Senior Director, Strategic Execution

About the Role

SchoolHouse Connection (SHC) is entering a new phase of growth. As our work expands across programs, policy, communications, partnerships, and emerging state-based efforts, we are creating a new senior leadership role to help ensure that our priorities translate into coordinated, high-quality execution across the organization.

The Senior Director works in close partnership with the Executive Director and senior leaders to strengthen how the organization works together. This role is internally focused, building the systems, planning processes, and cross-team clarity to help a growing organization stay focused, aligned, and effective. This role builds relationships across the organization, supports a strong culture, and helps keep the team's energy directed toward outcomes and impact.

This role is ideal for a senior leader who combines strong systems thinking with excellent judgment, communication, and follow-through and who is motivated by enabling others to succeed in moving from vision to execution in a mission-driven environment.

What You’ll Do

1) Turn strategy into clear priorities and coordinated plans

• Work with the Executive Director to translate SHC’s strategic direction into a focused set of near-term organizational priorities with clear outcomes, ownership, and measures of success.
• Translate annual goals into realistic shorter-term commitments that reflect capacity, sequencing, and dependencies across teams.
• Maintain visibility into work across programs, policy and advocacy, communications, operations, and new initiatives to identify misalignment, duplication, or strain.
• Help leaders make informed tradeoffs so the organization stays focused on the highest-leverage work.

2) Build and lead the organization’s planning and follow-through processes

• Design, lead, and continuously improve SHC’s core planning and management processes, including annual retreats, quarterly planning, leadership check-ins, progress reviews, and meetings to identify and resolve cross-team challenges.
• Ensure meetings are well structured, focused on the most important issues, and lead to clear decisions and next steps.
• Document key decisions, clarify next steps, and reinforce follow-through.
• Strengthen how information flows across teams so leaders and staff have the clarity they need to coordinate effectively.

3) Drive accountability and solve cross-team challenges

• Surface and address cross-functional challenges related to timing, scope, sequencing, and coordination.
• Help make clear who is responsible for what, who makes which decisions, and how teams will coordinate shared work, especially when initiatives involve more than one team.
• Work closely with the Executive Director to strengthen shared clarity, disciplined execution, and consistent accountability across the senior leadership team.
• Support a culture that balances agility and learning with focus, discipline, and high standards.

4) Help lead SHC’s next phase of growth

• Lead organizational expansion through a two-year state-based pilot by hiring and managing pilot staff and ensuring the work is integrated with SHC’s broader priorities.
• Oversee evaluation and continuous improvement of the pilot to inform SHC’s growth model and future operating practices.
• Document and codify plans, decisions, and lessons learned to support consistency, learning, and scalability.

What We’re Looking For

You are a highly effective organizational leader who can bring structure, clarity, and momentum to complex work. You are able to see the big picture while also building the systems and follow-through that keep an organization moving to create impact.

Required experience and knowledge

• At least 10 years of experience in senior operations, strategy, chief of staff, or organizational leadership roles, preferably in a complex nonprofit or other mission-driven organization
• Demonstrated success translating strategy into execution across multiple teams or functions
• Experience designing and leading planning processes, operating rhythms, and progress-monitoring systems
• Experience leading teams through growth, change, or increased complexity
• Strong understanding of nonprofit operating models, capacity constraints, and cross-functional coordination

Key strengths for success

• Exceptional systems thinking and pattern recognition
• Strong judgment and facilitation skills, including the ability to frame options, tradeoffs, and recommendations for senior leaders
• Excellent project and portfolio management skills
• Clear, concise writing and communication skills
• High emotional intelligence and the ability to navigate ambiguity and competing priorities with steadiness and trust
• Ability to balance flexibility and discipline in a fast-moving environment

Why Join SchoolHouse Connection?

SchoolHouse Connection is the nation’s leading organization working to overcome homelessness through early care and education. This role offers the opportunity to help shape how a growing, high-impact organization works and grows, while directly supporting efforts to improve outcomes for children, youth, and families experiencing homelessness.