DairyNZ’s story
Progressing a positive future for New Zealand dairy farming Te whanake anamata angitu mō ngā pāmu kau o Aotearoa
We are full of people who have a passion for doing good and creating positive change. We leverage our collective strength by bringing the dairy sector together, helping farmers build more sustainable, profitable and resilient farm businesses, because a strong dairy sector means a strong New Zealand.
Your opportunity
We are looking for a strong and inspirational people leader with a proven track record of driving high performance to lead and manage our farmer facing Regional Teams. This is where the ‘rubber hits the road’, delivering the ‘in person’ elements of DairyNZ’s strategic programmes and maintaining a visible, trusted and influential presence within dairy farming communities across New Zealand.
Our Regional Teams include our farmer facing and event management teams, ensuring our events and interactions have as much reach as possible and enhancing farmer access to our great knowledge, tools and resources. This is a critical role, ensuring DairyNZ’s presence across NZ enhances our ability to deliver our strategy, facilitating the sharing of farmer know-how and our research, science and solutions. The ability to skilfully influence outcomes, facilitate change through the cooperative sharing of knowledge, reach and engage meaningfully with farmers and successfully manage a variety of stakeholder relationships will be critical to the success of the role. This role needs to foster strong cross-functional collaboration?across DairyNZ, working closely with the Head of Farmer Communications and Programme Leads to ensure consistent, targeted messaging that amplifies impact and aligns with strategic priorities.
As part of the Farm Solutions & Policy Team, this position will also contribute to business unit decision making and provide strategic input, including flow of information regarding farmer needs and supporting emerging issues from regions.
About you
As an inspirational leader, you’ll know the importance of creating the right environment for our people to perform at their best, able to translate our strategy into actions for this team and motivate to deliver impact for our farmers. With your farm systems and/or behaviour change understanding, you are able to ‘connect the dots’ for our people, our farmers and our partners and provide subject matter expertise for our operations.
We’d love to hear from you if you:
- Have extensive experience of leading, inspiring and managing remote teams.
- Have experience in translating strategy into action, setting quality KPIs and adjusting plans as needs change.
- Are a skilled relationship builder, have credibility and able to influence internally as well as in our communities, with our farmers and with stakeholders.
- Are a change agent, champion the need for agility and a forward thinking culture.
- Extensive experience in a customer focussed role in agribusiness and/or sales/behaviour change
- Are a critical thinker, can evaluate problems, gather information, understand causes, and identify best possible solutions.
A primary industry background is critical for this appointment, preferably within dairy. Click here to view the position description. Applications close 24th August 2025 at 11:55pm