Teach For America’s Systems Learning Lab (“the Lab”) seeks a Vice President, Chief Talent and Strategy Officer (CTSO) to play a critical role in creating and bringing to life the systems/strategies that will drive operational and talent excellence. The CTSO will build the foundation upon which the Lab itself and its regions will be able to pursue systems impact and reinvention. The CTSO will directly manage a small team focused on talent and adult learning but will also be charged with accelerating the growth and development of all Lab staff and the leadership teams, including Executive Directors (EDs), of the Lab’s regions. The CTSO will report directly to the Co-Founder of the Systems Impact & Reinvention Lab and collaborate closely with other leaders within the Lab, our regions, and across our national organization.
Areas of Responsibility:
Develop and execute a strategy for the Lab’s operational excellence (45%)
- Drive alignment from the Lab’s top-level vision through every layer of execution with the Lab’s central operations & with individual regions’ work, while incorporating “bottom-up” inputs that can refine our overall vision
- Develop the systems/structures that will provide a foundation of operational excellence for the Lab as a unit and for each of its two sides
- Determine the relationship between the regions in the Lab & other TFA regions so that we both live into a “one TFA” mindset and allow the Lab the nimbleness to experiment and learn while driving exceptional results for students
- Establish measures of success for the regions in the Lab and create systems/processes to hold a high bar for accountability
- Identify how the two sides of the Lab can most effectively “talk to each other” and install communication structures that allow for rapid learning/iteration at all levels
- Identify how to most effectively share Lab learnings with the rest of the organization – and potentially with external audiences
Develop and execute a talent strategy for the Lab (45%)
- Lead hiring and talent development for the Lab while building/strengthening the culture of this ~16-person team
- Identify the key skills/mindsets an ED must have to excel in each side of the Lab while learning from our most successful EDs and coaching others towards this profile
- Determine what’s needed to develop an ambidextrous regional team – one able to drive stronger results in our existing model while also pursuing new ways of operating/innovating
- Understand and mitigate the various potential regional crises that could prevent teams from operating in ambidextrous ways and progressing towards reinvention
- Develop and provide coaching/training for all people managers in the Lab to mitigate crises related to manager competence, while exploring how to design jobs and reporting lines to introduce more peer-to-peer accountability
- Coach regional leadership members (i.e. those who lead functions) to build capacity that frees up EDs to pursue reinvention
- Institute and model a culture where learning and iterating is more important than perfectionism
Provide organizational leadership and management (10%)
- Manage 2-4 full-time staff in the talent and adult learning space
- 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
- Collaborate with and learn from national teams to accelerate the Lab’s work and create impact for Teach For America
Educational Background:
Bachelor’s degree required; relevant advanced degree strongly preferred but not required
Skills/Experience:
- 10+ years of exceptional performance in strategy, operations, and talent functions
- Teach For America staff experience strongly preferred
- Experience at schools sites and/or teacher development/coaching preferred
- 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
- Ability to drive cross-functional change by working collaboratively in dynamic organizational environments
- Possesses exemplary verbal and written communication skills, including an ability to communicate ideas to others clearly, simply, and compellingly, as a strong storyteller
- Strong self-awareness and ability to independently self-reflect
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 25% of time)
- Willingness to work some weekends and evenings
- Participate in staff-wide responsibilities, such as the selection of prospective corps members
Job Function:
Organization Info
Listing Stats
Post Date:
May 10 2019
Active Until:
Jun 10 2019
Hiring Organization:
Teach For America
industry:
Nonprofit