As the Senior Vice President, Org-Wide Learning and Strategy (OWLS), you will lead Teach For America’s organizational learning vision and lead the OWLS team in supporting that vision. You are ultimately responsible for driving learning and improvement across the organization and community by community, ensuring that we are getting better at our work at every level.
You will work with stakeholders across the organization to set Teach For America’s learning agenda and then operationalize this across the network, including division of responsibilities and interaction processes with all other teams. You will set the vision, direction, and strategy for the 40-person OWLS team and manage the 4 subteam leaders toward execution of the learning agenda. You will represent TFA with critical external stakeholders (e.g., funders, external thought leaders, etc.) and in key external forums (e.g., conferences, working groups, etc.) on topics related to organizational learning, research, data, and knowledge management.
You are a distinctive thought leader and people leader with the ability to recognize, define, disentangle, and solve highly complex systems-level problems; communicate effectively with a wide range of audiences; manage complex teams and processes; build strong relationships and work effectively across lines of difference and lines of organizational authority; and operate with ease with influential leaders, both internally and externally.
The SVP, Org-Wide Learning and Strategy reports directly to the Executive Vice President, Chief Operations and Program Officer and serves as a member of TFA’s Executive Leadership Team.
As an expert in research-driven and learner-centered organizational learning, you will:
- Spark and facilitate our ongoing organizational discussion around what it means to be a learning organization
- Guide and oversee research and analysis to drive organizational learning
- Ensure that the organization uses data thoughtfully and effectively at every level
- Open up the learning ecosystem of the organization by building and maintaining external lines of communication, relationships, and partnerships to ensure that TFA can access world-class, cutting-edge thinking and share what we learn with others
- Represent and communicate our organizational learning vision internally and externally
As the leader of the 40-person OWLS team, you will:
- Drive and evolve the vision for the OWLS team and the structures and processes that enable the team to lead and support the entire organization
- Attract, develop, and retain the diverse and distinctive talent that is needed to the propel the work of the team forward
- Lead the team with wisdom, creativity, purpose, and clarity
- Ensure that the team is a welcoming and inclusive environment that draws upon a diverse range of voices and perspectives
- Directly manage a chief of staff and 4 vice-president level subject matter experts in data, reporting & insights; adult learning; knowledge management; external research; and internal learning and innovation and coach them toward achieving ambitious outcomes with their respective teams
Mindsets and Approach to Leadership
- You deeply believe education is an essential lever in the effort to expand human and civil rights and believe Teach For America is vital to continued progress. You are a constant learner, obsessed with understanding the multiple dimensions of education reform success and failures, past and present, in communities across the country. You can speak firsthand and with conviction to the power and potential of the individual and collective impact of this leadership force, understand the lessons learned in pursuing our theory of change over time, and can connect these to the trajectory of education reform more broadly.
- You enjoy and are very good at problem solving and helping others to solve problems. You easily identify patterns in various types of data and often identify new and different solutions to challenges. While not directly responsible for conducting research and analyzing data, you are comfortable with and capable of guiding and managing others in this work. You are data-driven but realize that movement building is people-centered work and know to follow the head and when to follow the heart.
- You are passionate about continuous improvement and learning and bring both skill and curiosity to our learning theory, design, and continuous improvement efforts.
- You have the passion and skill to drive change across a large, complex, organization.
- You strive to understand and illuminate the root causes of educational equity and are thoughtful about how research and data has the potential to either dismantle or perpetuate systems of oppression.
- You are a servant leader. Even though much of your work is done with others and through collaboration, you assume personal responsibility for progress. You enjoy seeing others thrive. You create clarity in ambiguity, embrace tension and challenge as a necessary product of rigorous debate, and can disagree and then commit wholeheartedly. You help teams and teammates become the best versions possible.
- You are effective with varying audiences and constituents; you are comfortable in a classroom in a high poverty community and in a boardroom of a major corporation.
- Clear evidence of training, experience, and/or ability to manage in the areas of research, organizational learning, data science, statistics, etc.
- Proven impact in organizational learning rooted in research, analytics, knowledge management, adult learning
- Minimum of 10 years of professional work experience, deep experience with Teach for America preferred
- Prior team management experience required, including managing team execution through layers
Skills
- Demonstrated ability to build and foster strong relationships and team culture across many lines of difference
- Success in motivating people and networks to action
- Ability to build an inclusive, collaborative, and reflective performance culture, leading to achieving ambitious goals
- Highly organized, goal-oriented, and responsive.
- Effective management of a portfolio of complex projects
Work Demands
- Some weekend and evening work
- Ability to travel to in-person meetings in various US cities (approximately two times per month)
- Working virtually with colleagues who are based all over the country