Are you known for thinking deeply about how to run effective organizations in a way that is equitable and sustainable? Do colleagues come to you for advice on management challenges? Do you often find yourself trying to distill complex ideas into simple, actionable frameworks? If so, read on: The Management Center (TMC) is hiring a VP of Content and Communications. We’re looking for someone who can help pull together rigorously thought-out and easily accessible ideas, develop tools and resources to teach those ideas, and strategize to share those resources with our clients and the broader social change world.
Who We Are
Our mission is to help social change leaders learn how to build and run organizations effectively, equitably, and sustainably so that they can deliver exceptional results towards their missions. Founded in 2006, we’re now a 45+ person, $10 million organization. We've helped shape the practices of hundreds of influential organizations and thousands of individual managers, with a particular focus on social justice and educational equity organizations. Our clients work on critical issues, like advocating for educational equity, promoting immigration reform, fighting for racial, economic and gender justice, and protecting voting rights. We aim to help them by making their organizations as effective as possible, by providing coaching, training, and resources for the broader field.
We work hard to deliver services that produce high levels of client satisfaction, which has enabled us to grow by word of mouth. We hope to increase our impact and reach by creating better resources and new products to make our lessons stick so that it is easier for our staff and our clients to do their work. Given the environmental, political, economic, and social state of our world, we feel tremendous urgency to make all of our resources and work as powerful, accessible, and aligned with our commitment to antiracism as possible.
Our small-but-mighty Content team is responsible for wrangling and developing the best thinking, practices, and frameworks for managing towards a more just world. In partnership and consultation with our colleagues, we create tools and resources to operationalize ideas and practices for running more effective, equitable, and sustainable organizations.
What You’ll Do
Although the job title has “communications” in it, the majority of your work will be focused on developing and editing (mostly written, for now) content. A smaller percentage will be spent on general marketing and communications work.
1. Create and curate content -- approximately 50% of your time
- You’ll create and curate tools and articles on management topics to help managers and leaders of social justice and educational equity organizations address complex management challenges in alignment with TMC’s approach, which blends a commitment to antiracism, a deep belief in the power of relationships, and a drive for getting results. You’ll use an inclusive process of collaborating with, getting input from, and testing content with other TMC staff.
- You’ll support our educational equity sector team to create and publish tools and resources specifically for educational leaders.
2. Drive TMC’s external communications -- approximately 25% of your time
- You will manage our external communications, including our website, newsletter and other email communications, and social media.
- You will help build our organizational brand and develop our marketing strategy.
3. Other stuff -- approximately 25% of your time
- You will support team initiatives, cross-team collaborations and communication, and other activities that contribute to the growth and maintenance of the content team. This may include: supporting the production of internal written work products, engaging in or conducting product experiments, co-creating our “knowledge-building agenda” and revamping our internal content repositories, and systems.
- You’ll field internal and external content-related inquiries and requests.
If you were here right now, you might be working on projects like the following:
- Figuring out how to adapt and repackage our existing content on performance evaluations to support managers navigating the COVID-19 pandemic, an election year, and an uprising against anti-Black racism and white supremacy;
- Updating our written tools and resources to match our latest Crash Course content;
- Supporting the development of a framework to teach relationship- and trust-building in management with an antiracist approach;
- Making a plan to revamp our website in 2021; and
- Working with the Chief Content Officer on our content creation and dissemination strategy for the rest of 2020.
You will report to our Chief Content Officer, Monna Wong, who will measure your success both by the quantity and quality of content that you develop and the extent to which your process builds relationships, alignment, and equity internally.
Who You Are
To be successful in this job, you will excel in five areas:
- Management alignment and insight: You will have a demonstrated track record of success in managing a diverse, high-performing organization, department, or team; bring an understanding of what it takes to produce results using an antiracist and intersectional approach; have instincts for going beyond the “textbook” to get to solutions; and be able to empathize with the senior leader (executive director, principal, superintendent, etc.) perspective and what it’s like to be in a senior management role.
- Critical thinking: You quickly grasp the subtleties of issues and come up with insightful and pragmatic ways to address them. You bring a healthy skepticism to conventional wisdom and can move past 101-level advice to focus on the highest-impact practices. You are able to identify patterns in the challenges our clients are facing and lead the development of breakthrough ideas to solve them.
- Commitment to antiracism and experience in centering racial and gender equity and inclusion: You have the ability to advance our thinking on management with practicing antiracism as a core part of the approach. You can do this because you draw on personal experience combating white supremacy, racism, and other interconnecting systems of oppression, particularly in the workplace, such as through: managing racially diverse teams to great results, creating inclusive cultures where all members thrive, developing equitable processes and policies, and building strong relationships across lines of identity and power.
- Compelling design, writing and editing: You can design resources that are easy-to-use, simple, concrete, friendly, and accessible to all. You are keenly aware of the power of language, and how different words can land on different audiences. You may not have the word “writer” or “editor” in a previous job title, but you write fluidly and can master our “voice” (friendly, down-to-earth, and knowledgeable) and can edit a document to do the same.
- Interpersonal skills: You may not be the life of every—or any—party, but you are able to build relationships and engage effectively with a talented, opinionated, and diverse group of team members, as well as external stakeholders. You communicate clearly and compassionately and are flexible and collaborative in your work. You demonstrate self-awareness about how your identities may influence how you show up, interact with, and are perceived by others.
We are more interested in these qualities than in any particular type of experience (including professional writing experience). You do need to understand and empathize deeply with our clients’ challenges, which means that you have real experience as a manager in the educational equity, progressive advocacy, or broader nonprofit arenas, including at least one significant stint as a senior executive within an organization. You will add to our culture, which we like to think blends excellence with heart (and a keen sense of humor helps). Because part of your job will include supporting our educational equity team with content development, you would ideally bring experience managing in an education setting (school leadership, central/network office) as well as in progressive and/or education nonprofits.
What Else You Should Know
The position is full-time and remotely based anywhere in the United States.
This role is at our Vice President level. The full-time salary range is between $91,800 and $128,520, with exact salary depending on experience and new staff rarely starting at the top of the range.
We also offer excellent benefits, including a trans and gender non-binary health fund and an additional 5% employer contribution to your retirement fund with no match required.
We are an equal opportunity employer, are committed to racial equity and social justice, and we make a particular effort to recruit people who identify as Black, Indigenous, and people of color to apply for open positions.