting the customer’s problem Execute complex processes without missing adaptive opportunities Applying policy, process, and best practices Organizing, leading, and participating in meetings   Growth and development: Skills you can advance in this role: All of the above + Leading your team’s adaptive performance process Setting a vision and theory of impact for a team Logos 1 consensus building Building consensus among people with strong, differing opinions Generating ideas by analyzing your competitors Diagnosing a client’s deeper needs Gathering qualitative and quantitative customer insight through experiments What you will learn: How to work cross-functionally to execute quickly and build a new organization, optimizing for scale and efficiency How to motivate teams and lead performance in an ambiguous environment, research and implement operational hypotheses and inform the strategy of a newly built team. You will gain the ability to continuously improve the client experience through a deep industry understanding. You are singularly positioned to realize how we can both work within and push the Airfreight industry forward to meet the standards of Flexport’s client-centric service. Future tracks this role could lead to: Becoming a leader of leaders. You learn how to be a player-coach who apprentices team leaders on skill development. Deep expertise in a specific area of supply chain management. You are the leading advisor in this area, someone our clients, partners, and internal teams go to for advice and strategy. You build process and tools or lead webinars to amplify your knowledge. Client advisor/ account management. Your deep passion for the custom experience sets you on a path to lead a team of advisors as they help grow Flexport’s book of business. Skill Glossary Coaching your colleagues This skill is about coaching your team to drive impact through a process of on-the-job-apprenticeship. Coaching is a process that enables people to improve their performance over time. There are two components to performance—will and skill. Will is tomo, the driver of performance. Coaching, on the other hand, is about helping your colleagues grow in skill. This skill is about leading working teams (i.e., at least 5 individual contributors), not whole organizations (i.e., at least three levels from the customer, with over 100 people). Fluency in this skill typically includes: Ensuring your team members choose their own skills to develop (i.e., skill goals). Having monthly skill development discussions (e.g., the 20:10 meeting where you spend 20 minutes helping your team member with their skill goals, and 10 minutes with your team member helping you). Planning on-the-job opportunities with your team members to make progress on their skill goals. Routinely annotating feedback and next steps for your team's skill goals.   Teaching colleagues how to use you as a coach: namely by encouraging them to talk to you about where they have and have not had impact, what skills they can improve, and how they can go about learning those skills. Providing your colleagues with continuous advice and positive reinforcement (e.g., telling them what they have been doing well).