Performance & Development Lead (Fractional)

This role is about performance development, not performance management. It is about coaching Partners and Functional Leaders to develop their people well, giving every new joiner a genuine development runway from day one, and building the skills, frameworks and programmes that help people grow faster and more deliberately. The mandate is making sure people are developing, not just being assessed. Success in year one means Partners and Functional Leaders are more confident developing their people, people grow with real development evidence behind every promotion case, every new joiner is on a development runway from day one, and there is a live, skills-based framework people can see their growth against. The role sits in the People Team working with the Chief People Officer, the Reward Lead, and People Ops, and works closely with Partners and Functional Leaders across client and enablement teams.

Responsibilities

Feedback and check-in skills: build the skills behind how Unity gives and receives feedback, including people requesting feedback proactively, managers giving sharp and timely feedback, and structured check-in conversations; Learning programmes: design and curate professional and technical skills development that sits underneath the performance model, sourcing external providers where that is the better route and building internal content where it is not; Calibration and promotion readiness: help Partners and Functional Leaders build strong evidence for promotion and reward decisions, coaching on what good evidence looks like; Probation and onboarding: own onboarding and the probation experience so new joiners and their sponsors get real substance from day one; Performance tooling literacy: build firm-wide understanding of the modern performance tools Unity uses to connect strategy to individual accountability; Skills and progression frameworks: define skills and progression frameworks for client-facing and enablement tracks that map onto Unity's grading and progression criteria, working with the Reward Lead; Measurement: use data, not just attendance or completion rates, to track whether this work changes behaviour, and report to the CPO and Management Team

Requirements

Senior experience in people development, performance coaching or L&D, ideally somewhere with a strong, explicit growth philosophy rather than a generic annual-review cycle; Genuine comfort connecting development work to how Unity assesses and rewards performance, without this becoming a process-administration role; A strong instructional designer and facilitator, able to build and personally deliver programmes, not only commission them; Energised by growing people and building a development mindset into how they work, rather than running review mechanics or delivering content for its own sake; A pragmatic prioritiser, comfortable scoping ambitious work into 3 focused days a week and sequencing what matters most first; Confident coaching senior Partners and Directors on how to develop their people, not just how to assess them