Job Description

As a People Partner Leader, you inspire and lead a cross divisional People Partner community to be credible, trusted partners in driving business impact and value creation. You do this by enabling scalable HR initiatives and solutions, owning enterprise wide people outcomes, and acting as a catalyst for organizational transformation and innovation—in service of Novartis’ purpose to reimagine medicine to improve and extend people’s lives.
In this role you own the harmonized People Partner processes and ways of working across the country or aligned business units, ensuring a high-quality HR experience that meets Employee and stakeholder expectations, today and in the future.

Key Responsibilities

People Partner Leadership Expectations

• Lead with empathy and impact, balancing the ability to challenge the status quo with enabling the team to thrive and deliver meaningful work while representing a collaborative and confident leadership style, holding self and others accountable through an authentic and transparent approach.
• Build strong stakeholder partnerships, constructively challenging when needed while remaining approachable and solution‑oriented to deliver business unit specific people imperatives through strong cross collaboration and disciplined execution.
• Lead, coach, mentor, and guide a future ready People Partner Team that delivers business priorities, coaches leaders, resolves complex escalations, and continuously simplifying and modernizing delivery through strategic hiring, capability development, and career stewardship.
• Ensure strong in‑country adoption of the performance management lifecycle (objective setting, check‑ins, reviews, and PIPs), building manager and associate capability. Partner closely with the Rewards team across mid‑year and year‑end cycles to ensure disciplined execution, insights‑based decisions, and early identification of performance hotspots.
• Coach and guide leadership teams on role evaluations and reward decisions in line with local governance, policies, and timelines. Lead the delivery of reward and recognition programs, including international assignments and off‑cycle reviews, ensuring policy adherence and timely execution.

ER, Governance & Risk Management

• Serve as the single escalation point for complex, country-level people, performance, and organizational matters—advising leaders on employee relations (conflict and grievances) and leading investigations into complex complaints and Conflict of Interest cases, ensuring timely resolution, remediation, and follow-through.

Insights, Analytics & AI Enablement

• Demonstrate strong AI literacy and technology outlook, embedding analytics and AI‑enabled solutions across the People Partner value chain to improve execution quality and scalability with a Data-driven outlook.

Moments that matter:

• Deliver trusted P&O People Partnering to people leaders, managers, and associates, providing expert guidance on critical moments across the employee lifecycle through the team.
• Enable and coach leaders to build capability and self‑sufficiency in people processes, driving simplification and consistent adoption of best practices.

Essential Requirements:

• 15+ years of experience in HR partnering role/s with strong experience in people management.
• MBA or equivalent in Human Resources is preferred.
• Experience as a strategic advisor to business driving HR priorities, enabling high quality talent, performance, and reward outcomes.
• Ability to partner with senior business leaders and HR peers to deliver the talent agenda, with strong stakeholder management and influencing capabilities.
• Role‑model self‑awareness and a growth mindset through continuous learning, acknowledging gaps, and personal accountability.
• Recent experience in leading, coaching & mentoring diverse people partner/business partner teams

Desirable Requirements:

• Experience in leveraging AI to simplify people processes, reduce duplication, and shift team capacity toward higher impact, value adding work.
• Experience in Global/ MNC and complex & matrixed organizations.

Commitment To Diversity and Inclusion
Novartis is committed to building an outstanding, inclusive work environment and diverse teams' representative of the patients and communities we serve.

Accessibility and accommodation
Novartis is committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodation to individuals with disabilities. If, because of a medical condition or disability, you need a reasonable accommodation for any part of the recruitment process, or in order to perform the essential functions of a position, please send an e-mail to diversityandincl.india@novartis.com and let us know the nature of your request and your contact information. Please include the job requisition number in your message

Why Novartis: Helping people with disease and their families takes more than innovative science. It takes a community of smart, passionate people like you. Collaborating, supporting and inspiring each other. Combining to achieve breakthroughs that change patients’ lives. Ready to create a brighter future together? https://www.novartis.com/about/strategy/people-and-culture

Join our Novartis Network: Not the right Novartis role for you? Sign up to our talent community to stay connected and learn about suitable career opportunities as soon as they come up: https://talentnetwork.novartis.com/network

Benefits and Rewards: Read our handbook to learn about all the ways we’ll help you thrive personally and professionally: https://www.novartis.com/careers/benefits-rewards

Skills Desired

Business Acumen, Change Implementation, Coaching, Connecting The Dots, Data Analysis & Reporting, Empathy, Employee Lifecycle Management, Employee Relations & Engagement, Influencing, Matrix Collaboration, Operational Excellence, Performance Management, Resilience, Stakeholder Management, Waterfall Model