Canonical - We deliver open source to the world faster, more securely, and more cost-effectively than any other company. We develop Ubuntu, the world’s most popular enterprise Linux from cloud to edge, together with a passionate global community of 200,000 contributors. Ubuntu means 'humanity to others. We chose it because it embodies the generosity at the heart of open source, the new normal for platforms and innovation. Together with a community of 200,000, we publish an operating system that runs from the tiny connected devices up to the world's biggest mainframes, the platform that everybody uses on the public cloud, and the workstation experience of the world's most productive developers. Secure and reliable, elegant and intuitive, and open for innovation - Ubuntu is the future of open source, which is why it's the fastest-growing Linux in the world despite already being the most widely deployed.
We are recruiting to fill the position below:
Job Title: Head of Organisational Development
Location: Lagos
Employment Type: Full-time
About the Job
Help define the future of the workplace, with a global, growing open source software company that is a pioneer in remote-first collaboration and employment. We are well known in tech circles as the publisher of Ubuntu, the preferred OS for cloud computing, containers, software engineering and AI/ML data science. With almost every team remote by default, Canonical sets the pace on the 21st-century digital workplace. We're small for a platform vendor, but profitable. Our goal is to be the world's best, not biggest, global software company.
This is an opportunity for a person with outstanding leadership, organisation and intellect, to build our Organisational Development team that develops and harmonises our management practices. We are now 1,000+ colleagues across 70+ countries. We would like to create a new team to focus on organisational development - specifically to deepen our insights and effectiveness as a remote-first and globally distributed organisation.
The whole world had a taste of remote work in 2020-21, and it has become a source of fascination and debate in business circles. We want to be the best in the world at it. We deeply believe that our mission is best served by hiring people evenly across the globe who are themselves highly motivated by that mission. However, we know that being effective remotely requires discipline and good habits, and we would like to invest in the research needed to understand that, the training and policymaking which enable it, and the selection mechanisms that ensure consistency of behaviours.
We'd like to understand what really makes a distributed, remote-first workplace work. We think we're pretty good at this, remote-first for almost 20 years, but we know there is a lot still to understand, and the frontier of possibility continues to move outward.
We'd like to invest in research, analytics and tooling which raises the bar even further for remote collaboration, organisation and leadership. Most importantly though we'd like to invest in training and bi-directional communications to ensure that our management team are consistent in setting and maintaining expectations in every team, in every time zone.
So first and foremost this is a role for someone who *wants* to develop managers and leaders, who *wants* to set the pace for distributed company management, who has the drive and the energy and the leadership skills to make that happen across hundreds of teams, and who has ideas to bring to the table for experimentation and evolution.
You will lead one part of a wider People team, a cross-disciplinary group of organisational psychologists, engineers, statistics / analytics experts, talent science and employee relations specialists. We are recruiting globally, and believe we are bringing in outstanding new colleagues in a way that is fearlessly global. Naturally, they come from a wide range of backgrounds, norms and experiences, and our goal in setting up the Org Dev team is simply to lead the leaders to a position of consistent clarity on who we are, how we roll, and how that changes over time.
Responsibilities
What your day will look like:
Develop and implement an inspiring and comprehensive talent development and culture strategy
Host our ongoing discussion about management practices, skills, habits and perspectives
Deliver an exceptional experience for aspiring and existing leaders who want to become trusted Canonical managers
Own the renewal and activation of values internally and externally
Create and implement leadership performance indicators and metrics
Design, develop, and run management curricula
Own our management skills matrix for performance management, talent assessment, succession planning, mentorship, virtual learning and career development.
Lead engagement survey focus groups and change initiatives
Set up a company learning framework for training
Build and manage a new team of organisational development specialists
Analyze data and leading trends to better understand career development
Own Canonical's personal development budget, currently US$ 2,000 per person.
Requirements
What we are looking for in you:
An exceptional academic track record
Excellent writing and communication skills
Experience relevant to have a clear position on remote work and management
Strong views on the key conditions that create high performing teams
Ability to lead, create strategy, develop plans, communicate plans, and drive change across a company
Analytical and problem solving skills, for data driven decision making
Experience in people management and being accountable for a budget
Ability to travel twice, sometimes four times a year, for one or two week company events.