Manager, Ocean Operations

The opportunity:

The role of the Manager Ocean Operations is a critical part of making Flexport’s mission to make global trade easy for everyone a reality. Flexport today connects almost 10,000 clients and suppliers across 109 countries. In this role, your direct customers are the partners within your region: our account management and customs teams, subcontractors, carriers, terminals, trucking providers and our clients. Your work directly supports Flexport’s end customers in achieving their logistics goals. Most importantly, you will play a pivotal role in building the next operational model at Flexport: allowing us to effectively scale to achieve our mission of making global commerce so easy there will be more of it.

This role is designed to hire, train, and develop a team of motivated operations experts while strategically leading them through the complex world of freight forwarding.  You will work cross-functionally to navigate ambiguous challenges and establish a world-class operating team. At this stage in Flexport's journey, we understand that great leadership is what will help us achieve our goal. We also understand that great leaders have to learn how to balance tactical and adaptive responsibilities. A leader who is too tactical will squelch the creativity and motivation of their teams. A leader who is too adaptive will create a lot of wasted time and effort, which will also squelch the motivation of their teams. Your job as a leader is to create balance for those you manage.

Tactical Responsibilities:

As an Ocean Operations leader, you are an expert in executing the end-to-end movement of shipments within a regional network including FCL and LCL import and export shipments.

• You will hire, coach and build a 5 -10 person team responsible for the end-to-end movement of ocean freight shipments within a regional network (both imports and exports), including intermodal movements.
• You will personally represent Flexport’s value proposition by recommending supply chain solutions for new clients and opportunities to the account management team.
• You will guard the “front line” in ensuring the highest standard of Flexport quality: the right processes and metrics are in place for shipments to move “on-time” and exceptions are resolved quickly and appropriately. You will be responsible for meeting internal KPIs and SLAs that demonstrate quality delivery.
• You will design a scalable operational infrastructure and procedures to ensure your team is delivering the highest levels of efficiency and productivity for your customers. If they are not, you will look for opportunities to improve them.
• As an Ocean team leader you will:
• Monitor regional vendor (e.g. carrier, trucker) performance and partner with Procurement on performance management initiatives.
• You will serve as the primary relationship manager for internal and external partners in your region such as shippers, terminals, carriers, container freight stations, customs brokers, truckers, the Customs team and the Ocean Operations team. You will be the primary point of contact for internal and external escalations.

Adaptive Responsibilities:

• You will work with gateway and global management to ensure the right metrics and data are in place to empower your regional team to deliver great performance.
• You will be responsible for monitoring and improving overall cost-to-serve while maintaining a high level of client satisfaction.
• You will help design and implement operational infrastructure and procedures in the team you oversee while constantly identifying and executing on opportunities to realize optimal efficiency and productivity.
• You will empower your team to prioritize and align on key initiatives, experiment with the best ways to drive growth and maintain high on-the-job motivation.
• You will be an active student, learning the skills of leadership which Flexport will strive to apprentice.
• You will work with Account Management to design and iterate on effective feedback loops to ensure client needs are met.
• You will act as a strategic consultant to your global counterparts, product & engineering and the operations excellence team on ocean supply chain operations and your regional gateway ocean or network operations strategy.

What you will need:

Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree in logistics, supply chain, business, or related fields.
• Minimum 7+ years of experience in logistics, freight forwarding, supply chain or ocean carrier operations.
• 2 to 3years of leadership experience
• Very good knowledge of ocean export & import rules & regulations in Cambodia
• Thorough understanding of both FCL and LCL business
• Good communication skill, efficiency in time management, high accuracy and patience and problem-solving skill
• Good communication of written and spoken English.Chinese is a plus.

Mindset: 

We’re looking for folks that have:

• Excitement to manage relations and create a best-in-class operational structure
• Demonstrated ability to lead teams in day-to-day execution and process improvement
• Hands-on, process-oriented, structured thinker with strong problem-solving capabilities 
• Strategic vision and ground floor execution
• Excellent communication, interpersonal and organizational skills
• Client service mindset - obsessed with client and squad happiness
• A mastery of internal and external communication
• Courage to challenge the status quo when logic and reason require it. See something broken? Fix it!
• The desire to lead, train and develop up and coming industry talent

Skills:

• Coaching your colleagues
• Encouraging your team to improve how the team works
• Helping your team learn from their performance outcomes
• Inspiring your team
• Engaging a customer with empathy and without bias
• Pressure testing qualitative and quantitative work
• Building strategy through a customer viability lens
• Designing processes
• Leading difficult conversations 
• Forming hypothesis and developing experiments
• Communicating with structure (“A mastery of (internal) communication”)
• Managing time and commitments (“Next-level attention to detail”)
• Investigating and troubleshooting the customer’s problem
• Execute complex processes without missing adaptive opportunities
• Applying policy, process, and best practices
• Organizing, leading, and participating in meetings

Growth and development:

Skills you can advance in this role:

• All of the above +
• Leading your team’s adaptive performance process
• Setting a vision and theory of impact for a team
• Logos 1 consensus building
• Building consensus among people with strong, differing opinions
• Generating ideas by analyzing your competitors
• Diagnosing a client’s deeper needs
• Gathering qualitative and quantitative customer insight through experiments

What you will learn:

• How to work cross-functionally to execute quickly and build a new organization, optimizing for scale and efficiency
• How to motivate teams and lead performance in an ambiguous environment, research and implement operational hypotheses and inform the strategy of a newly built team.
• You will gain the ability to continuously improve the client experience through a deep industry understanding. You are singularly positioned to realize how we can both work within and push the ocean industry forward to meet the standards of Flexport’s client-centric service.

Future tracks this role could lead to:

• Becoming a leader of leaders. You learn how to be a player-coach who apprentices team leaders on skill development.
• Deep expertise in a specific area of supply chain management. You are the leading advisor in this area, someone our clients, partners, and internal teams go to for advice and strategy. You build processes and tools or lead webinars to amplify your knowledge.