Hi everyone,
I’m delighted today to share some news about the leadership of the Foundation’s Talent & Culture (HR) department. Joady Lohr and Anna Stillwell, the T&C team’s current senior leaders, will be assuming permanent senior leadership roles within the T&C team.
As many Wikimedia Foundation staff know well, we have a Talent & Culture team that brings everything they’ve got to supporting the organization and each other. Over the past few years, they dug in, offered staff critical support through transition, and have given our colleagues the resources and structure we need to come together around our values and build a stronger, better, more inclusive culture.
They’re a team that is far from ordinary - and it makes sense that their leadership, and its structure - would reflect that. Anyone who has worked with Joady and Anna recognize they are two sides of the same coin: they’re deeply passionate about their work, have highly complementary skills and experience, and they put the needs of the Foundation first. They’re a team that shares strengths, shares accountability, and shares vision. We want to celebrate this leadership and relationship with roles that make the most of their strengths, in service to the organization and mission.
*I’ve asked Joady Lohr to be our Chief Talent & Culture Officer. *
In this capacity, Joady will lead the T&C department. She’ll be responsible for developing a strong, diverse team, with the capacity and clarity they need to thrive. She’ll work at the executive team level to advance a clear and comprehensive vision for how we serve and support employees throughout their time with the Foundation. She’ll work closely with Anna (more on that below) to ensure our culture and philosophy are incorporated in our staff policies, procedures, and programs. Her full job description is below.
As many of you know, Joady is already handling many aspects of this role. Over the course of her five years with the Foundation, she has been committed to consistently improving and developing systems, structures, and consistency for everyone in the organization. She led the charge on opening up our compensation bands and our EEO (diversity) data for increased transparency. She’s made hard calls and handled tricky situations with grace, respect, and empathy. She has pushed for leading-edge parental leave, vacation, and sick time, including our experiments with remoting and relaxing. She drove the case for upgrading our internal systems to support these benefits. And she’s been acting as our interim lead for T&C for a long while now, in official and unofficial ways.
*I’ve asked Anna Stillwell to take on a new role, which we’ve worked together to define and name. *
She’ll be working across the organization to collaboratively build our culture and organization for the future. She’ll be a strategic partner to departments and the executive team, with leadership on recruiting high-level roles, developing our internal leaders, and acting as an ambassador and catalyst for the Wikimedia Foundation as a cultural leader and employer. She’ll remain in the T&C reporting structure, working closely with Joady, and stepping in as T&C department leadership when necessary. What’s the title? VP didn’t quite capture what we were looking for, so we went abroad (and to the wikis) for inspiration. We’re calling it: Chargée d’Affaires (VP), and hope it will provoke conversation. Her full job description is below.
Many staff members will remember the cheers that went up across the organization when Anna rejoined the T&C team earlier this year. Anna joined the Foundation three and a half years ago, and quickly became a defender and champion of its values. This isn’t purely figurative -- 110 people participated in the recent org-wide values process that Anna drove (you’ll hear more about the outcomes at this month’s metrics meeting). Anna has been working with the executive team to help us clarify our own expectations around leadership and responsibility, encouraging us to stretch our own areas of comfort. And she’s been invaluable behind the scenes in bringing in highly qualified leaders to our work, successfully recruiting for the Endowment Board and working with the Board of Trustees to identify new candidates for the appointed Trustee seats, alongside Michelle Paulson.
I am thrilled to recognize Joady and Anna’s commitment and capacity with these new roles. They were unanimously the choice of the CTCO search panel, and they have my full support and that of the executive team. I am grateful for their collaborative and creative approach to leadership, and for their partnership in developing roles that recognize their strengths. I’m looking forward of many years of collaboration and creativity to come.
I want to thank the CTCO review panel, including Amy Elder and Liz Verlade as coordinators, Elena Goliy, Lisa Gruwell, Katie Horn, Ryan Kaldari, Angel Lewis, Toby Negrin, Joseph Seddon, and Kathleen Yazbak of Viewcrest Advisors (formerly of the ED search) for her perspective and support.
Please join me in offering congratulations to Joady and Anna!
Katherine
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Chief Talent and Culture Officer
Responsible for employee operations
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Co-design (with Anna) the vision and execute a leading-edge, comprehensive talent management strategy. -
Co-define and co-execute (with Anna) a coherent, inclusive philosophy across the employee lifecycle. Communicate that philosophy and ensure that it is consistently practiced in employee relations, employment policies, and procedures.
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Develop and improve relevant Foundation systems for staff support, including operations, immigration, employee relations, payroll and HR information systems in compliance with applicable law, regulations, and Wikimedia policies. -
Oversee performance management, compensation, and benefits: -
Develop and implement leading-edge benefits and employee wellbeing -
Evaluate and improve talent management systems on an ongoing basis -
Evaluate and evolve competitive, clear, consistent compensation structures that reward performance -
Establish and evolve career pathways and professional development -
Work with the Chargé d’Affaires to integrate diversity and inclusion while promoting a global view. -
Identify legally sensitive issues and work collaboratively with the executive team and outside counsel to understand and prepare for such matters. -
Ensure effective and timely internal and external recruiting support for all Foundation departments. -
Support WMF Board HR Committee as appropriate.
Responsible for the Department
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Develop a strong, diverse team guided by a clear and comprehensive talent management vision. Align all T&C teams including Recruiting, Operations, and Culture around common purpose and effective execution. Build a pipeline of successors. -
Provide regular coaching on a broad range of disciplines across the employee lifecycle: recruiting, hiring, benefits, compensation, on-boarding, orienting, training and developing, performance, employee relations, promotion and off-boarding. -
Ensure access to information, resources, and tools to enable the team to be effective, including: -
Clear roles and responsibilities -
Career development pathways -
Annual planning and budgeting -
Represent the T&C team at regular executive team meetings and retreats
Chargée d’Affaires
Collaboratively build a culture and organization for the future.
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In partnership with the executive team, think and act in service of talent and culture needs for the future of our projects and movement (e.g., forecast future talent needs—individual and collective competencies). -
Co-design (with Joady) the vision and execute a leading-edge, comprehensive talent management strategy. -
Co-define and co-execute (with Joady) a coherent, inclusive philosophy across the employee lifecycle. -
Champion our values, embed them throughout the employee lifecycle. -
Champion special projects and ideas worthy of support. -
Represent culture and organizational design at executive team.
Collaboratively recruit high-level roles for the future: Board of Trustees, Endowment Board, executives, and special projects.
Engage leaders in their own development:
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Roll out a leadership framework, a central architecture of accountabilities at different levels of leadership throughout the organization, sync JDs. -
Drive and evolve our cutting-edge leadership program. -
Drive adoption of our leadership practices. -
Develop, drive, and evolve manager training (hiring, orienting, performance management, development, succession planning). -
Drive adoption of management practices. -
Lead the people side of succession planning. -
Manage and evolve cultural orientation.
Be an ambassador (Charge d’Affaires)
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Make WMF a creative, generative, well-regarded culture to work within. -
Develop and represent the public profile of the Wikimedia Foundation as an employer and culture leader, including writing, external networking, and representing the foundation at public engagements.