HR Business Leader - Global R&D

Welcome to Haleon. We’re a purpose-driven, world-class consumer company putting everyday health in the hands of millions. In just three years since our launch, we’ve grown, evolved and are now entering an exciting new chapter – one filled with bold ambitions and enormous opportunity.

Our trusted portfolio of brands – including Sensodyne®, Panadol®, Advil®, Voltaren®, Theraflu®, Otrivin®, and Centrum® – lead in resilient and growing categories. What sets us apart is our unique blend of deep human understanding and trusted science.

Now it’s time to fully realise the full potential of our business and our people. We do this through our Win as One strategy. It puts our purpose – to deliver better everyday health with humanity – at the heart of everything we do. It unites us, inspires us, and challenges us to be better every day, driven by our agile, performance-focused culture.

Role Summary

The HR Business Leader (HRBL) partnering the China, APAC & India Sub-Continent (ISC) and MEA Operating Units works with the China, APAC & ISC and MEA R&D Heads (and their R&D Category Leadership Teams). The HRBL is a strategic partner, accountable for shaping the organisational, leadership and talent conditions required to accelerate innovation and growth.

Lead with an enterprise mindset and create connections beyond functional boundaries to identify opportunities to enhance business performance and growth, through organisation effectiveness, strategic workforce planning, talent, capability and culture. Reporting to and working alongside with the Head of HR for Global R&D, the role acts as a trusted adviser, challenging leaders to think differently about how they organise, develop and deploy talent and enable future ready capabilities. This role plays a critical role to lead the R&D Talent transformation programme and ensuring that R&D has the leadership, talent and organisational effectiveness required in these areas to deliver Haleon's strategic ambitions.

The HRBL provides a strategic partnership to senior RDLT leaders, contributing to delivering Haleon’s growth ambition and value creation.

The role is accountable for:

 1.    Translating business priorities into integrated talent, capability, organisation, and workforce plan

2.    Improving business performance and shaping culture.

3.    Serving as a key member of the assigned RDLT Senior leaders’ leadership teams, challenging and coaching leaders to lead with enterprise growth mindset and build strong and effective teams.

Key responsibilities

With reference to R&D China, APAC & ISC, and MEA Operating Units, the HR Business Leader will:

1.    Drive the effective implementation of enterprise-wide operating models and organizational design strategies, including support to the change management programme. Specifically, support and enable the Growth Acceleration plans for China and India with clear people agenda priorities.

2.    Translate and embed the strategic workforce and capability plans within the business by leveraging synergies across R&D categories, OUs and Enabling functions. Proactively build the pipeline for critical, scarce and breakthrough capabilities to support the local for local, local for global and global for local business opportunities.

3.    Partner with senior leaders to raise the performance bar, strengthen leadership accountability and cultivate a culture of high performance, growth and continues improvement

4.    Drive the execution and embedding of enterprise-wide succession planning and talent pipeline strategies for flagged and critical leadership roles – spearheading the talent review and succession planning for senior roles in the assigned areas in R&D.

5.    Act as a trusted advisor. coach and challenger to RDLT senior leaders, providing thought leadership, bringing external insights and challenging a wider enterprise perspective.

6.    Raise the talent bar, especially on key leadership position influencing leaders to make bold, high-quality talent decisions, ensuring strong leadership pipelines, differentiated talent outcomes and succession for critical roles.

7.    Drive culture change, acting as a change leader to create a consumer-first, performance-oriented, and agile culture.

8.    Partner with Head of HR R&D and work as One HR team with People Solutions and specialist CoE teams to deliver better employee experience, mitigate enterprise-level risk and inform policy refinement.

About you

Essential

• Strategic & Business Acumen: Strong business and financial literacy, with a deep understanding of the business model, market, and competitive context.
• Enterprise-first mindset: Proven experience balancing local business needs with broader Global Functional and Haleon priorities.
• Leadership & Influence : Credible and confident strategic partner and trusted advisor, able to influence senior leaders with strong level of ownership, navigate complexity and ambiguity, and maintain focus on delivering organisational and business outcomes.
• Systems thinking: Proven ability to identify patterns, interdependencies and opportunities across multiple teams and functions to drive greater organisational value.
• Change Leadership: Proven skills to lead complex organisational change, manage communications, and embed new ways of working with courage.
• Collaboration: A collaborative matrix HRBL who works in an integrated way with CoE and People Solutions expertise to deliver results with One HR team mindset.
• Data Literacy: Strong analytical capability and data literacy to inform decision-making and demonstrate the value of interventions.

Preferred

• Experience in a global, matrixed organization, or in high complexity markets, creating connections across teams and enhancing knowledge sharing.
• Experience in building high performing teams and performance-driven culture.
• Experience or interest in driving R&D (or global functions) talent and capability agendas in complex, global environments (CPG preferred) with deep understanding of consumer-centricity combining external perspectives to elevate  conventional thinking about what great talent and capability looks like.
• Ability to work with cultural nuances and diverse market labour relations contexts.
• Experience in actively leading digital and AI adoption within HR and the wider business.

 Job Posting End Date

2026-11-30

Equal Opportunities

Haleon are committed to mobilising our purpose in a way that represents the diverse consumers and communities who rely on our brands every day. It guides us in creating an inclusive culture, where different backgrounds and views are valued and respected – all in support of understanding and best serving the needs of our consumers and unleashing the full potential of our people. It’s important to us that Haleon is a place where all our employees feel they truly belong.

During the application process, we may ask you to share some personal information, which is entirely voluntary. This information ensures we meet certain regulatory and reporting obligations and supports the development, refinement, and execution of our inclusion and belonging programmes that are open to all Haleon employees. 

The personal information you provide will be kept confidential, used only for legitimate business purposes, and will never be used in making any employment decisions, including hiring decisions.

Adjustment or Accommodations Request

If you require a reasonable adjustment or accommodation or other assistance to apply for a job at Haleon at any stage of the application process, please let your recruiter know by providing them with a description of specific adjustments you are requesting. We’ll provide all reasonable adjustments to support you throughout the recruitment process and treat all information you provide us in confidence. 

Note to candidates

The Haleon recruitment team will contact you using a Haleon email account (@haleon.com). If you are not sure whether the email you received is from Haleon, please get in touch.