Business Manager (Parental Leave Cover)

Job Title: Business Manager (Parental Leave Cover)

Location: London

Remuneration: £68,000 - £78,000 depending on experience                      

Contract: Fixed Term 12 months

Start Date: 1st December 2025

Hours: Full-Time or Part-Time Pro Rata (5 or 4 days per week)                        

The Role

The Business Manager is a senior, cross-cutting role, working in close partnership with FILE’s Senior Leadership Team (SLT) to enable and enhance strategic alignment, organisational effectiveness, and cross-functional collaboration. This role balances strategic insight with operational excellence, ensuring the SLT works as effectively as possible while driving delivery on organisational priorities.

This is a highly facilitative, cross functional role requiring exceptional judgement, communication, and organisational skills. It operates with a birds-eye, systems level view of the organisation, acting as the connective tissue that keeps the SLT aligned. The role balances a forward-looking strategic perspective with hands on operational execution. The postholder will work across teams to identify challenges and opportunities, manage critical projects, facilitate decision-making, and champion a culture of transparency, collaboration, and accountability.

Key Responsibilities

1.    Strategic Partner to Senior Leadership Team: Work with the SLT as a thought partner to drive clarity, alignment, and execution on organisational priorities, including planning cycles, workflow management, and organisational performance reviews.

2.    Operational Leadership and Execution (SLT): Lead operational cadences (SLT meetings, offsites, quarterly reviews, and strategic planning sessions) and manage cross-functional initiatives and projects. In 2026 this will include supporting the development of FILE’s 2027-2030 organisational strategy.

3.    Confidential & Complex Decision Support: Handle highly confidential issues such as legal, financial, or organisational change initiatives with discretion and maturity. Provide quality recommendations to support complex and confidential decision making.

4.    Support Team Leadership & People Management: Manage, empower and develop the Executive Assistant team, ensuring strong support for the SLT and fostering a collaborative, high performing leadership culture.

5.    Cross-Functional Coordination and Collaboration: Enable effective communication and coordination across teams, ensuring alignment and follow through on organisational priorities.

About you

We know that long lists of criteria can be discouraging and that some candidates will not apply for a role unless they feel they feel they meet all of the criteria. If you feel you meet at least some of the essential criteria, we still encourage you to apply.

We also recognise that skills and experience can be gained in unexpected places, so we welcome applications from candidates who feel they have relevant skills for the role, gained from a wide range of professional, lived and learned experiences.

·       Confidential and Sensitive Information Handling - Deals with legal, financial and organisational issues at a sensitive level, requiring discretion and maturity. Autonomy is high, but final accountability rests with SLT/Executive Director.

·       Project & Program Management - Manages cross-functional projects end to end coordinating stakeholders and reporting to SLT.

·       Change & Risk management - Handles change initiatives and risks, providing recommendations. Requires high judgement, though execution shared with others.

·       Team Leadership & People Management - Directly leads and manages a team of Executive Assistants.

·       Strategic Thinking and Judgement - Acts as thought partner to SLT, anticipating issues and preparing options. Must balance strategic insight with operational detail.

·       Collaboration & Stakeholder Management - Builds strong relationships with SLT and wider teams, ensuring alignment and transparency.

·       Adaptability & Resilience - Works across strategy, operations and leadership, often shifting between priorities according to organisational need. Must thrive under pressure and complexity.

·       Justice, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion - Helping embed JEDI principles into policies and practices and acting as a role model for inclusive behaviours.

About FILE

The Foundation for International Law for the Environment (FILE) is a not-for-profit philanthropic organisation working to accelerate legal action on climate change. 

Through grant-making and in-house legal expertise, we empower our partners to deliver strategic, innovative legal interventions and we support lawyers in their own countries to bring their own cases. 

Legal action can unlock the systemic changes in finance, policy and social systems needed to protect all of us from climate change. The power of the law is both direct (changing policy and practice) and indirect (signalling the wider shifts taking place across these systems).

FILE is a ‘regrantor’ - this means we do not bring legal action in our own name. We receive grants from our philanthropic donors and make onwards grants to partners who align with FILE’s charitable aims and purposes. We do not seek to make any profit from our activities either in a relevant financial year or in the longer term.

Location

We are advertising this role for candidates based (and with the right to work) in the UK.

Working for FILE

FILE is a collaborative community of individuals who share a passion for climate, nature, and justice. We bring together knowledge and experience to support our mission.

Our people are empowered to lead their work both individually and as part of a wider team in order to make impactful change. As a relatively young organisation with the ambitious mission to change global systems, our roles are ideally suited to those who are strategic, innovative and collaborative, and open to growing in line with the Foundation.

FILE is committed to challenging systemic injustice. Our ability to do so is strengthened by the diversity of our partners and staff. Our mission, work and impact is global, with staff and partners from across the world and a range of lived experiences. We are actively working to create a culture where colleagues feel welcomed, heard and supported to succeed and thrive.

How FILE supports its staff

FILE is committed to creating a workplace that supports our staff to do their best work and develop professionally. FILE offers a generous annual leave policy and additional time-off work to support wellbeing. Amongst other benefits, FILE offers private healthcare, enhanced maternity, paternity and shared parental leave, enhanced sick leave, flexibility working remotely and also abroad and a matching contribution to a pension scheme.

Applications

Please apply on our website and upload your CV. This role is open for applications immediately and we accept applications on a rolling basis. If you are interested, we encourage you to submit your application as early as possible. The role will be closing on the 28th of October. 

Representation and Culture

FILE recognises the under-representation of historically marginalized communities and individuals in climate, nature and philanthropy spaces. We are committed to developing an organization that represents the world we are looking to protect and building a culture that supports such.

In doing so, FILE is committed to building policies and practices that ensure no current or prospective employee is discriminated based on disability, sex, sexual orientation, pregnancy and maternity, race or ethnicity, religion or belief, gender identity, or marriage and civil partnership.