Chief Operating Officer

The Role of Chief Operating Officer (COO)

The Chief Operating Officer (COO) ensures Plan International is resilient, well governed, and future ready. As a strategic enterprise leader, the COO shapes the Leadership Team agenda and sets the organisation’s enterprise approach to how Plan International operates, governs itself, and evolves to deliver impact at scale. The role fosters inclusive decision making and collective leadership, while ensuring that strategy is translated into delivery through strong systems, accountable leadership, and efficient, risk-aware operations across regions and country programmes.

The COO provides strategic oversight of the organisation’s enterprise enabling environment and global services, ensuring coherence between global standards and country-level realities. Through this enterprise leadership, the role strengthens organisational effectiveness, performance, and accountability, and enables impact and growth in a complex and changing sector.

The COO holds strategic accountability for organisational integrity and performance culture, embedding global values and behaviours and ensuring operational excellence supports Plan International’s mission and strategic priorities. The role brings enterprise foresight and adaptive capacity, enabling the organisation to evolve its operating model over time while remaining robust, compliant, and values led.

As a member of the Leadership Team, the COO actively shapes and champions a culture of collective responsibility for the overall strategic direction of Plan International Inc, consistently modelling Plan International’s values and behaviours, underpinned by feminist leadership principles, as One Plan, shared values.

The Opportunity

Plan International is entering an inspiring new chapter in our journey. As part of our operating model review, we are evolving our Leadership Team structure to strengthen how we lead and deliver together. This transformation builds on a strong foundation and positions us to be more agile, cohesive, and impact-driven. Our new leadership model fosters faster decision-making, clearer accountability, and a culture of collaboration and empowerment across all levels.

We are deeply ambitious for our organisation—courageous in holding ourselves and others to account, yet humble in our approach. Our vision is bold: to become the thought leader and the go-to for girls in crisis. In a sector facing unprecedented challenges, we need leaders who are strong, steady, and resilient—ready to navigate storms and emerge stronger. If you share this ambition and have the courage to lead with integrity and transform the lives of girls worldwide, join us to help shape the future of Plan International.

Requirements and Qualifications

Successful applicants will bring the following skills and experience:

• Extensive Senior Leadership Experience: Must possess extensive senior leadership experience in global operations, governance, or enterprise-level service delivery within complex international organisations.
• Strategic Execution: Demonstrated ability to lead strategic execution, drive cross-functional coordination, and enable organisational performance across diverse operational domains.
• Expertise in Resilience and Risk Management: Deep expertise in organisational resilience, safeguarding, and integrated risk management, with a track record of embedding these frameworks into operational practice.
• Organizational Model Experience: Experience navigating federated, networked, or decentralised organisational models is also essential to support both global coherence and local relevance.
• Interpersonal Skills: Outstanding stakeholder engagement and influencing skills, with the ability to build trust, foster strong cross-functional collaboration, and lead across culturally and geographically diverse contexts.
• Education: BA/BSc/HND qualification is required.