Director of Africa Operations at Educate!

Performance Objectives

Country Performance Oversight: This function will encompass direct supervision of country leadership, including:

• Manage teams to goals and stay up to date on progress towards goals; unlock support for the country's leadership team to ensure they can reach their goals.
• Coach Country Directors to manage teams to strategy: check team plans and understanding against org-wide strategy; identify areas of strategic misalignment and facilitate the process of resolution.
• Identifies and shares risks with COO and CEO: When notices issues of dysfunction or greater risk to achieving the country's broad objectives, these issues are brought to the COO and CEO for greater organizational risk management.
• Financial Oversight: Approve additional budget requests for country operations. Ensure country directors submit budgets on time. Ensure budgets are in line with the country's cost model and funding strategy.
• People, Performance, and Culture: Support country leadership teams to ensure the right skills are in place to meet goals, roles are designed well and filled appropriately, succession plans are in place, and that there is a culture of high performance and team connection.
   

Country Monthly, Quarterly, and Annual Planning Oversight

• Manage org-wide goal-setting system: Ensures directors and head submit goals according to goal-setting process and work with COO to adapt goal-setting systems for maximum effectiveness
• Manage Planning Cycles to Country Strategy: Ensure country leaders are having the right conversations with their teams to create plans around high-priority strategic initiatives.
• Overseeing planning process to ensure budgets and goals are submitted on time and monthly goals reflect org priorities
   

Matrix Coordination: Educate! operates across a three-dimensional matrix that includes product leaders, functional leaders, and country leaders. In this role, you will collaborate with our COO to ensure that the three dimensions of our matrixed organization work smoothly together and each add value in the right places. Projects and/or responsibilities are likely to include:

• Identifying where greater training or new processes are needed to support collaboration across the matrix, and collaborating with the COO to develop training or processes for this.
• Raising important issues to functional directors: Sharing relevant areas of need with functional directors to ensure appropriate support is given.
• Integrating functional priorities into country priorities: Ensuring country goals reflect functional priorities, helping functional directors resolve issues of poor performance in certain departments, staffing challenges, cross-departmental coordination challenges.

Strategic Projects: You'll lead strategic projects that directly impact Educate!'s ability to scale and expand our impact. Past examples of strategic projects that you would be likely to take on this role include:

• Building new management and learning & development framework for our 250+ youth mentors to support lean operations at scale.
• Creating new staffing strategies for key functions to respond to changing leadership needs during the COVID pandemic.
• Planning retreats and periodic communications to ensure strategic alignment across a dispersed leadership team.
• Researching and rolling out new project management tools to support more efficient operations across the organization.

Qualifications

• Proven to be a highly organized operator
• Ability to work well with executives, and able to lead and influence across multiple levels and functions of an organization.
• Strong orientation to team culture and cross-functionality.
• Minimum of a Bachelor's degree with 10-15+ years of work experience managing teams (including managing managers and/or other leaders) across multiple locations and or functions
• A good fit with our Five Cultural Tenets (see "What is Educate! About?" Below; learn more by looking at Educate!'s culture deck here.