Ground Zero
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Position description
Our organisation is seeking an exceptional, deeply driven leader to join our senior leadership team. We have openings across two distinct, high-impact geographies. While both tracks require powerhouse programme leadership, they offer unique contextual environments:
You will own our most complex portfolio: multiple large programmes running simultaneously, embedded deep within government systems. You will hold full accountability for driving consistent, high-quality execution at scale while navigating systemic complexity, operating through ambiguity, and ensuring delivery holds under pressure.
Key Responsibilities:
- Ownership of Large, Complex Public Education System Transformation
You will be responsible for our entire state/regional portfolio—setting the multi-year vision, making high-stakes strategic choices, and holding ultimate accountability for outcomes at scale.
- Strategic Long-Term Vision: Define and own the long-term strategy for the state, aligning our ambitions to state priorities to ensure every initiative is built to embed and endure.
- System-Level Impact: Hold ultimate accountability for achieving audacious, measurable improvements in teaching practice, student learning, and system processes (such as training, coaching, and academic monitoring).
- Autonomy & Discipline: Make consequential decisions across programme design, resource allocation, and strategic direction, with the autonomy to move fast and the discipline to build for permanence.
- Data-Driven Rigour: Keep the theory of change alive by stress-testing assumptions against impact data, course-correcting quickly, and holding the team to the highest evidential standards.
- Growth & Sustainability: Identify and convert new opportunities to deepen our footprint. Ensure all programmes are deeply embedded within government frameworks to build institutional ownership and continuity beyond our direct involvement.
- Influencing and Shaping Government Priorities at the Highest Levels
Act as our lead strategic voice, operating with authority at the intersection of civil society and government to shape how state and national entities invest in education reform.
- High-Stakes Policy Dialogue: Lead critical policy dialogues, inter-departmental forums, and strategic negotiations with the credibility to challenge, influence, and align senior government stakeholders.
- Agenda Setting: Shape the education policy agenda through strategic negotiations and expansion frameworks that embed our approach directly into the architecture of the state system.
- Network Building: Build an influential external network across academia, civil society, funders, and peer organizations to amplify our thought leadership.
- National Mobilisation (Delhi Context): Play an active role in contributing to cross-state and national conversations, leveraging proximity to apex national institutions and networks.
- Building and Leading a High-Calibre Leadership Team
You will build, shape, and inspire the multi-layered team delivering this mission, mentoring the next generation of exceptional education leaders in India.
- Leadership Pipeline: Lead a multi-layered programme team across verticals, ensuring absolute clarity and strong execution. Intentionally build a strong second line of leadership capable of independently owning large verticals.
- Coaching & Culture: Guide direct reports through honest feedback, structured development, and career-shaping conversations.
- High-Bar Environment: Cultivate a culture where the bar is exceptionally high and people are proud to clear it—where stretch and support coexist, and psychological safety enables bold thinking.
- Organisation Building: Contribute actively to our national senior leadership team with the same rigour, ambition, and strategic clarity expected within your specific geography.
What Success Looks Like (3–5 Years):
In three to five years, you will have left a mark on the education system that is visible, measurable, and irreversible:
- Systemic Integration: Our organisation is embedded in the system as a co-architect whose models, tools, and approaches are fully owned and sustained by government stakeholders with decreasing reliance on our team over time.
- Autonomous Leadership: A high-performing regional leadership team is securely in place, independently driving large programme verticals with absolute clarity and rigour.
- National Reference Point: Your programme models become a national benchmark; other states, the central government, and global practitioners look to your portfolio as a blueprint worth replicating.
- Strategic Expansion: Our footprint expands significantly through new partnerships, programmes, and funding avenues identified and secured under your leadership.
Qualifications
The Ideal Candidate Profile
- A Systems Thinker: You effortlessly see the connection between a single teacher’s classroom behavior and a multi-million-dollar state policy, moving between micro-details and the big picture without losing rigour.
- Comfortable with Complexity: You do not simplify what is inherently hard or default to easy wins. You stay with difficult, high-stakes problems to build genuine alignment across diverse stakeholders.
- Operationally Credible: You have a proven track record of making complex operations work in challenging environments. You combine high-level strategy with tight execution.
- Data-Literate & Intellectually Rigorous: You treat data as an active tool for decision-making rather than a post-facto reporting exercise. You are comfortable navigating imperfect data to make sound, timely choices.
- A Master Connector: You can effortlessly command a room of government secretaries, academic leaders, international donors, or field staff—adapting your communication style seamlessly without ever losing consistency in your core message.
- Mission-Driven: You are energised by the scale and complexity of working inside government systems, understanding that sustainable public education reform is slow, heavily contested, and entirely worth it.
Qualifications and Role Requirements
- Educational Background: Master’s or PhD in Education Policy, Education Leadership, Comparative Education, or a related field, featuring a deep structural understanding of how public systems are designed, reformed, and assessed.
- Work Experience: 15–18 years of experience with a proven track record of delivering robust strategic and operational leadership, alongside a history of managing large, high-performing teams to excellent standards.
- Core Competencies: Outstanding interpersonal, leadership, and collaboration skills. Demonstrated ability to influence macro-level strategic decisions, adapt quickly to changing political or environmental landscapes, and introduce innovative structural ideas. You should be enthusiastic about expanding your influence into national and international domains.
- Language Proficiency: Full professional fluency in both English and Hindi is mandatory.
Application instructions
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