Senior Director, HR Business Partner, Wholesale North America

About the role

The Senior Director Human Resources - Wholesale North America is a newly created senior leadership role accountable for end-to-end HR business partnership with Sonova’s Regional Wholesale leadership team. The role enables scale, consistency, and functional excellence by shaping a future-ready, data-driven commercial organization—capable of accelerating growth through a clear operating model, fit-for-purpose organization design, and the capabilities, skills, and culture required for the function to enable Sonova growth and innovation.

Responsibilities

• Enable the teams and operating model by driving organizational effectiveness and functional readiness across the wholesale organization – both local and regional organizations.
• Lead org design and organization effectiveness and efficiency: shape scalable structures, roles, and governance/ways of working that improve simplification and speed of decision-making.
• Use insight and evidence (people analytics, engagement signals, performance data, feedback loops) to identify bottlenecks and design targeted interventions that improve agility, collaboration, and accountability.
• Coach and challenge the regional business leaders on operating model evolution, Sonova behaviors, talent decisions, and change leadership—balancing short-term need to deliver functional outcomes with long-term capability.
• Embed a performance-oriented environment that is fair, transparent, and standards-driven, with clear expectations and disciplined follow-through.
• Lead integration of acquired businesses, aligning structures, ways of working, and culture, while standardizing core HR practices, balancing global frameworks with local needs.
• Build a unified culture across Wholesale — connecting diverse brands, “silo” team structures, and leadership approaches into “one Wholesale” with shared purpose and ways of working.
• Shift from siloed to collaborative delivery by strengthening cross-functional teaming, role clarity, and shared outcomes (customer impact, growth, and brand/channels strength).
• Embed modern ways of working (e.g., agile collaboration, experimentation and learning, continuous improvement) to increase speed-to-market and customer-centric execution.
• Design and execute a change approach covering narrative, communications, stakeholder engagement, change impact, and resistance management.
• Build change capacity within people leaders and teams by implementing practical interventions, enabling toolkits that make the new Wholesale operating model stick.
• Own talent and workforce strategy for the assigned segment in partnership with the HR CoEs: strategic workforce planning, critical roles, succession pipelines, and build/buy/borrow decisions.
• Define and build future commercial capabilities (e.g., data-driven decision-making, customer insights, martech and digital fluency, content and brand excellence, commercialization, experimentation).
• Strengthen leadership capability at all levels—combining future sales/commercial expertise with high-quality people leadership and team effectiveness.
• Create career paths and capability journeys for key commercial disciplines, enabling internal mobility, progression, and transparent development pathways.
• Scale upskilling/reskilling through digital and blended learning solutions and targeted developmental experiences/development programs to enable a skills-based organization.

Requirements

• 10+ years in HR with significant time as a senior HRBP in a complex, multi-state and consumer/technology/industrial/healthcare industries, combined with experience within Commercial, Wholesale or Sales environment.
• Experience in leading organization, function, state or team transformation with measurable adoption and business impact.
• Strong background in organizational development: org design, role clarity, governance, spans/layers, decision rights, and org health interventions.
• Demonstrated experience in workforce planning and capability frameworks/career architecture, ie critical roles, succession, and workforce shaping.
• Effective partnering closely with Centers of Expertise (Talent, Rewards, L&D) and translating “CoE solutions” into functional org and people outcomes.
• Strong commercial mindset and understanding of business growth levers (customer, brand, portfolio, pricing/value, channel performance), and how B2B commercial teams enable objectives.
• Trusted advisor who has proven experience in coaching and challenging senior leaders
• Proven capability in change leadership and adoption.
• Strong stakeholder management across diverse geographies and team; able to align leaders who may have competing priorities.
• Demonstrates “modern, commercial HR”: performance focus, clarity, pragmatism, and fairness, with high integrity.
• Systems thinker: sees interdependencies across operating model, talent, culture, governance, and incentives. Strong data orientation: uses people analytics and insights to diagnose issues, prioritize interventions, and track effectiveness (not “data for data’s sake”).
• Outcome-led and practical: can simplify complexity, make good trade-offs, and drive decisions to closure.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and pace; thrives in perform and transform mode (new function, new ways of working while enabling the organization to deliver short term outcomes).

Qualifications

• A minimum of 200Mb/sec download and 10Mb/sec upload speed internet connectivity is required to support any remote/hybrid employee functionality at Sonova.

Skills

• Systems thinker: sees interdependencies across operating model, talent, culture, governance, and incentives. Strong data orientation: uses people analytics and insights to diagnose issues, prioritize interventions, and track effectiveness (not “data for data’s sake”).
• Outcome-led and practical: can simplify complexity, make good trade-offs, and drive decisions to closure.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and pace; thrives in perform and transform mode (new function, new ways of working while enabling the organization to deliver short term outcomes).

Benefits

• Military and veteran preference
• Medical, dental and vision coverage*
• Health Savings, Health Reimbursement, Flexible Spending/Dependent Care Accounts
• TeleHealth options
• 401k plan with company match*
• Company paid life/ad&d insurance
• Additional supplemental life/ad&d coverage available
• Company paid Short/Long-Term Disability coverage (STD/LTD)
• STD LTD Buy-ups available
• Accident/Hospital Indemnity coverage
• Legal/ID Theft Assistance
• PTO (or sick and vacation time), floating Diversity Day, & paid holidays*
• Paid parental bonding leave
• Employee Assistance Program (24/7 mental health support hotline, 5 company paid counseling sessions and more)
• Robust Internal Career Growth opportunities
• Tuition reimbursement
• Hearing aid discount for employees and family
• Internal social recognition platform

Pay

This role's pay range is between $233,000 - $310,000. This role is also bonus-eligible.

Schedule

Aurora (IL), United States