Deputy Director, Strategy, Planning, and Management (Gender Equality)

Deputy Director, Strategy, Planning, and Management (Gender Equality)

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Seattle, WA, United States

The Team

The Gender Equality Division’s mission it to ensure women and girls in Africa and South Asia can enjoy good health, make their own choices, earn their own money, and be leaders in their societies. When women and girls have an equal chance to thrive and lead, everyone benefits. We know that women and girls are not a monolith. A woman’s experience and the barriers she faces are different depending on factors like where she lives, how old she is, and how much money her family has—alongside other factors including her race, caste, and education level. We seek to address these compounding barriers through deep partnership with our grantees. As a philanthropy, our role is to listen to and learn from these experts. We take risks in new areas, prove concepts, and bring these ideas to governments, partner organizations, and private sector companies to scale. The Gender Equality Division builds off our existing strengths as a foundation in areas like global health and data, partnering closely with all of our global divisions. 

Your Role

As Deputy Director, Strategy, Planning and Management (DDSPM), you will be dedicated to strategic portfolios across the Gender Equality Division and will work across the foundation to enable these teams to achieve their impact goals. You will do this by leading the strategic, financial, and operational aspects of the program work. The Gender Equality Division is in an exciting growth phase, and initially you will partner with the Gender Impact Accelerators (Data & Insights and Digital Connectivity) and Gender Integration teams to achieve our ambitious impact goals. Overtime, and as the division continues to grow, you may also partner with and support additional portfolio areas.

In this role you will bring complimentary strategic and investment acumen to the technical expertise of these teams to assist in defining their programmatic strategy, portfolio planning and trade-offs, initiative and investment-level decision making including the development of strategy execution plans. This is an exciting and unique role as it works across new portfolios that are built up in a collaborative and functional way.

Overview of the teams you would support:

• Gender Data & Insights aims to generate primary data that supports burden estimates and tools for reproductive health and anemia in girls and young women.
• Gender Equality Digital Connectivity aims to reduce the gender gap in digital adoption for women and girls through a research and advocacy focused learning agenda​.
• Gender Integration aims to ensure the foundation is working toward gender equality with capabilities to apply a gender lens through strategy development, investment design, and customized technical assistance to accelerate impact​.

This is a role that will report to the Director, Gender Impact Accelerators.

What You’ll do:

Portfolio Definition 

• Work with portfolio Directors and team to define and clearly articulate the program and policy and advocacy strategies, Bodies of Work (BoW), and investment priorities. Ensure that these are supported by team and strategy structures.
• Partner with Division Directors and Deputy Directors to develop sub-initiative strategies, execution plans and ensure effective strategy prioritization and refinement.
• Ensure overall prioritization of activities needed to plan, implement and achieve the strategic plan are aligned and additive.
• Lead or co-lead complex strategic projects that are cross-functional in nature.
• Develop strong, cross-functional relationships across the foundation to ensure appropriate engagement, expertise, sharing of information, and co-development of joint opportunities for impact

Strategy Implementation and Operations

• Drive alignment of portfolio work to strategy and implementation plans; including the development of processes and/or instruments to ensure alignment of activities with strategy results.
• Lead the annual strategy review process and articulation of strategic priorities; including the process to define and assess portfolio bodies of work. Partner with Directors and teams to ensure that strategy review materials effectively portray and support the continuation and/or refinement of the GE Division and strategy.
• Develop and execute a portfolio management approach that fosters effective stewardship, strategic planning, and resource allocation. Cultivate insights to communicate portfolio allocation and progress.
• Responsible for framing portfolio progress including working with the relevant functional partners to define strategy metrics, progress metrics, and setting of targets and goals for each portfolio. Continuously refine data, metrics and models.
• Accountable for strategy hierarchy; including developing and implementing process improvements and other efforts.
• Oversee overall rhythm of business across the teams; including cross-team communication.
• Provide overall alignment of grantee partner engagement with program priorities. Ensure that partner feedback and learning supports the team’s grant development process. Provide feedback and advisory support to initiative teams on development and administration of major grants.
• Advise Director and program team on business-related decisions; including the identification and assessment of key portfolio risks and the development and management of mitigation and/or contingency plans at the portfolio level.
• Planning and management of co-chair meetings, defining meeting objectives, content development, stakeholder engagement, and after-action review to track and institutionalize learning.
• Develop and execute approaches for ensuring joint opportunity identification and shared accountability of results in a matrixed environment

Business & Enablement Team Management

• Partner with support functions (including Human Resources) and program team management to lead, recruit, develop, and train staff.
• Lead a team of fellow Strategy, Planning, and Management resources by communicating performance expectations, creating goal alignment, integrating project and organizational change, giving and seeking feedback, providing coaching, measuring progress and holding people accountable, supporting employee development, and recognizing achievement and lessons learned.
• Promote culture, values, and team effectiveness, including regular team health checks. Collaborate with the business teams to facilitate retreats and cross-organization collaboration.
• Support Division Directors with workforce planning in partnership with HR business partners.
• Guide the cross-Division business team to support the activities needed to plan, implement, and achieve our strategic plan. This will include ensuring effective onboarding, communicating clear performance expectations, creating goal alignment, integrating project and change management activities, giving and seeking feedback, providing coaching, measuring progress and holding people accountable, supporting employee development, and recognizing achievement and lessons learned.
• Actively manage extended Business Team relationships across the foundation with business partners (e.g., with Finance, Grants & Contracts, and Legal).

Team Enablement & Effectiveness

• Serve as an active listener across the division to keep pulse on team health and effectiveness
• Partner with business team members to develop an approach to division continuous learning and improvement, find opportunities to build division cohesion and camaraderie, plan virtual and in-person learning and team building moments
• Promote efficiency and productivity on the team by providing leadership and support in process development, implementation, and improvement of tools, analysis, reporting and change management
• Responsible for knowledge management and documentation of division institutional knowledge
• Navigate a wide range of operational issues with solid experience and understanding of core business and organizational fields (e.g. strategy, operations, legal, IT, HR, marketing, finance, planning, and budgeting) in order to counsel the team on high leverage engagement opportunities

Trusted Advisor to GE Division’s Directors and GE Leadership Team

• Serve as an advisor and thought partner to portfolio Directors – including overseeing co-chair and other leadership communication.
• Given the matrixed nature of our work, develop a rhythm of business and associated modalities that enable clarity in communication, collaboration and synergies across foundation
• Play a leadership role in the design of the GE Division’s organization structure, promotion of culture and values, and facilitation of team retreats and cross-organization collaboration. Monitor and manage succession planning, team performance and development.

Cross-Division and Foundation Continuous Improvement

• Actively engage with the foundation DDSPM community and support continuous improvement and change management initiatives.
• Participate, where appropriate, on foundation-wide projects representing the GE Division perspective.
• Cultivate innovation and support simplification of processes.

Your Experience

We are looking for someone who enjoys the opportunity of working on complex problems and building solutions that have the potential for transformational change in the lives of low-income women and girls around the world. We seek a creative, dedicated professional who has an outstanding portfolio of accomplishments in roles of increasing responsibility and leadership. Additionally, you’ll bring:

• Advanced degree and a minimum of 10+ years’ experience in international development, international business strategy, business development; including experience with negotiations with collaborators. Experience in and/or familiarity with our focus geographies helpful.
• Knowledge and experience in gender equality program and strategy design preferred.
• Deep knowledge of strategy development and implementation, design of performance management systems of goals, targets, and monitoring process. Familiarity with development economics, demonstrated experience of moving evidence to action, comfort with emerging tools/levers to drive income generation for women, and exposure to working in the field is a huge plus.
• Demonstrated strength in systems thinking, structured problem solving and strategic business planning, with the ability to synthesize disparate information and critically analyze development challenges.
• Experience in designing and driving complex, multi-stakeholder change management initiatives
• Skilled at growing teams through maturity stages (e.g., start-up to establishment). Excellent people management and team building skills including a “coach” mentality with demonstrated ability to indirectly leverage human resources and to guide teams to effectively achieve clear, yet complex goals and objectives.
• Skilled in group problem solving and collaboration to resolve problems with complex concepts in a dynamic setting; strong facilitation and mediation capabilities
• Adept at project management, including critical path thinking, detail orientation, setting priorities and planning.; particularly in a resource-constrained setting. Ability not only to establish priorities but also to adhere to priorities in a thoughtful way.
• Excellent communicator, always seeking information pertinent to the issues being dealt with in the program, on the team, and/or across the foundation.
• Proficiency in working effectively with decision makers as it pertains to strategy development and operations.
• Strong analytic, technical and financial knowledge; including the ability to communicate data and results to inform sound strategic and tactical decisions. Experience developing, evaluating, managing, and monitoring business plans, budgets and financial reports.
• Deep financial knowledge, including the ability to use or create complex financial models and effectively communicate data and results to inform sound strategic and tactical decisions.
• Ability to fluidly switch from strategic to tactical tasks.
• A highly-cultivated sense of resilience. Ability to accept and recover from setbacks, adapt well to change, and drive forward in the face of adversity.
• A hands-on, team-oriented leadership style with the ability to be flexible and adjust to changing circumstances.
• Intellectual quickness, curiosity, discipline, resourcefulness and resilience.
• High level of cultural competence.
• Ability to travel domestically and internationally (when able to do so).
• Commitment to the foundation’s core values, mission and programs with an approach that is consistent with the foundation’s guiding principles while holding oneself to the highest ethical standards.

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