Head of Constituency Office - Office of Kanishka Narayan MP Location: Vale of Glamorgan Salary: £45,000 Deadline to apply: 08/09/2024 Recruitment stages: Application form (1 hour) > Interview (40 mins) > Security clearance Contract: Permanent, subject to a 6-month probation period. Context Kanishka was recently elected as Labour MP for the Vale of Glamorgan and is focused on relentlessly building residents’ trust and delivering improvements for the Vale and Wales. That means two specific things for the team: A shared mindset of what matters. Kanishka wants to put Vale residents’ experience of their MP front and centre, putting dignity, joy and support for residents at the heart of all our work. A focus on how we work. Kanishka is determined to build a culture that doesn’t take existing processes and conventions as given and instead finds ways to make a substantive difference through effort, agency and constant improvement. Overview Kanishka is recruiting for an ambitious, impact-focused Head of Constituency Office who will drive the overall effort for the office in the Vale of Glamorgan. Subsequent sections list the attributes and responsibilities of this role. At its core, there will be three functions in this role: team management, stakeholder engagement, and strategic decision-making in a political, ambiguous context. There is no requirement to have worked in politics. A mindset of agency, effort, and delivering outcomes will be valued much more than the directness of political experience. Applicants who require particular flexibility of employment pattern are encouraged, as are those who feel suited to and excited for this role but may not fit the written specifications. Candidate Attributes Strategic decision-making: you will need to make your decision-making legible to others, transparently communicate the downsides of your decisions, and be able to say no to staff and stakeholders. Constituent focus: you will need to instil a user-focused attitude to deeply understand the constituency’s needs and serve them relentlessly. Leadership and management aptitude: you will be responsible for building a new team and creating a team culture, and your ability to hire superbly, coach well, and adapt the team will drive our success. Proactivity: you will be in a newly created role and will need to take the initiative in figuring out the best way to achieve our goals and executing plans that deliver them. This includes proactive idea generation and raising productive disagreements with others. Operational excellence: your team will be responsible for getting details right, managing multiple complex projects in parallel, and inevitably dealing with political and logistical complications. Holistic approach to risk and cost-benefit analysis: you will face challenges without obvious solutions, and will need to make difficult high-stakes decisions (e.g. political and financial) while acting under uncertainty. Interest in designing and implementing systems: you will be setting up new systems in multiple domains, and you will need to make them robust, efficient, and intuitive. Relationship aptitude: you will be building and managing a team, as well as being relied upon by Kanishka, so you will need to earn and retain the trust of your colleagues. Key Responsibilities Developing an ambitious, high-impact set of strategic operating principles and workflows and embedding these into a delivery model and team culture. Day-to-day management of key office workflows: Local policy projects Constituent relationships and casework delivery Communications objectives Political stakeholder management. Management of Kanishka’s constituency office team. Oversight of Kanishka’s diary commitments, delegating tasks to others as appropriate. Supporting and managing the recruitment of new staff. Responsibility for managing all aspects of the budget, keeping Kanishka informed of all relevant financial matters and liaising with parliamentary authorities on office finance. Identify training opportunities and ensure office teams maintain and develop knowledge of relevant legislation where appropriate. Ensuring accurate personnel records are kept and notifying authorities of contractual changes as necessary. Have final sign-off on all relevant delegated areas from the MP, for example, constituent correspondence. Team Ethos We are one team. Westminster team members must be deeply committed to issues in the Vale, and colleagues based in the Vale need to have opportunities to explore issues in Westminster. We are a cross-sector team. We will always benchmark our approaches against best practices in the private and public sectors to attract and retain top talent. We are a community. We will have a small group of full-time staff who actively invest in building a network of expert advisers who engage as needed. We are non-hierarchical. We want a high agency, high ownership and high- ambition culture built on respectful challenge and shared commitment. We We cannot achieve this if we are bogged down by excessive signoffs and reporting structures. We have a shared obsession with impact. We want to make the Vale and Britain an even more exciting, compelling place to live in, and we think public policy is a great way of making that a reality. If you have any questions about the role or the application process please get in touch at kanishka.narayan.mpparliament.uk