The Management Center (TMC) is seeking an experienced manager to work with our clients – primarily executive directors and other senior managers of progressive advocacy organizations. You will lead coaching engagements and serve as a teacher / coach / trainer / nudge / confidante / advisor / thought-partner to client executives, with the aim of helping them build their teams into high performing organizations that deliver great results.
Ideal candidates won’t be lifelong consultants or necessarily have any consulting experience at all. Rather, we seek experienced senior managers (have held roles at senior levels of organizations, either as an executive director or second-in-command or as the head of a department) who have produced results and who have a passion for teaching other leaders from diverse backgrounds how to do the same.
Your job will be to instill the management practices that will help your nonprofit clients become high-performing organizations that deliver great results equitably and sustainably. You will work with CEOs and their senior teams to help them define ambitious goals; manage for execution; implement rigorous “people practices,” including selecting and retaining a diverse team of the best talent and letting go of people who don’t meet expectations; and build cultures that reinforce high performance, constant improvement, and values like equity and transparency.
At any given time, you will lead roughly three to five intensive client engagements and several other less intensive relationships. Your work with clients might include:
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Observing them in action, diagnosing their needs, and designing the scope of our work with them;
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Delivering services to clients, including coaching senior executives one-on-one, designing new organization-wide systems, providing advice on challenges of the day, and conducting trainings for senior teams;
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Serving as the primary point of contact for clients and developing strong working relationships with them;
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In the most encouraging way possible, nudging client leaders to make sure they are following-up on their commitments; and
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Prioritizing across client needs to ensure we spend our energy wisely.
Beyond your work with clients, you will help build and grow TMC by collaborating with peers on team and organizational initiatives. You might develop new tools for all of our clients to use, identify better approaches for how we engage with clients, or help us come up with more effective ways to assess our progress.
You will report to one of our senior coaches, who will measure your success primarily by improvement in your clients’ practices, client satisfaction, revenue generated, and contribution to our culture.
To be successful in this job, you will excel in four areas:
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Management insight: You will have a demonstrated track record of success in managing a high-performing organization, department, or team, and will therefore bring a deep understanding of what it takes to produce results, instincts for going beyond the “textbook” to get to solutions that will work, and an understanding of the CEO perspective and what it’s like to be in a senior management role.
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Critical thinking skills: You will need the smarts to quickly become “fluent” in your clients’ contexts, analyze situations to see beyond the surface of challenges, and effectively customize general practices to fit clients’ particular needs.
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Racial and gender equity commitment and skills: You understand the impact of systemic and implicit biases related to race and gender identity that can play out in management practices, and you're able to surface this with clients in a way that allows them to hear what is being said without compromising the clarity of the message. You can proactively spot issues of equity and inclusion in the work and bring practical solutions.
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Interpersonal and relational skills: You can win over a wide range of clients by relating to their challenges, building trust, being deeply on their side, and operating in a range of modes depending on the situation (teaching, nudging, problem solving, facilitating). You are attuned to team and interpersonal dynamics and can advise clients how to handle tricky situations in a nuanced way.
We are more interested in these four qualities than in any particular type of experience. However, because you will need to be able to relate as a peer to executive directors and other senior leaders, you will presumably bring experience yourself having operated at senior levels of organizations, either as an executive director or second-in-command or as the head of a department. Prior experience in the nonprofit or progressive political arena is a plus, but not a requirement.
Finally, you need to contribute to our culture, which we sum up as “excellence with heart”, by living into our core values and helping to strengthen our organization.
Our coaching roles come in two varieties – a more junior position (Vice President) and a more senior position (Partner), with the difference between the two being the executive experience you bring and the type of clients with whom you work.
Our most urgent current need, given our current client demand and staff makeup, is for a Partner-level coach based anywhere in the United States.
This position is full-time and requires moderate travel (1 – 4 days per month). Please note that we, as an organization, are currently not traveling for any reason until, at the soonest, the final quarter of the year.
The full-time salary range for VP roles is between $94,544 to $135,023, and between $126,072 to $171,392 for Partners, 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 other people of color to apply for open positions.
Our mission is to help social change leaders learn how to build and run more effective organizations so they can deliver great results. Founded in 2006, we have helped shape the practices of hundreds of influential organizations and thousands of individual managers, focusing in particular on leading progressive organizations working for social change. Our clients work on issues – like promoting immigration reform, fighting for racial, economic and gender justice, advocating for educational equity, and protecting voting rights – where they face an inherently uphill battle and so must fight more effectively than their opponents if they are going to win. We aim to help them do that by making their organizations as effective as possible.
A great deal of our work involves direct coaching of clients, and we also offer publications and training to the broader field. Along the way, we have built a strong reputation: on our most recent anonymous survey, 95% of clients said they “Strongly Agree” (the top choice on a 7-point scale) that they would recommend TMC to a friend. Such positive word-of-mouth has created fairly explosive demand for our services that the new coach will help us meet.