Senior Organisational Development Practitioner

Canonical is a leading provider of open source software and operating systems to the global enterprise and technology markets. Our platform, Ubuntu, is very widely used in breakthrough enterprise initiatives such as public cloud, data science, AI, engineering innovation and IoT. Our customers include the world's leading public cloud and silicon providers, and industry leaders in many sectors. The company is a pioneer of global distributed collaboration, with 1200+ colleagues in 75+ countries and very few office based roles. Teams meet two to four times yearly in person, in interesting locations around the world, to align on strategy and execution.

The company is founder led, profitable and growing.

Canonical builds the open-source software that runs the world’s clouds, devices and AI, and we hold our managers to a high standard. Our Talent Development team exists to make leaders and managers at Canonical genuinely excellent. We define what great management looks like here, and we bring managers and leaders up to that standard through direct, hands-on work, both from the centre and embedded inside engineering and commercial organisations.

As a Senior Organisational Development Practitioner you are the person who sets the bar for how coaching and organisational development is practised here. You coach leaders to a clear standard of management excellence. You diagnose how a whole organisation is led and drive the plan to raise it. You develop the practitioners working in the field. It is one of the most senior and demanding Talent roles at Canonical: hands-on coaching and organisational-development craft with real leaders, in a company that expects you to be credible in a room of directors and to earn that credibility fast.

You work both from the central team and embedded inside a leader's organisation for periods, turning what you learn in the field back into how we develop leaders and managers across Canonical.

Location: These are remote based positions, available across EMEA and the Americas.

Raising individual leaders

• Coaching leaders to visibly raise their game against a clear standard of management excellence.
• Landing the hard conversations, because you coach leaders to make them happen.
• Turning 360 feedback into real, followed-through commitments, not a report that gets filed.

Lifting organisations and the company

• Leaving an organisation you take on visibly  better led, off a sharp first-weeks diagnosis and a plan you own and drive.
• Contributing to defining and implementing new ways of working across our globally distributed company.

Building the function and its standards

• Developing the practitioners in the field so they get visibly better at their craft under your supervision.
• Setting the bar for how coaching and organisational development is done at Canonical: owning what exceptional looks like, proving the methods in the field, and holding the practice to them.
• Sharpening the management-excellence standard itself across Canonical, by feeding back what you learn in the field.

• Deep, hands-on coaching and organisational-development practice with real leaders and teams, not just programme design.
• A track record of measurably changing how leaders behave, with specific examples you can talk through.
• Credibility: you can walk into a room of directors and be taken seriously.
• Effectiveness operating inside someone else's organisation without formal authority.
• A clear and honest philosophy of development: you know where coaching helps, and you are candid about where a role or fit decision is the right call.
• An exceptional academic track record from high school and university.
• Excellent written and spoken English.
• Sincere personal motivation aligned with our mission.
• Willingness to travel up to 4 times a year for internal events. 

In addition we expect that you will match our values, by being:

• Precise, taking care to deliver correctness and clarity.
• Reliable, delivering high quality work that builds trust and confidence.
• Accessible, collaborating to build products and systems that are usable.
• Adroit, blending enthusiasm, knowledge, adaptability, style and character.

• A management-consulting background: comfortable with ambiguity, able to diagnose, propose and move.
• Experience coaching across a distributed, fast-moving, technical organisation.
• Experience building competency or development frameworks.
• Experience designing and running effective workshops or training sessions, in person and online.
• Learning-design judgment for development materials. We want the design sense; AI handles the production drafting.
• Talent-development experience, valued alongside but secondary to coaching and consulting craft.

Canonical is a pioneering tech firm at the forefront of the global move to open source. As the company that publishes Ubuntu, one of the most important open source projects and the platform for AI, IoT and the cloud, we are changing the world of software. We recruit on a global basis and set a very high standard for people joining the company. We expect excellence - in order to succeed, we need to be the best at what we do. Most colleagues at Canonical have worked from home since its inception in 2004.​ Working here is a step into the future, and will challenge you to think differently, work smarter, learn new skills, and raise your game.

We are proud to foster a workplace free from discrimination. Diversity of experience, perspectives, and background create a better work environment and better products. Whatever your identity, we will give your application fair consideration.

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