Communications Director, US West & Canada

Location:

Lisle, IL

Full Time

People and Communications Director (Strategic Business Partner), US West & Canada

Founded in 1910, KONE is a global leader that provides elevators, escalators and automatic building doors, as well as solutions for maintenance and modernization that add value to buildings throughout their life cycle. Our mission is to improve the flow of urban life and make our world’s cities better places to live by providing innovative solutions that help make people’s journeys safe, convenient and reliable.

Our operations in over 60 countries around the world have helped us achieve our position as an innovation and sustainability leader with repeated recognitions by Forbes, Corporate Knights for clean capitalism and others.

This role acts as the enterprise-level architect for high performance culture, leadership capability, organizational effectiveness, and transformation across KONE’s frontline operations in the United States & Canada. This role serves as the principal strategic partner to Senior Vice President who oversee a portfolio exceeding $1.5B USD in P&L, 3,000+ employees, wide-scale unionized field operations, and complex, regionally distributed service organizations.

Acting one level below the CHRO, this leader accelerates transformation by shaping organizational design, simplifying structures and decision paths, elevating leadership capability, mobilizing talent with courage, and embedding execution discipline while reinforcing our corporate culture. They lead with courage, speed, and simplicity – driving cultural and operational shifts required to enable business growth, digital transformation, modernization, and outstanding customer and employee experience.

This role leads and directs a team of 2 senior leaders to deliver and execute and leads/participates on critical committees that drive organizational policy and decision‑making requiring strong influencing and business partnering.

• Strategic Business Partnering
• Leadership Effectiveness & Capability
• Team Leadership & Development
• Organizational Development & Workforce Planning
• Change & Transformation Leadership
• Culture, Engagement, DEI, & Belonging
• People Communications
• Data, Insights, & Operating Rhythm
• Governance, Compliance, & Risk Management

You will bring 10+ years of progressive and successful Human Resources experience, preferably with a multinational company, to KONE. You will use the knowledge gained through your bachelor’s degree in a relevant field (HR, Labor Relations, Business, etc.), or 12+ years of equivalent experience.

• Advanced influencing, facilitation, storytelling, and communication skills, including the ability to translate complex strategy into simple, repeatable narratives for frontline audiences.
• Demonstrated capability in coaching leaders to lead others—strengthening clarity, accountability, empowerment, and performance through trust‑based leadership.
• Strong organization design capability to drive a high‑performance culture and operational excellence.
• Ability to operate with multidimensional leadership expectations—balancing transformation, performance, results, and people leadership.
• Strong business and financial acumen; ability to partner on incentives, pricing, fixed costs, and other business levers impacting delivery and profitability.
• Strong analytical and insight capabilities—able to synthesize workforce, engagement, performance, and business data (e.g., Workday, engagement tools, BI) into actionable leadership insights.
• Strong organization design, workforce planning, and capability development skills, including designing and driving multi‑district change programs end‑to‑end.
• Demonstrated knowledge and experience working within Federal and State Employment Laws.
• Proven success in coaching and developing talent and teams.
• Excellent verbal, presentation, facilitation, and written communication skills.
• Demonstrated ability to lead projects across business units, ensuring effective change management and the ability to lead others through change.
• Ability to work collaboratively in a matrix organization.
• Demonstrate…