As the Lab Operations Leader, you'll be at the helm of our site's performance, balancing scientific rigor with strategic business decisions. Your key responsibilities will include:
- Championing Quality: Foster a culture where quality is paramount, coaching your team on adherence to all operational and regulatory standards, and driving continuous improvement.
- Customer-Centricity: Deliver timely, high-quality results that build trust and exceed customer expectations, actively contributing to business growth.
- People Leadership: Create a safe, engaging, and inclusive environment. You'll be present and accessible, ensuring your team is supported, empowered, trained, and motivated to reach their full potential. This includes anticipating staffing needs, optimizing schedules, recruiting and onboarding top talent, and prioritizing retention through growth opportunities.
- Financial Stewardship: Monitor and manage lab budgets, driving profitable growth by optimizing labor, inventory, and other resources to ensure sustainable and efficient operations.
- Innovation & Improvement: Lead a team relentlessly focused on continuous improvement, learning from challenges, and championing new ideas to enhance service, quality, and efficiency.
- Core Operations: Oversee daily lab operations, ensuring high-quality, efficient testing with consistent turnaround times, guided by a balanced operational scorecard.
- Quality & Safety Assurance: Maintain compliance with industry standards, prepare for external audits, and promote a strong culture of safety and cleanliness in the lab.
- Customer Engagement: Represent the organization with professionalism, proactively understanding customer needs, and communicating effectively on capabilities, results, and pricing.
- Vendor Management: Continuously manage outside vendors to minimize waste and ensure high standards.
- Cross-Site Collaboration: Actively contribute to best practice sharing across our network and collaborate with other facilities for overflow testing, resource sharing, and training.
- Visible Leadership: Maintain a strong presence in the lab, observing operations and providing real-time coaching and feedback.
- Project Supervision: Supervise non-routine projects as assigned.
What You Bring:
- A Bachelor’s degree in science, business, or a related field is required; a Master's degree is preferred.
- Five (5) or more years of experience in an operations setting, leading frontline supervisors who directly oversee an hourly workforce.
- Prior experience in commercial laboratory testing or manufacturing environments, particularly with food, cosmetics, or tobacco samples, and exposure to safety and quality protocols, is preferred.
- A proven track record of successfully driving financial and operational performance against defined metrics.
- Demonstrated ability to manage teams through a span of frontline leaders.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to interpret complex business, technical, and regulatory documents.
- Skilled in developing reports, business correspondence, and standard operating procedures.
- Confidence in presenting to and engaging with senior leadership, peers, customers, and cross-functional teams.
- Demonstrated capability to solve practical problems using sound judgment, especially in dynamic or ambiguous situations.
- Ability to work with mathematical concepts such as probability and statistical inference, and apply concepts like fractions, percentages, ratios, and proportions to practical situations.
- Experience leading a team of three to eight supervisors, indirectly leading a total team of 15 to 40 members.
