Associate Director – Global Thought Leader / External Engagement; Process Standards, Quality Framework & Compliance Enablement

At Lilly, we unite caring with discovery to make life better for people around the world. We are a global healthcare leader headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana. Our employees around the world work to discover and bring life-changing medicines to those who need them, improve the understanding and management of disease, and give back to our communities through philanthropy and volunteerism. We give our best effort to our work, and we put people first. We’re looking for people who are determined to make life better for people around the world.

Lilly’s mission is to improve patient outcomes. Engaging with External Experts—including Thought Leaders (TLs), Healthcare Professionals (HCPs), and other stakeholders—across the product lifecycle (development, launch, and commercialization) is essential to achieving this goal. Contracted and non-contracted engagements bring external insights and expertise into our work, helping to fuel innovation in patient care. Whether serving as investigators, advisors, developers, consultants, authors, or speakers, experts from around the world partner with Lilly to advance science for the ultimate benefit of patients.

To maximize the value of these external engagements, Lilly aims to deliver a coordinated, customer-centric experience that is consistent, transparent, and grounded in integrity. The Global Medical Affairs Office, Thought Leader External Engagement (TLEE) Center of Excellence is a global, centralized capability that strengthens Lilly operations by establishing enterprise standards and quality and compliance frameworks for external engagement. Through harmonized, practical processes, tools, governance models, and global training, TLEE enables faster, clearer, and more scalable engagement planning and execution across Global, IBU, and Affiliate teams—improving cross-functional visibility, reducing variability, and helping teams focus more time on the insights that advance our science and strategies. While the capability sits in Medical Affairs, TLEE partners broadly with Marketing, Medical, PRA, Corporate Affairs, Health Outcomes, Development/LRL, and enabling functions (e.g., Ethics & Compliance, Legal, Privacy, and Quality) to support globally coordinated engagements—serving as an enablement function for enterprise-wide external engagement.

Position Purpose

The Associate Director – Global Thought Leader External Engagement provides enterprise leadership for the definition, governance, and sustained adoption of global Thought Leader External Engagement (TLEE) process standards & quality frameworks, and compliance guardrails.

This role owns the global TLEE quality framework, ensuring consistent, inspection‑ready, and sustainable execution by translating policy, quality, and regulatory requirements into harmonized, executable workflows, governance models, and global training frameworks across Global, IBU, and Affiliate teams.

Operating as a horizontal capability leader, the role shapes how Thought Leader External Engagement is designed, governed, and enabled globally. The role partners closely with IBU and Global External Engagement teams, Ethics & Compliance, Legal, Privacy, Quality, and other functional areas to define and support how Lilly plans and executes meetings with external stakeholders. 

This role is critical to enabling a consistent, scalable, and compliant global external engagement model, ensuring Lilly teams can focus on generating high-quality insights that advance science and improve patient outcomes

Key Responsibilities:

Global Process Standards & Workflow Harmonization

• Define, maintain, and evolve global TLEE process standards (contracted and non-contracted) and operational guidance.
• Harmonize end‑to‑end workflows for Thought Leader identification, planning, engagement, documentation, and evaluation across Global, IBU, and Affiliate teams.
• Reduce unnecessary variation across regions and teams while respecting local regulatory and operational requirements.
• Translate policies, SOPs, and regulatory expectations into clear, role‑specific, executable guidance.

Quality Framework Ownership

• Design, maintain, and continuously improve the global TLEE quality framework.
• Ensure standards and workflows support inspection readiness, documentation integrity, and traceability.
• Embed quality expectations into governance models, training, and operational guidance to support sustainable, compliant execution at scale.
• Evolve how compliant insight capture informs future strategic enablement

Compliance Guardrails & Enablement

• Serve as a compliance enablement lead for Thought Leader External Engagement.
• Partner with Ethics & Compliance, Legal, Privacy, and Quality to interpret requirements and proactively mitigate risk through process clarity, standardization, and education.
• Act as a trusted advisor to leadership on process risk, consistency, and sustainability
• Lead authorship of new standards that compliantly evolve the impact of external engagement.

Governance & Decision Frameworks

• Establish and maintain governance models, including decision rights, RACI frameworks, escalation paths, and approval thresholds.
• Clarify ownership across Global, IBU, and Affiliate teams to enable efficient and compliant execution.
• Drive consistent application of standards through governance and enablement

Global Capability Enablement, Adoption & Continuous Improvement

• Operationalize TLEE process standards, quality frameworks, and compliance guardrails through a cohesive global training and adoption strategy.
• Partner with Medical Affairs Learning and Capability teams and existing IBU and Affiliate trainers to embed standards into onboarding, role‑based training, and continuous learning—designing and supporting train‑the‑trainer models that equip local teams for accountable deployment.
• Drive adoption at scale through toolkits, communications, training inputs, and structured feedback loops that connect field experience back to global standards.
• Define and advance how adoption, effectiveness, and standards evolution are tracked and measured—leveraging operational signals, quality indicators, compliance trends, and stakeholder feedback to inform continuous refinements
• Ensure training content and operational guidance remain current with evolving standards, quality expectations, and emerging risk areas to improve clarity, efficiency, and scalability across the enterprise.

Scope & Influence

• Enterprise‑level scope across Global, IBU, and Affiliate Thought Leader External Engagement teams.
• Shapes how Thought Leader engagement is governed, enabled, and quality‑assured globally.
• Operates as a capability and governance leader, not a specific therapeutic‑area or field‑execution owner.
• Leads centrally the definition and enablement of new standards to meet gaps and goals of global teams

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree with minimum 5 years' experience in Global Medical Affairs, Marketing, External Engagement, Quality, Compliance, or enterprise capability leadership roles.

• **"Qualified applicants must be authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis. Lilly will not provide support for or sponsor work authorization or visas for this role, including but not limited to F-1 CPT, F-1 OPT, F-1 STEM OPT, J-1, H-1B, TN, O-1, E-3, H-1B1, or L-1."

Preferred Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience defining global process standards, creating playbooks, quality frameworks, and governance models.
• Proven ability to influence- across functions, levels, and geographies without line authority.
• Experience in or partnering with Ethics & Compliance, Legal, Privacy, and Quality teams.
• Experience developing and deploying global training or train‑the‑trainer models.
• Strong systems thinking, change management, and stakeholder engagement capabilities.
• Experience operating in complex, global matrix organizations.
• Existing P4/P4-2 with proven delivery and influence with adjacent functions/scope

Travel0–10%, global

Lilly is dedicated to helping individuals with disabilities to actively engage in the workforce, ensuring equal opportunities when vying for positions. If you require accommodation to submit a resume for a position at Lilly, please complete the accommodation request form (https://careers.lilly.com/us/en/workplace-accommodation) for further assistance. Please note this is for individuals to request an accommodation as part of the application process and any other correspondence will not receive a response.

Lilly is proud to be an EEO Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of age, race, color, religion, gender identity, sex, gender expression, sexual orientation, genetic information, ancestry, national origin, protected veteran status, disability, or any other legally protected status.

Our employee resource groups (ERGs) offer strong support networks for their members and are open to all employees. Our current groups include: Africa, Middle East, Central Asia Network, Black Employees at Lilly, Chinese Culture Network, Japanese International Leadership Network (JILN), Lilly India Network, Organization of Latinx at Lilly (OLA), PRIDE (LGBTQ+ Allies), Veterans Leadership Network (VLN), Women’s Initiative for Leading at Lilly (WILL), enAble (for people with disabilities). Learn more about all of our groups.

Actual compensation will depend on a candidate’s education, experience, skills, and geographic location.  The anticipated wage for this position is

Full-time equivalent employees also will be eligible for a company bonus (depending, in part, on company and individual performance). In addition, Lilly offers a comprehensive benefit program to eligible employees, including eligibility to participate in a company-sponsored 401(k); pension; vacation benefits; eligibility for medical, dental, vision and prescription drug benefits; flexible benefits (e.g., healthcare and/or dependent day care flexible spending accounts); life insurance and death benefits; certain time off and leave of absence benefits; and well-being benefits (e.g., employee assistance program, fitness benefits, and employee clubs and activities).Lilly reserves the right to amend, modify, or terminate its compensation and benefit programs in its sole discretion and Lilly’s compensation practices and guidelines will apply regarding the details of any promotion or transfer of Lilly employees.

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