Head of Service - Smokefree

Join us on our journey to empower over a million people to change their behaviours and thrive!

At Thrive Tribe we deliver award‑winning healthy lifestyle and wellbeing programmes that make people happier and healthier! We’re looking for a Head of Service to join our Smokefree Island service. You will be responsible for ensuring Thrive Tribe’s Smokefree Island programme delivers measurable health outcomes for local communities. By leading high‑performing teams, strengthening commissioner relationships, and driving operational excellence, you will play a critical part in improving population health and securing the long‑term success of our regional services.

You will be supported by the specialist leaders on our neighbouring contract Smokefree Hampshire. Smokefree Island is a part of 4 public health contracts across the region which employs a wider multidisciplinary workforce delivering services in communities across the Isle of Wight and Hampshire. The contracts include services to help residents to stop smoking, lose weight and get active, covering a population of over 1.5 million people and a budget of over £4 million.

As a senior operational leader, you will be accountable for Smokefree Island’s performance, ensuring services deliver strong outcomes, meet contractual KPIs, and provide an outstanding experience for both service users and staff. You will play a key role in strengthening relationships with commissioners and partners, driving service innovation, and creating the conditions for sustainable contract growth and retention.

Like all roles at Thrive Tribe, you can expect your time at work to be fun, varied and challenging. We don’t like to stick to a firm JD as we know from experience that things change throughout the lifetime of a role and it gives our people the chance to play to their strengths. The core responsibilities for this position include:

• Leading Smokefree Island to maintain the ethos and success of Thrive Tribe, building strong relationships with teams, commissioners, stakeholders, and partners in line with our values.

• Creating a high-performing and positive employee experience for your teams, ensuring Thrive Tribe remains a supportive, engaging, and developmental place to work.

• Providing strategic leadership across the contract to ensure delivery of contractual KPIs while driving quality, innovation, and continuous improvement.

• Developing the capability of your leadership team to deliver outstanding operational leadership and building a strong succession pipeline to support future growth.

• Implementing Thrive Tribe’s full portfolio of digital, remote, and face-to‑face services to ensure programmes remain responsive to client and community needs.

• Delivering service financial performance, including P&L (profit and loss) accountability and effective budget management across services.

• Supporting the mobilisation of new contracts within your region to ensure services launch successfully and at pace.

• Working with Business Development colleagues to shape service design, pricing, and the development of competitive national and regional tenders.

• Collaborating with other Service Leads to ensure a consistent, joined‑up approach across regions and service areas.

• Representing Thrive Tribe at Public Health strategic groups and wider health system forums across the region.

• Working with colleagues across all of our Thrive Tribe services to contribute to new projects and service developments – we’re always looking to share knowledge and resources!

• Ensuring due consideration is given to our Safeguarding, Information Governance and Clinical Governance policies and procedures. To ensure safer recruitment and safeguarding for all we adopt pre‑employment processes, including DBS checks.

• Helping us maintain the ethos of Thrive Tribe by driving our organisational culture forward across our services and using every opportunity to embed our values!

Associate Director of Operations (Hampshire & Isle of Wight)

Direct reports: 3

We are looking for someone with experience leading the delivery of public or private sector services, managing teams, and overseeing budgets.…