Head of HR MENA

About us

With over 200 brands sold in nearly 180 countries, we're the world's leading premium drinks company. Bring your passion and use your curiosity as you explore, collaborate, and innovate to build brands consumers love. Together with passionate people from all over the world, you'll test new ideas, learn and grow, and unlock a brighter, more exciting future.

Join us to create a career worth celebrating.

About the Function:

Our Human Resources (HR) team bring brilliant people together to help us continue building iconic brands. We harness the diverse talents of our people to help them excel. We champion an inclusive and collaborative culture, where all voices and perspectives are celebrated and valued.

HR is at the heart of markets around the world, finding and developing talent that will unearth new ideas and inspire innovation. From creative problem solvers and entrepreneurs to scientists and engineers - whatever your experience and ideas, we'll help you to harness your talents, empowering you to be the best you can be.

About the role:

The Head of HR for Diageo MENA provides strategic people leadership across one of Diageo's most complex, volatile, and high growth regions globally. The role is accountable for shaping and delivering the MENA people and organization strategy to enable sustainable business performance, resilience, and long-term growth within a sensitive Total Beverage Alcohol (TBA) environment. With the evolving MENA landscape, the Head of HR plays a critical role in ensuring Diageo has the leadership, capability, culture, and organizational agility required to unlock growth opportunities while managing risk with integrity and care. As a trusted advisor to the MENA Leadership Team, the role balances deep regional insight with enterprise thinking, ensuring Diageo's global people agenda is thoughtfully adapted to local realities.

• Translate commercial and strategic priorities into impactful people, capability, and organization strategies
• Anticipate external market shifts, including regulatory, cultural, geopolitical, and consumer changes, and proactively align the people agenda to support evolving business model
• Act as a core member of the MENA Leadership Team and provide strategic counsel to senior leaders on organizational design, leadership effectiveness, and workforce planning

• Own end-to-end talent strategy for the region, including succession planning, leadership development, and critical capability building
• Build strong local talent pipelines while enabling cross-market and cross-functional mobility to develop diverse, future-ready leaders with multi-market experience
• Partner with Global Talent and Learning CoEs to deploy enterprise programmes with regional relevance

• Champion Diageo's purpose, values, and performance culture across a highly diverse region
• Drive inclusion and diversity strategies that respect cultural and religious contexts while reinforcing Diageo's global I&D commitments
• Foster high engagement, trust, and belonging across all markets, including complex and remote operating environments

• Lead organization design and transformation initiatives to ensure agility amid regulatory, and market changes
• Enable disciplined and empathetic change management, supporting leaders and teams through periods of volatility and ambiguity, and strengthen organizational resilience and readiness for growth and transformation

• Ensure reward, performance, and recognition frameworks are competitive, equitable, and compliant with local legislation while aligned to Diageo's global standards

• Collaborate effectively with HR Centres of Excellence (HR Operations, Talent, Reward, Learning) to deliver consistent, high-quality people solutions and for positive colleague experience
• Act as the voice of the MENA region in global HR forums, ensuring regional insights inform enterprise-wide policy, talent, and organizational decisions

• Senior HR leader with significant experience operating in multinational, matrixed organisations, ideally within emerging or highly regulated markets
• Demonstrated expertise in employment legislation, labour relations, compliance, and risk management across multiple jurisdictions
• Strong strategic capability, with the ability to connect people initiatives to commercial outcomes and business performance
• Proven change leader with experience navigating complexity, ambiguity, and transformation at scale
• Exceptional stakeholder management, influencing, and communication skills, with the credibility to partner effectively with senior executives
• Highly self-driven, resilient, and solutions-oriented, operating with integrity, discretion, and sound judgement