Description About us. National Highways have an excellent opportunity for a Supplier Relationships Manager to join our team in the Northwest region. The Supplier Relationships Manager will establish and maintain an effective supplier community, engaging, motivating and inspiring it through clear shared vision and goals. The Supplier relationships Manager will also build effective relationships across a wide range of internal and external stakeholders and encourage a highly collaborative way of working that supports cooperation and innovation in the region. This role can be based from any of the following office locations in the Northwest region – Warrington, Manchester, Penrith or Preston. You will: Provide effective leadership to inspire and align a complex organisation, made up of internal and multiple external supplier teams to work towards shared goals, and promote a culture that supports innovation, collaboration, service excellence and continuous improvement. Develop and embed the required practices, forums and communication channels to foster collaboration, acting as a catalyst in establishing and maintaining a collaborative partnering ethos between all community partners, including the National Highways team ensuring best possible contractual outcomes. Manage effective working relationships between internal and supplier teams, working collaboratively across organisational boundaries to remove blockers, address emerging issues and enable 2-way dialogue and feedback from the supplier community on lessons learned. To champion and facilitate effective use of early contractor involvement in solutions and promote a culture of continuous improvement, supporting the community in identifying and acting on opportunities to deliver the programme more effectively realising safety, customer service and efficiency benefits. Provide guidance to senior managers across disciplines in relation to collaboration with the supply chain community and other stakeholders in Operations, acting as the subject matter expert within their area of specialism to contribute to high performance across the directorate and to support the timely resolution of issues. Proactively monitor the supplier community performance, processes and financial data, analyse and investigate trends and issues, and collaborate with suppliers, Operations and Commercial & Procurement colleagues to identify and deliver improvements. About you. Experience in commercial and contractual principles in highway engineering and understanding of the supplier market Experience of having had a leadership role within a continuous improvement environment, delivering and capturing benefits and driving best practice forward to effective implementation Exceptional stakeholder management and communication skills and ability to convey complex and challenging information to a variety of audiences. Lead and inspire cross functional specialist teams across organisational boundaries Evidence of presenting complex information and initiatives to senior managers and peers both internally and externally About us. Here at National Highways, we manage and improve England’s motorways and major A roads, helping our customers have safer, smoother and more reliable journeys. Our priorities are safety, customers and delivery, and at the core of this, are our values of passion, integrity, safety, teamwork and ownership. Operations is at the heart of keeping the strategic road network moving and ensuring our customers get the best possible experience when using our roads. We address over 39,000 customer enquiries every month, plan and deliver all maintenance activities on the network, drive efficiencies and improvements across our systems and roads, and respond to incidents across 4,500 miles of motorways and major A-roads that we manage. All to make sure National Highways customers have safer, smoother, and more reliable journeys. External candidates will be offered a starting salary at the lower end of the pay scale, while current employees will be appointed in accordance with our established pay policy. We are committed to creating a diverse environment and welcome applicants from all backgrounds.