Senior Change Manager

Kia ora!

Air New Zealand is on an accelerated journey to deliver the best flying experience on Earth. Our purpose is to enrich our country by connecting New Zealanders to each other and New Zealand to the world. As part of our brand promise, we embrace Manaaki – taking care further than any other airline and creating meaningful experiences that empower and connect.   

Your Impact Starts Here

To support this vision, we are currently seeking an experienced Senior Change Manager on a 6-month contract (Internal Job Title: Delivery Enablement Specialist) to join the Delivery Enablement team.  

This isn’t your standard change management role. We’re looking for a T-shaped professional with deep change expertise, a broad delivery skill set, and a proven ability to lead and land outcomes at scale. You’ll bring experience working across large, complex programmes - someone who has delivered in fast-moving enterprise environments and knows how to drive clarity, momentum, and impact. You’ll take a hands-on, “roll your sleeves up” approach to change delivery, working side-by-side with stakeholders to make sure outcomes are achieved, issues are unblocked, and progress sticks. 

You will champion and leverage our agile operating rhythm to deliver outcomes via large-scale cross-functional initiatives. This will require you to manage complex dependencies between teams, third parties, and across the organisation to ensure end-to-end delivery success.    

Key Roles and Responsibilities:     

• Develop and lead change strategies that align to programme objectives and delivery frameworks, grounded in early change planning activities such as impact assessments, stakeholder analysis, change readiness, and sequencing. 

• Design and deliver fit-for-purpose change activities, including communications, engagement sessions, training, workshops, and reinforcement plans that support the end-to-end change journey. 

• Actively manage change delivery, from planning through to execution, ensuring all activities land effectively, are contextually relevant, and respond to evolving stakeholder needs. 

• Identify and address change risks and issues, using insights from engagement and delivery to adjust plans and maintain momentum. 

• Build strong partnerships with key stakeholders and sponsors, ensuring alignment, shared ownership, and commitment throughout the change process. 

• Track progress and adoption of change, using metrics, feedback loops, and behaviour indicators to evaluate effectiveness. Reinforce key messages and practices to ensure change is embedded and sustained over time. 

• Leverage Air New Zealand’s enterprise agile delivery model to ensure change activity is integrated into programme planning, iterative cycles, and delivery rhythms. This includes aligning change timing to business readiness and programme cadences, while working in partnership with delivery leads and teams to enable value realisation. 

• Actively ensure the safety and security of all people, assets, systems & procedures in your area of responsibility. 

Experience & Skills:     

• Proven experience delivering change in an iterative, value-driven way, ensuring the continuous realisation of benefits over time, rather than relying on traditional waterfall models. 

• Significant experience leading large-scale organisational change efforts and delivering complex business and technology outcomes in a corporate environment. 

• Comfortable operating in ambiguity, with the ability to interpret complex situations and define structure, clarity, and direction when the path forward is not obvious. 

• Strong influencing and engagement skills, with a proven ability to work across diverse stakeholder groups, manage expectations, and build trusted relationships. 

• Clear, confident communicator and active listener, able to support complex technical or business discussions and guide them to practical closure. 

• Experience in aviation, transport, logistics, or operations is an advantage, supporting the ability to quickly understand operational environments and challenges. 

Why this role?  

This is a chance to join a delivery-focused team and help shape the way we land change across Air New Zealand. You’ll work alongside others who value collaboration, clarity and momentum – and you’ll be supported to grow while making a real difference.  

This role closes Sunday 10 August at 11:59pm.

At Air New Zealand, we are proudly committed to diversity, equity and inclusion and believe in creating a truly inclusive workplace where everyone can be themselves and thrive. Our people are our greatest asset – because while everything else we do in our operation can be replicated by our competitors, it is our people that truly set us apart. We are firm believers in celebrating the differences and diversity of thought our people bring to their roles. We encourage candidates from diverse backgrounds, including those with a disability, additional health and mental health needs, and/or are neurodiverse to apply for our roles.

If you have encountered any accessibility barriers and require further information or reasonable accommodations to our recruitment process, please reach out to the recruiter listed on this job advert so they are able to support you to freely participate equitably in our recruitment and selection process.

Whāia te pae tawhiti kia tata. Ko te pae tata whakamaua, kia tina.

"Seek to bring distant horizons closer. Once near, seize them and make them your reality."