Your Journey at Crowe Starts Here:
At Crowe, you can build a meaningful and rewarding career. With real flexibility to balance work with life moments, you're trusted to deliver results and make an impact. We embrace you for who you are, care for your well-being, and nurture your career. Everyone has equitable access to opportunities for career growth and leadership. Over our 80-year history, delivering excellent service through innovation has been a core part of our DNA across our audit, tax, and consulting groups. That's why we continuously invest in innovative ideas, such as AI-enabled insights and technology-powered solutions, to enhance our services. Join us at Crowe and embark on a career where you can help shape the future of our industry.
Job Description:
The Marketing Events Lead Assistant Director is responsible for leading the Event Lead team in planning, production, and operational delivery of a portfolio of complex, high-visibility, market-facing events while simultaneously managing their assigned events. This role combines hands-on event ownership with broader portfolio oversight, team leadership, stakeholder advising, and process improvement responsibilities.
The Event Lead Assistant Director serves as a trusted advisor and primary event partner for assigned business areas or strategic programs. The role translates business objectives into clear event strategies and detailed execution plans, establishes success criteria, manages budgets and resources, guides vendor and technology decisions, and oversees delivery from intake through post-event evaluation. The role independently leads assigned events and provides strategic direction, coaching, and quality review for Event Leads, Event Operations team members, subject matter experts, and other contributors.
This position contributes practical thought leadership to the event function by identifying trends, introducing scalable practices, improving the attendee experience, and recommending technology-enabled solutions. The Event Lead Assistant Director supports the Executive Operations and Events Leader in implementing function-wide standards, service expectations, governance, and reporting, but does not hold full accountability for the overall firmwide event strategy. The position requires excellent relationship building skills, conflict resolution experience, strong judgment, executive presence, project and financial management skills, and the ability to influence across a distributed professional services environment.
RESPONSIBILITIES:
Responsible for strategic and operational leadership of the Event Lead team and assigned programs.
Team Leadership
Lead, coach, and develop the Event Lead team, assigning work and resources based on business priorities, event complexity, capacity, and development opportunities.
Set clear expectations for roles, deliverables, timelines, quality, and decision-making, and hold team members and contributors accountable for results.
Provide day-to-day direction, feedback, quality review, and escalation support to Event Leads, Event Operations team members, contractors, vendors, and matrixed contributors.
Build a culture of collaboration, ownership, knowledge sharing, continuous improvement, and consistent execution across the Event Lead team.
Identify team capability gaps and development opportunities, providing targeted coaching, tools, resources, and process improvements.
Model strong executive presence, sound judgment, adaptability, and calm decision-making in complex or high-pressure situations.
Establish team priorities and resource deployment decisions based on business impact, complexity, risk, and capacity.
Support the Director of Executive Operations and Events with resource planning, portfolio reporting, team development, strategic initiatives, and implementation of the broader meetings and events roadmap.
Relationship Leadership & Influence- Serve as the escalation point for cross-collaboration teams, assigned accounts, leadership teams, and strategic programs.
Develop trusted advisor relationships with senior leaders, event sponsors, and cross-functional partners by demonstrating credibility, responsiveness, and sound business judgment.
Establish and maintain strong relationships and operating processes between the Event Lead team and Marketing, Sales, Communications, Finance, Procurement, Technology, Legal, Risk, and other critical event functions.
Influence decisions through clear recommendations, business @context, data, experience, and thoughtful assessment of risks and tradeoffs.
Navigate differing stakeholder priorities, resolve conflict, and facilitate productive conversations that result in clear decisions and shared accountability.
Anticipate stakeholder needs and concerns, proactively addressing issues before they affect relationships, timelines, or event delivery.
Maintain stakeholder trust by communicating risks, constraints, changes, and required decisions early and transparently.
Build relationships beyond individual events by developing a strong understanding of business priorities, stakeholder expectations, and recurring event needs.
Program Management
Lead a portfolio of complex, high-visibility, and high-risk events from concept through completion, accountable for quality, budget, risk, stakeholder satisfaction, and participant experience.
Translate business objectives into clear event strategies, success criteria, scope, roles, decision rights, and comprehensive project plans covering timelines, resources, logistics, technology, communications, risk, and measurement.
Balance concurrent event priorities, capacity, budgets, resources, and dependencies, proactively identifying risks, delivery gaps, and corrective actions.
Facilitate planning meetings, executive updates, and decision forums, clearly communicating status, risks, tradeoffs, recommendations, decisions, and required actions.
Lead vendor, venue, budget, forecast, contract coordination, and technology decisions, ensuring solutions meet business, financial, operational, and attendee experience requirements.
Direct pre-event readiness, live-event execution, contingency planning, issue resolution, and escalation management, making timely decisions as conditions change.
Ensure events comply with firm policies and applicable legal, insurance, health and safety, data privacy, contractual, and risk-management requirements.
Lead post-event evaluation and continuous improvement by measuring outcomes, synthesizing feedback, identifying trends, and translating lessons learned into scalable practices, standards, and process improvements.
LEADERSHIP SCOPE AND DECISION-MAKING:
Operates with substantial independence on assigned events and portfolios, escalating decisions that materially affect firmwide strategy, policy, reputation, or major financial commitments.
Leads through influence and matrixed teams; may assign work, provide coaching, review deliverables, and coordinate resources without formal direct-report responsibility.
Makes recommendations on event approach, vendors, technology, budget tradeoffs, risk mitigation, and resource deployment based on business objectives and established standards.
Acts as a bridge between event strategy and execution, converting firmwide direction into repeatable operating practices and bringing field insights back to function leadership.
LI-SAW #LI-Remote
QUALIFICATIONS:
Progressive corporate meeting and event planning, production, and logistics experience, ideally within professional services or another complex, matrixed organization.
Demonstrated success leading complex, high-profile events and managing multiple concurrent projects with significant budgets, stakeholders, vendors, and dependencies.
Strong project, p
