Do you want to put your financial and analytic super powers to work to support social justice leaders on the front lines of the resistance? Are you known for using spreadsheets for #everything?
The Management Center (TMC) is seeking a Head of Finance to ensure the smooth operation of our organization and support our high-performing team as we grow. This organizational leader will operate like a CFO; manage our internal finance function and small, but mighty, Finance Team; and serve as an advisor to the Executive Leadership Team. They will build the systems, make the projections, monitor trends and make recommendations to ensure financial health and stability as we expand to reach more clients effectively.
Who We Are
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’re now a 45+ person, $11.5 million organization (and growing!). We've helped shape the practices of hundreds of influential organizations and thousands of individual managers, with a particular focus on social justice organizations. 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, by providing coaching, training, and publications for the broader field.
What You’ll Do
As TMC’s staff, programs, and sectors have grown, our finances – and those of our sister organization, The Management Action Center – have become much more complex. The Head of Finance, which will report directly to TMC’s Chief of Staff (who serves as a member of the Executive Leadership Team) and is in charge of taking our financials to the next level of performance.
The role will evolve over time, and the more you can handle the better, but you will:
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Serve as a key member of the leadership of our Administrative Team, managing our Finance Director and Finance Coordinator, and designing your team to adapt to changes
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Manage all the day-to-day and annual administrative and financial functions of our organization
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Monitor our finances, make projections, analyze trends, develop tools to help us better understand our cost structure, and suggest wise courses of action to promote our financial health
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Make reports to the Executive Team, program and sector heads, and our Board of Trustees on progress to our financial goals (both at the organizational and team levels)
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Ensure smooth financial operations, including ensuring that all contracts, invoices, and records are in order, and that we receive a clean annual audit
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Act as “Chief Problem Solver” to handle ad hoc issues that arise, and develop and implement smart solutions
If you’d been in this role in the past year, for example, you would have: developed modeling scenarios to determine the extent to which our healthy reserve cushions our loss of in-person training revenue; led us in our budget process, making it easy for team heads to see budget implications of their decisions; reported actuals and projections to the Executive Team monthly; prepared us for our audit; and helped us to figure out how to financially support a massive shift in the structure of roles on our training team.
Who You Are
To be successful in this job, you will demonstrate the judgment, work, and wisdom of a senior leader who can garner the trust of the rest of our team of very smart individuals. Fundamentally, we want someone who loves making things work, directly and through others, and who has the skills and seasoning to do that in our context. You may have managed staff directly and have significant experience managing complex projects involving staff who didn’t report directly to you.
More specifically, you will have or be most or all of the following:
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Financial expertise and ability to manage complex financials: Your expertise does not come from a certain number of years in the field or type of degree; it comes from the experience of successfully and responsibly managing the financials of a nonprofit organization. You have led processes around budget analysis, planning, projections, and trends in a fast-paced, high-volume environment. You are results-oriented and have experience and expertise in building systems, processes, and internal controls that make managing complex finances more efficient, effective, and transparent. You demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of how finance and operations must follow from, and enable what, the organization wants to achieve programmatically.
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Analytical problem solving: You are able to zoom into the details, back out to the big picture, and then back again seamlessly. You demonstrate critical thinking with an organizational view. You run a tight, yet easy-for-staff, financial ship and ensure clear communication of the organization’s charted path (whether teams will meet goals; how current decisions will impact the organization in 3-5 years; etc.).
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Demonstrated commitment to racial and gender identity equity: You have demonstrated success in ensuring more equitable and inclusive outcomes for those impacted by your work. You understand the impact of systemic and implicit biases related to race and gender identity that can play out in financial processes and practices, and you’re able to surface this for the organization as you operate as a support and/or guide. You can proactively spot issues of equity and inclusion in finances and can bring practical solutions.
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Strong relationship-building skills and flexibility: You are able to build trust with heads of teams. You bring colleagues and team members into the problem-solving process in a way that feels constructive and collaborative. You demonstrate flexibility and adaptability (not rigid): you name what it would take to do something and thread the needle of having a structure and identifying the conditions under which that structure can bend. You recognize it’s not just about the numbers, you get the people behind the numbers and work to make it as easy as possible for staff and clients to understand and engage. You convey and/or translate financial information in a clear, free-of-jargon manner.
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Detail-oriented in a fast-paced environment: You bring a passion for making things work well and an ability to handle a large volume of work impeccably in a high-performing environment. You strategically prioritize the most important and impactful projects, juggle competing demands in a way that keeps things moving forward.
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Management experience: You have managed diverse (with regard, minimally, to race and gender identity) staff and/or projects to ambitious goals. You can manage effectively upwards, sideways, diagonally and can work collaboratively. You are able to gain followership of staff and team heads.
Prior experience in the progressive advocacy, educational equity, or broader nonprofit arenas is a plus, but not a requirement. You also need to contribute positively to our culture, which we like to think blends excellence with heart (and a keen sense of humor helps).
What Else You Should Know
We are an equal opportunity employer, are committed to racial and gender equity, and we make a particular effort to recruit candidates who identify as black, indigenous, people of color, and gender non-binary to apply for open positions.
This position is based in Washington, D.C., and is ideally full-time, although it may be possible to set up a part-time schedule. Even when we’re not working in a pandemic, everyone on the admin team has the flexibility to work from home a set number of days per week.
This role is at our Partner level and the full-time salary range is between $122,400 - $166,400, 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.