The Role
We are a global Secretariat, and we are currently wanting to diversify our Leadership Team to more broadly reflect geographic and cultural diversity. The Secretariat is currently around 30 FTE staff, based around the world, working in a completely virtual way. The team has three clusters of work: Finance & Corporate Resources: Alliance Programme: Fundraising & Communications and is led by a CEO. The cluster Directors and the CEO form the Leadership team of the Alliance Secretariat. We are therefore seeking candidates based in India, Kenya, South Africa, or the Middle East. The candidate must be able to work in English and, ideally at least one of our other working languages namely Arabic, French or Spanish.
The Director of Alliance Programme will manage a diverse team of individuals, located across the globe. Rather than a ‘top down’ leader, the post holder will need to be more of an enabler’ and critical friend to a team of professionals with a range of experiences. While the Alliance Programme Team covers a range of specialisms, the post holder will encourage an agile approach, helping them to shift their focus as and when needed. While the team is small, they are the engine of our Alliance Programme.
The Alliance Programme portfolio covers our member engagement work, knowledge management and practice exchange, research, programme monitoring, evaluation and learning, and advocacy. The postholder is a key member of the Secretariat Leadership Team and has collective responsibility for the leadership and delivery of the whole Secretariat.
Main Responsibilities
A. Leading management of the programmatic work through relationships with members
Working with members to help them understand a more focused approach in terms of activities and thematic focus.
Building upon our national advocacy work, to develop regional initiatives and take advantage of global opportunities, building on our advocacy capacity and helping key members to become confident ambassadors.
Achieving scale by engaging a wider network of organisations and individuals in our practice exchange, research and campaigning; enabling strategic use of resources to achieve the greatest impact across the whole portfolio of work.
Collecting and evaluating the pipeline of ideas and issues constantly emerging, assessing and making recommendations against the conceptual framework and strategy.
Adjudicating between members and the Secretariat where competing ideas and proposals require prioritisation of resources
Preparing and recommending proposals for new members
Supporting members in emergency response and to consider the Alliance’s role in strengthening local response, recovery and resilience in humanitarian contexts
Being responsible for any onward granting from the Secretariat to members
Building in strong accountability and reporting mechanisms as well as project and grant management across the membership and the team
Embedding perspectives of children and those with lived experience into our work is crucial and where relevant and appropriate, supporting self-advocacy
Ensuring due diligence is conducted and maintained with all members
Upholding the highest standards of safeguarding approaches across all areas of work
B. Managing the Alliance Programme Team
This role leads two sub-teams: Membership Engagement and Alliance Programme Advisors. The Membership Engagement Team is responsible for bringing in new members to the Alliance, coordinating the member journey, member communications, supporting our community learning platform and our knowledge sharing series ‘How We Care’. They are also responsible for engaging a wider network of local practitioners and those with lived experience to participate in aspects of the Alliance work. This role will support that work and seek to grow the Alliance in both scale and scope.
The Alliance Programme Advisors are responsible for moderating and supporting our members in documenting their models of practice, undertaking research, taking forward advocacy at national, regional and international levels and campaigns. In addition, this sub-team is responsible for monitoring, evaluation and learning, supporting children’s participation and providing both functional and thematic guidance.
Key to this will be:
Managing the Alliance Programme Team of 11 people across different cultures, countries and time zones, with direct line management responsibility for 6 staff
• Carefully allocating workload and priorities, and facilitating cross team working and sharing of knowledge and experience
• Supporting, enabling and developing individual team members
• Building the effectiveness and satisfaction of the whole team, and fostering the desired culture
• Forging strong relationships between the Alliance Programme Team as a whole and individually with other teams in the Secretariat
• Brokering relationships and conflicts with other stakeholders as necessary
• Assessing, adding and overseeing the management of consultants who add capacity to the team
• Delivering reliable, open, transparent internal communications up, down and across the team and wider organisation.
C. Co-Leading the Secretariat
Working with colleagues in the Leadership Team to:
Translate the vision and strategy for all members and stakeholders
Grow and develop the wider network of internal and external partners
Manage the work and approach of the Secretariat ensuring effective use of resources to deliver the best results, and monitoring performance of the whole Alliance
As part of the Leadership Team this role takes collective responsibility in:
Weaving and coordinating across the Alliance to achieve the impact we want
Drafting and planning implementation of global strategy
Designing and embedding a results framework
Driving financial sustainability and integrity
Enabling strategic use of resources to achieve the greatest impact across the whole portfolio of work
Building systems, processes and capacity across the Alliance to enable delivery
Providing information, analysis and data for the Board to effectively lead the Alliance
Developing and role-modelling the desired culture and ways of working
Acting as ‘confident’ diplomat, being able to negotiate with members who are passionate about the work they are doing and their involvement in the network
Working with members to help them understand a more focused approach in terms of activities and thematic focus
Facilitating and coordinating cross Alliance working and delivery
Person Specification
Knowledge
Post graduate degree level of education or equivalent professional qualification within a relevant discipline
Expert knowledge related to child rights and the care and protection of children across a range of different contexts
Strong experience of supporting research, advocacy, campaigns & policy development
Prior work on children’s participation or those with lived experience
Experience of working for a local civil society organisation, preferably in a resource constrained or politically restrictive environment
Experience of working in a multicultural setting, in more than one language (ideally Arabic, French or Spanish), demonstrating understanding of working internationally – a high level of fluency in English is essential
Budget and financial management experience
Knowledge management experience, ideally digital, facilitating shared learning and practice exchange, using both online and face to face techniques
Experience of planning and running multilingual network meetings (online and face to face, ranging from webinars to small conferences)
Experience of managing remote teams
Expert knowledge of safeguarding initiatives and practical application across a range of approaches
Skills
Strategic leader
Strategic thinker with a record of promoting new ways of working and delivering culture, process and behaviour change
Excellent planning and organisational skills
Experience of planning and running multilingual network meetings (online and face to face, ranging from webinars to small conferences)
Experience of managing remote teams
Interpersonal skills
Builds and strengthens relationships
Engenders trust
Listens first to understand
Strong influencing and communication skills
Facilitator
Finds common ground
Flexible
Enabler
Strong coaching and mentoring skills– acting as a critical friend
Intellectual skills
Creative
Propositional
Future focused
Curious
Behaviours
Diplomatic, but challenging of behaviours that are unhelpful
Supportive
Assertive yet respectful
Collaborative and facilitative, seeking engagement and genuine convergence
Willing to do a range of tasks from simple, basic to complex and high level
Consistently seeking to improve how we do things to achieve better
Embracing change and innovation
Demonstrating intercultural competence and sensitivity
Authentic
