CEO Job Description

Medic’s Board has engaged Russell Reynolds Associates to conduct the CEO search. All Inquiries, nominations, and applications should be directed to: medicceo@russellreynolds.com.

the role

The new CEO will assume leadership of an organization that is widely recognized as a pioneer in its field, with robust funding and a distinctive track record across product, delivery, and research teams. As a visible and visionary leader in the movement for global health equity, this individual will build community, create space and momentum for change, and form outstanding working relationships with key stakeholders. The CEO is responsible for leading and resourcing all aspects of an ambitious non-profit organization that builds open-source technology. This leader will be expected to nurture and continue to shape the organization’s strategy, provide mentorship to colleagues, and motivate the team.

This individual will seize on opportunities to expand work with partners in the open-source community, double down on operational excellence, and embrace a growing technical and moral leadership role in the wider digital health field.  They will be highly capable of not only evangelizing the product, but also bringing the requisite knowledge and experience required to deepen the organization’s network among local implementation partners, government health authorities, and global NGOs.

Key Organizational Responsibilities:

  • Provide vision and leadership by anticipating issues and trends, leading efforts to frame strategy and Medic’s agenda
  • Drive and guide the execution of strategy and overall operations using qualitative and quantitative insights and creativity
  • Manage risks and resourcing to ensure organizational resilience and long-term impact
  • Ensure the financial health of the organization through successful fundraising planning and execution as well as implementation of revenue strategies, in partnership with the CDO
  • Inspire the team and global health community, directly and through facilitation
  • Provide ultimate oversight for annual budgeting, budget preparation, and budget presentation, collaborating with the leadership team
  • Transparently and effectively communicate the why, what, and how of strategy and tactics to the team and external stakeholders
  • Ensure board members are engaged and board expertise is harnessed, upholding a high standard for good governance and productivity at the board level
  • Collaboratively build product vision with the Chief Product Officer and the CHT open source community
  • Collaboratively build Medic Labs’ long-term R&D pipeline with the Chief Research Officer and other leadership
  • Collaborate with people operations and leadership to recruit, retain, and ensure inclusion for a diverse group of teammates in key roles; Foster diversity, equity, and inclusion across all aspects of the organization

Responsibilities Regarding Partners and the Broader Movement:

  • Shape the field’s narrative and norms by contributing to and guiding strategic communications
  • Set an example of courageous leadership aligned with Medic’s values, bringing moral imagination and ethical lenses to the field of digital health
  • Frame and position Medic’s work within a larger history and fight for global health equity
  • Influence public policy and funding to advance digital transformation and global health
  • Serve as the final point of contact for key partners, including funding partners
  • Find and create alignment with leaders across our ecosystem
  • Represent Medic and its values, and participate in high-impact events
  • Advocate on behalf of under-resourced partners, health workers, and health care systems

Candidate profile

Medic is looking for a CEO who can build upon the strengths of the organization and bring fresh imagination to the work ahead. Central to this mandate is proven leadership and an exceptional ability to inspire others, craft strategy, understand and build organizational maturity, and collaborate with senior leaders within and outside the organization. Hands-on problem solving and a systems perspective that integrates technical, operational, and moral priorities will be essential for the next CEO. They will ideally bring cross-sector experience leading complex organizations through growth.

In terms of the performance and personal competencies required for the position, we would highlight the following:

Professional Experience

  • Proven success in a leadership role with complex and distributed organizations having a strong values-driven mission and culture
  • Strong management background across public, private and/or non-profit sectors, which demonstrates financial acumen, managerial sophistication, understanding of organizational behavior and culture, commitment to accountability, and ability to deliver results
  • Demonstrated capacity to work across cultures
  • A sincere willingness and ability to create and implement partnerships
  • Successful fundraising experience
  • Direct experience working effectively with a Board of Directors of a mission-driven organization

Setting Strategy

  • The ability to create and articulate an inspiring vision for the enterprise as a whole
  • The inclination to seek and analyze data from a variety of sources to support decisions and to align others with the organization’s overall strategy
  • An entrepreneurial and creative approach to developing new, innovative ideas that will stretch the organization and push the boundaries within the industry
  • The ability to effectively balance the desire/need for broad change with an understanding of how much change the organization is capable of handling, to create realistic goals and implementation plans that are achievable and successful

Executing for Results

  • The ability to set clear and challenging goals while committing the organization to improved performance; tenacious and accountable in driving results
  • Comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty; the ability to adapt nimbly and lead others through complex situations
  • A visionary who seeks data and input from others to foresee possible threats or unintended circumstances from decisions; someone who takes smart calculated risks
  • A leader who is viewed by others as having a high degree of integrity and forethought in their approach to making decisions; the ability to act in a transparent and consistent manner while always taking into account what is best for the organization

Leading Teams

  • The ability to attract and recruit top talent, motivate the team, delegate effectively, celebrate diversity within the team, and manage performance; widely viewed as a strong developer of others
  • The ability to persevere in the face of challenges, and exhibit a steadfast resolve and relentless commitment to higher standards, which commands respect from followers
  • A leader who is self-reflective and aware of their own limitations; leads by example and drives the organization’s performance with an attitude of continuous improvement by being open to feedback and self-improvement

Relationships and Influence

  • Naturally connects and builds strong relationships with others, demonstrating strong emotional intelligence and an ability to communicate clearly and persuasively
  • An ability to inspire trust and followership in others through compelling influence, powerful charisma, passion in their beliefs, and active drive
  • Encourages others to share the spotlight and visibly celebrates and supports the success of the team
  • Creates a sense of purpose/meaning for the team that generates followership beyond their own personality and engages others to the greater purpose for the organization as a whole

Nomination and application process

Inquiries, nominations, and applications should be directed to: 

medicceo@russellreynolds.com

BACKGROUND

Medic is a non-profit technology startup, founded in 2010, that builds tools for people who care. Medic designs, delivers, and supports world-class, open-source software for health workers providing care in the world’s hardest-to-reach communities. The organization believes providing communities with sophisticated, human-centered technology is an effective tool on the path to achieving a more just world, where universal health coverage is a reality and health is a secured human right.

Medic serves as the technical steward and a core contributor to the Community Health Toolkit (CHT), an open-source platform that supports health workers as they provide essential care in their own communities. The CHT includes a collection of open-source software frameworks and applications, with resources to help partners design and deploy digital tools for care teams with the support of an active community of collaborators. Applications powered by the CHT currently support over 34,000 health workers in 15 countries across Africa and Asia as they conduct over 19 million health services each year. The Medic community’s technical strengths and outstanding ecosystem of partners make for a unique pathway to scale; whereby the adoption of CHT apps is expected to continue growing rapidly in the years ahead.

The Medic team, composed of 90 global health, technology and product innovators, is dispersed across 32 countries and brings a collective drive to advance health equity. While one member of Medic’s field team is traveling 100 miles to visit a remote clinic, other members – software developers, health researchers, and project managers – are working with technical partners to fine-tune models, devise new patient interventions, and make time-saving, human-centered software improvements.

Medic practices human-centered, participatory design when building, scaling, and studying new technologies and digital health strategies. The organization believes in creating and supporting open-source projects, promoting accountability, encouraging local ownership and adaptation, and supporting standards that enable collaboration and efficient data-sharing. Medic works in solidarity with technical organizations, governments, and NGOs to harness these tools for care coordination, health workforce performance management, and wider health systems strengthening. 

Medic has a decade of experience collaborating with a diverse set of partners, across more than 100 health systems and more than 25 countries. To date, they have worked with over 75 implementing partners, including community-based organizations, local and international non-governmental organizations, local governments, and Ministries of Health. They are guided by the mission and insights of community health workers. They aim to make their tools accessible to any impact-driven health organization, regardless of their size or resources. Advancing the core objective of universal health coverage, Medic aims to improve health for people who are the poorest and most marginalized.

For over a decade Medic’s research collaborations have helped to demonstrate that digital tools can strengthen health systems and improve care in hard-to-reach communities. They and their partners have conducted seminal studies on text messaging for care coordination, digital decision support, performance analytics, and human-centered design for community health. Medic’s multidisciplinary research team leads a range of in-house studies and supports a thriving network of scientific collaborators.

Additionally, launched in early 2020 with catalytic funding from The Rockefeller Foundation, Medic Labs incubates long-term breakthrough opportunities in data science and precision health, with a focus on health equity. This work builds on Medic’s global role in the open-source community, while also creating space to explore new technologies, cultivate new partnerships, and accelerate radical discoveries for the field.

After co-founding and spending eleven years at the helm of the organization, Josh Nesbit will be stepping down from the role of CEO, leaving behind a rich and enduring legacy built upon the organization’s values of humanity, creativity, solidarity, initiative, and openness. As one of Medic’s founders, Josh has been a constant steward of these values, instilling a remarkable degree of stability in the mission and organization throughout a decade of rapid growth. The organization is now seeking a new CEO to bring Medic into its next chapter during this especially important moment in history.

Medic has organizational hubs in the US, Kenya, Senegal, Nepal, and Uganda, with more than a third of the team working remotely from around the world. This leader will be based in Kenya, Nepal, or North America, but will also spend time at each regional hub. 

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