Head of Organisational Development

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.

Location: This role can be held anywhere in the Europe, Middle East or African time zones.

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