Executive Director

About the Ignite Coalition

The Ignite Coalition is a multi–Blue Plan collaborative coalition bringing together nonprofit Blue Cross organizations to advance crossplan strategy, learning, and execution. The coalition provides a safe, candid, noncompetitive forum where member plans work together on a focused set of high impact strategic priorities, rather than operating independently or in silos.

Ignite is a cross organizational, industry facing coalition, engaging CEOs, boards, senior leaders, and emerging talent across member plans to accelerate shared learning, align strategic direction, and deliver meaningful outcomes for the Blue system.

The Executive Director (ED) is a fulltime strategic leader responsible for guiding the Ignite Coalition’s evolution into a more focused, collaborative, and strategically aligned entity.

Operating with a unique blend of Chief Strategy Officer and Chief of Staff leadership, the ED serves as the coalition’s strategic guide and integrator, helping CEOs and plan leaders align on direction, priorities, and shared value creation, while also acting as the execution engine that ensures disciplined delivery of priority strategy tracks. The ED translates collective ambition into focused action, maintains momentum across initiatives, and ensures sustained, high quality engagement and outcomes for CEOs, plans, and boards.

This role is designed as a senior leadership position with accountability for building and sustaining coalition strategy, operations, and impact over time. The ED will establish strong foundations, enable effective collaboration across member plans, and ensure continuity, momentum, and longterm value for the coalition.

This is a primarily virtual role, with periodic inperson convenings to support leadership alignment, strategic discussions, and coalition relation shipbuilding. The role reports to the Chair of the Ignite Coalition and reinforces the coalition’s shared purpose and noncompetitive, crossplan orientation.

• Serve as the strategic integrator for the coalition, aligning purpose, vision, and guiding principles across CEOs, boards, and member plans.
• Ensure disciplined execution of 3–5 high impact strategic tracks, including scoping, resourcing, and tracking measurable progress.
• Facilitate crossplan collaboration, ensuring shared learning, insight exchange, and problem solving are consistently delivered.

• Build and maintain the coalition’s operating rhythm, including board meetings, strategy sessions, leadership development forums, and track convenings.
• Lead project management and execution across coalition initiatives, ensuring timelines, deliverables, and communications are clear and executed with excellence.
• Partner with committee and workgroup leads to operationalize governance, membership criteria, dues structures, and annual reviews.
• Provide strategic architecture and endtoend accountability for Ignite’s major conferences and inperson convenings, setting clear objectives, shaping high quality content and agendas, ensuring strategic coherence across sessions, and partnering with others on logistics and execution.

• Act as a player coach, enabling member leaders to contribute effectively while balancing diverse perspectives and agendas.
• Develop strong, trusting relationships across all plans and levels, including CEOs, boards, senior leaders, and emerging talent.
• Protect and reinforce the coalition’s safe, candid, noncompetitive environment for strategic dialogue and collaboration.
• Engage directly with multiple plan CEOs to align expectations, resolve tensions, and ensure followthrough while preserving trust and coalition cohesion.
• Operate effectively in high ambiguity and evolving mandates, bringing clarity and direction where none exists.
• Willing and able to lead hard conversations, including direct followups with plan CEOs and senior leaders.

• Facilitate high quality strategic conversations (virtual and inperson) that support learning, transparency, and insight sharing.
• Communicate progress, expectations, and…