Executive Office Catalyst
Arlington, VA
Global Leadership Team Office /
Full-Time /
On-site
Your Impact: Your leadership will help us identify new opportunities to accelerate our growth as you bring together cross-cutting teams to help us creatively achieve our goals. You will work closely with Ashoka’s leadership on high-priority projects and bring clarity and direction for our staff and network. You will truly be at the heart of Ashoka’s vision, strategy, and people, allowing you to provide key perspectives for major decision-making.
What You'll Do:
- We imagine these priorities as core parts of this role – and we invite whoever takes on this opportunity to help evolve this role by leveraging their unique skills and bringing their new ideas to life.
- Build and strengthen core critical relationships – ensure our CEO and other Leadership Team Members (comprising a four-person leadership team) engages with our most strategic partners and opportunities. You will partner with Leadership to also engage directly with anyone from top journalists to major donors and will be able to represent Ashoka at various engagements.
- Provide general leadership – when new opportunities emerge or programs need interim support, you will take leadership to rapidly organize resources to address any gaps. This leadership will help us always move forward even in times of transition.
- Provide leadership to Ashoka’s Executive Office – set strategic direction, provide team management, and oversee the search and selection of key roles.
- Manage weekly Executive Team meetings – develop engaging agendas that address top priorities and spark collective conversation and problem-solving. Help everyone learn and deepen their understanding of our ever-evolving strategy.
- Oversee Board meetings – partner with our Global Leadership and Ashoka’s Board to execute generative biannual gatherings that bring “aha moments” to Ashoka, helping us all better see the whole and bringing new focus to necessary areas.
- This role will require in-office presence in our Global Headquarters located in Arlington, VA (off Rosslyn metro stop).
What You Bring:
- We imagine a strong candidate for this role as having the following characteristics and experience:
- Experience in entrepreneurial/intrapreneurial and operational leadership in complex, global environments
- Experience in planning and leading strategic initiatives with organization-wide impact
- Proven ability to lead through empathic discernment, management, and exceptional communication skills
- Demonstrated skills in managing operations, deliverables and performance in a fluid, open, and agile environment
- A canny ability to get teams aligned, speaking the same language, and helping each other to succeed
- Social sector experience
Core Criteria
- Entrepreneurial Quality: Compelled to take creative initiative and ownership (e.g. founding an organization or company, starting a movement, or re-shaping the work of an existing organization). Demonstrates relentless and realistic how-to-thinking and passion for seeing their ideas come to life.
- Understanding and Belief in the Everyone a Changemaker: Understands and believes the Everyone a Changemaker vision at a gut level. To be able to innately ‘get’ this, candidates should have a broad and inquisitive intellectual and a thinking pattern that connects the dots between historical trends and current social context.
- Emotional and Social Intelligence: Ability to work efficiently and respectfully in teams, putting organizational/team goal first (personal glory second).
- Ethical Fiber: Exceptionally strong ethical behavior. Is self-reflective and has strong empathy skills. Trustworthy.
- Self-Definition: The person expects that changing the world in big ways and on a continental scale is what he/she will do in life.
About Ashoka:
Ashoka is the world’s largest community of leading social entrepreneurs, having pioneered the field of social entrepreneurship over 40 years ago. We support a robust network of more than 4,000 Ashoka Fellows in 90 countries who have successfully implemented systems-changing solutions to human and environmental problems globally. By learning from and collaborating with our Fellows and other social entrepreneurs, Ashoka identifies patterns and key levers to help society gain a new framework for living in the world as a changemaker.
Our current work is centered around the "Everyone a Changemaker" (EACH) movement, which stems from our belief that everyone has the potential and responsibility to make positive change in an ever-changing world. We continue to grow a global movement of social entrepreneurship, recognizing that the rate of change is accelerating and our problems are growing faster than our solutions.
