Chief Content Officer

Are you known for thinking deeply about how to run effective and equitable organizations? Do colleagues come to you for advice on management challenges? And do you find yourself worried, angry, or otherwise unhappy about the state of the world and the direction of our country? If so, read on: The Management Center (TMC) is hiring a Chief Content Officer (or, if you prefer, “Ruler of All Content”) to ensure that our work is fueled by smart, rigorously thought-out, and easily accessible ideas and that we develop the tools and products to share those ideas with our clients and the broader social change world.

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, $10 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.

We work hard to deliver services that produce extremely high levels of client satisfaction, which has enabled us to grow by word of mouth. As a result, we have more demand for our services than we can meet, and part of the way we hope to increase our impact and reach is by creating better resources and new products to make our lessons stick and so that it is easier for our staff and our clients to do their work. And given the state of our country, we feel tremendous urgency to make all of our resources and work as powerful as possible!

What You’ll Do

You will:

1. Drive our content strategy and creation – approximately 70% of your time

You’ll be our chief “idea wrangler,” meaning that you’ll lead our thinking on how organizations can best address difficult management challenges. To do this, you’ll engage with our coaches and trainers to rigorously test ideas and formulate practical, concrete solutions that blend nuance with simplicity.
Through your writing and editing, you will create tools and resources to help our clients implement effective and equitable management practices and serve as the voice of The Management Center, making topics like goal-setting compelling and easy to understand.

2. Oversee our external communications – approximately 10% of your time

You will own our website and newsletter.
You will serve as the final approver on all content (like an editor-in-chief!) to ensure a high bar for quality in everything that we share with the wider world.

3. Manage and lead – approximately 20% of your time

You’ll manage a small team of staff and consultants to chart and deliver on our “knowledge-building agenda”.
You will actively contribute to advancing the welfare of our broader organization by serving on our leadership team.

If you were here right now, you might be working on projects like the following:

Creating and disseminating tools and resources to support our clients in navigating the central challenges of managing during the time of COVID-19 in ways that are results-oriented, equitable, and sustainable (covering the intersections of managing through crisis; revamping/reinventing strategies and tactics; managing remotely; dealing with financial strains; and managing in a time of trauma and personal upheaval)
Driving new ways of engaging our clients and building a “community of practice” around managing during these times, like hosting “community conversation” webinars and creating a Slack channel for idea sharing
Working with our CEO and other staff to update and produce the third edition of our book, Managing to Change the World;
Developing the concepts and frameworks with which we can better teach managers to build strong relationships, especially across lines of identity and power;
Planning a revamp of our website and reorganizing our internal repository of tools and resources;
Conceptualizing and producing version 2.0 of the “TMC Operating System,” a guide that leaders of growing organizations can use to put rigorous, practical, and equitable management systems in place;
Observing training sessions and likely leading occasional coaching engagements to inform your work; and
Structuring and facilitating discussions across our team of practitioners (coaches and trainers) to foster an intellectual community and to accelerate our learning around what’s working and what’s not.

You will report to our Managing Director, Cindy Kang, who will measure your success primarily by the number and import of the products and tools you develop and the degree to which they shape our coaches’, trainers’, and clients’ day-to-day practices.

Who You Are

To be successful in this job, you will excel in five areas:

Management alignment and insight: You will have a demonstrated track record of success in managing a high-performing organization, department, or team; and therefore bring a deep understanding of what it takes to produce results; have instincts for going beyond the “textbook” to get to solutions that will work; and hold an appreciation for the CEO perspective and what it’s like to be in a senior management role.
Critical thinking: You quickly grasp the subtleties of issues and come up with insightful and pragmatic ways to address them. You bring a healthy skepticism to conventional wisdom and can move past 101-level advice to focus on the highest-impact practices. You are able to identify patterns in the challenges our clients are facing and lead the development of breakthrough ideas to solve them.
Commitment to and experience in centering racial equity and inclusion in your work: You have the ability to advance our thinking on management with equity deeply interwoven. You can do this because you are drawing on personal experience managing racially diverse teams to great results, creating inclusive cultures where all members thrive, and building strong relationships across lines of identity and power.
Compelling design, writing and editing: You can design resources that are easy-to-use, simple, concrete, friendly, and accessible to all. You write fluidly and can master our “voice” (ideally insightful and practical!) and can edit a document to do the same.
Interpersonal skills: You may not be the life of every – or any – party, but you need to be able to engage effectively with our talented and diverse team members, as well as external stakeholders, to generate and improve ideas and to garner buy-in to your decisions about content-related matters.

We are more interested in these qualities than in any particular type of experience. You do need to understand and empathize deeply with our clients’ challenges, which means that you have real experience as a manager in the progressive advocacy, educational equity, or broader nonprofit arenas, including at least one significant stint as a senior executive within an organization. You will add to our culture, which we like to think blends excellence with heart (and a keen sense of humor helps).

What Else You Should Know

For a candidate based outside of D.C., some travel would be required (~1 trip per quarter).

This role is at our Senior Partner level.

We are an equal opportunity employer, are committed to racial equity and social justice, and we make a particular effort to recruit people of color to apply for open positions.

Benefits

The position is full-time and remotely based anywhere in the United States.

We also offer excellent benefits, including an additional 5% employer contribution to your retirement fund with no match required.

How to Apply

https://managementcenter.applytojob.com/apply/XBA4A6qUHg/Chief-Content-Communications-Officer?source=nonprofitremote

Nonprofit Remote Jobs

Nonprofit Remote Digest - Issue #348