The Senior Managing Director, Network Building will help establish a world-class Systems Learning Lab (“the Lab”) that fuels learning for Teach For America’s 51 regions and keeps the organization on the vanguard of educational innovation. In this role, you will lead the Lab’s work with Teach For America’s 50,000+ alumni, identifying ways to accelerate the Lab regions’ “big bets” by engaging and activating experts and practitioners from across the network. These engagements will simultaneously advance our regions’ innovations and strengthen the affinity of our alumni towards Teach For America. Your work will be split fairly evenly between the art of building relationships and the science of strategically activating those relationships to create impact. The ideal candidate operates as a “talent maven”: possessing on obsession for pipelining talented individuals into roles where they can uniquely drive impact; exhibiting deep curiosity by asking great questions, pulling people in, and making them feel heard; and exuding a passion for both the systems change and reinvention missions of the Lab that brings others on board.
Within the Lab, you will collaborate with a top-notch team of intrapreneurs who are charting the future direction of Teach For America. This is a unique opportunity for a creative, strategic, and well-organized relationship-builder and communicator to help Teach For America live into its aspiration as a learning, network-driven organization. You will report to the Vice President, Chief Talent & Strategy Officer, and collaborate with regional Executive Directors, regional community leaders, and other internal and external stakeholders.
The SMD, Network Building has several essential responsibilities:
Build deep relationships across our broad alumni network (45%)
- Apply a “talent maven” approach to TFA’s alumni network, building relationships with change makers in various sectors and geographies who could both add value to Lab regions and gain real value/satisfaction by engaging with us
- Build champions for our systems impact & reinvention work by compellingly articulating the purpose of the Lab in ways that spur deeper engagement
- Strengthen overall alumni engagement with TFA by ensuring their work is seen/valued by the organization, regardless of their sector/function
Activate our national alumni network to create impact in Lab regions (45%)
- Understand and internalize the individual and collective roles our corps members and alumni ought to play to most contribute to the drivers of educational progress needed in each region
- Identify alumni and contexts nationally from which Lab regions can learn as they aim to advance their “big bets”
- Facilitate connections between Lab regions and the alumni who can accelerate their innovations (aligned with answers to Strategic Clarity Questions 4-6)
Provide organizational leadership (10%)
- Liaise with non-Lab national and regional teams, including as the Lab’s conduit to the Collective Leadership and Engagement team, to accelerate the Lab’s work and create impact for Teach For America
- Serve as a cultural leader on the team, be a daily model of Teach For America’s core values, and deepen understanding of our regional visions for impact and reinvention
- Operate as an unwavering team player, willing to jump in and help for the benefit of the collective team, even if not technically included in job description
- 6+ years of exceptional performance in externally-facing roles (recruitment, sales, etc)
- Teaching experience or other experience at schools sites highly preferred
- Thrives on feedback and hungry to continually learn, improve, and help others grow
- Embodies conviction around Teach For America’s mission and Theory of Change and exemplifies TFA’s core values; holds deep belief that educational inequity is a massive, urgent injustice, TFA plays a crucial role in the long-term fight for change, and we need to enlist as many outstanding, diverse leaders as we can to join the corps
- Ability to build and maintain strong relationships with leaders across an organization and operate with utmost cultural competence, integrity, ethics, maturity, discretion, confidence, and respect and humility
- Is outcomes-oriented and driven to maximize impact against measurable goals
- Ability to drive cross-functional change by working collaboratively in dynamic organizational environments
- Thinks strategically, using data to make timely and informed decisions to prioritize actions that matter most and have the greatest impact
- Strong self-awareness and always seeks to grow and improve - reflect on successes/failures, seek feedback, incorporate feedback immediately to improve, ask for the help or resources they need to be successful, and assume personal responsibility for growth
- Thrives in an entrepreneurial, fast-paced, diverse, results-oriented environment
- Manages complex, long-term projects with strong organization and orientation to details
- Possesses exemplary verbal, visual, and written communication skills, including an ability to communicate ideas to others clearly, simply, and compellingly, as a strong storyteller who constructs a narrative for a variety of audiences at all levels and in a variety of contexts
Work Demands
- Working with colleagues across the country leveraging remote technologies (e.g. phone, video conference)
- Ability to travel to in-person meetings in various U.S. cities (up to 50% of time)
- Willingness to work some weekends and evenings