Director, Enterprise Crisis Management
Required skills
- incident management
- crisis management
- enterprise significance
- escalating
- executive communications
- senior leaders
- banking operations
- customer impact
- payments
- technology disruption
Nice to have
- enterprise crisis-management program
- executive leadership
- material events
Role summary
The Director, Enterprise Crisis Management will lead the organization's crisis management process during significant events. This role involves assessing event severity, activating response structures, establishing roles and cadence, tracking impacts, and continuously reassessing the situation. The Director will develop and maintain the crisis management framework, including activation criteria, escalation paths, and playbooks. A key responsibility is building a decision-ready operating picture for executives, synthesizing information, and delivering concise briefings. The role also includes designing and facilitating exercises, leading after-action reviews, and partnering across various departments (Technology, Cyber, Risk, Legal, Communications) to integrate crisis management with business continuity and resilience efforts. A strong understanding of banking operations, customer impact, and regulatory considerations is essential.
- Lead the enterprise crisis-management process during significant events. Assess severity and activation, convene the appropriate response structure, establish roles and cadence, track impacts, dependencies, decisions and actions, and continually reassess the event.
- Develop and maintain the enterprise crisis-management framework, including activation criteria, escalation paths, decision rights, team structure, playbooks, notification protocols and the connection to functional incident-response processes.
- Build a decision-ready operating picture for executive management. Distinguish confirmed facts from assumptions, synthesize business and customer impacts with technical and control information, identify risks and decisions required, and deliver concise briefings and updates.
- Design and facilitate realistic enterprise exercises; lead after-action reviews and ensure lessons from incidents and exercises become assigned, measurable improvements to preparedness and response.
- Partner across business lines, Technology, Cyber, Operations, Risk, Compliance, Legal, Communications and critical third parties to integrate crisis management with continuity plans, recovery capabilities, regulatory obligations and known resilience gaps.
- Demonstrated judgment in triaging ambiguous events, determining enterprise significance and escalating before impacts are fully known.
- Ability to synthesize incomplete and sometimes conflicting information into concise, decision-ready executive communications; credible presence with senior leaders.
- Strong understanding of banking operations, customer impact, payments, technology and cyber disruption, third-party dependencies, regulatory considerations and reputational risk.
- Working knowledge of business continuity, disaster recovery, operational resilience and relevant banking guidance, including FFIEC expectations, with clear understanding of functional ownership boundaries.
- Ability to influence and coordinate leaders across functions without direct authority, build practical governance, and turn plans into usable exercises and response procedures.
- High school diploma or GED equivalent and substantial progressive experience in incident and crisis management, minimum 10 years or comparable depth. Must have personally led significant, real-world cross-functional incidents in a financial institution or similarly regulated organization.
- Bachelor's degree in a related field; experience designing an enterprise crisis-management program and briefing executive leadership during material events.
