Director, Transformation Integration and Adaptation

Description

Internal Job Title: Transformation Integration and Adaptation Enabler

External Job Title: Director, Transformation Integration and Adaptation

Heifer International is an equal opportunity employer.  All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, status as a protected veteran, among other things, or status as a qualified individual with disability. 

About Heifer International

Heifer International is a global nonprofit dedicated to partnering with smallholder farmers to sustainably address hunger and poverty in their communities while caring for the Earth. Since 1944, we have helped more than 52 million families around the world break the cycle of poverty. We operate in 19 countries across Africa, Asia, and the Americas, including the U.S., working with small-scale farmers to achieve living incomes and ensuring that they have adequate food, housing, and other essential resources to lead decent and dignified lives.

Our Values

At Heifer, our work and culture are grounded in our twelve Cornerstones and six Cultural Guiding Principles, which reflect our deep commitment to dignity, fairness, and impact. These values shape how we lead, collaborate, and grow as an organization. We believe in Passing on the Gift, accountability, caring for one another, sustainability, gender and social inclusion, and environmental stewardship. We prioritize full participation, open communication, and continuous learning rooted in self-awareness and human-centered leadership. Together, we foster a culture of belonging and shared purpose that drives meaningful, lasting change in the communities we serve.

The Organizational Context: A Global Ecosystem in Transformation

Heifer is transforming toward an agile, adaptive, farmer-centered, locally led, and globally connected network organization. Over the past several years, the transformation journey has focused on redefining our Program Model, exploring and experimenting with an emerging operating logic, evolving our thinking about the Business Model, and grounding our shared values and ways of working in the 12 Cornerstones.

Heifer is now moving from a predominantly design-focused phase toward shared language, experimentation, learning, and activation. The transformation spans multiple interdependent streams, including the Program Model, Operating Model , Business Model, Culture and Cornerstones, governance, experimentation and activation all emerging as a Regenerative Network Organization (RNO).

As this work becomes increasingly distributed across countries, networks, ecosystems, functions and capabilities, transformation can no longer depend on a small central team to make change happen. Heifer is intentionally building the capability to transform itself: enabling people across the organization to experiment, learn, adapt, make decisions and activate the emerging model in context.

This role is an amazing opportunity to contribute to a locally led, globally connected organization, being a member of a mission-aligned team, and the chance to reshape one of the world’s most respected development organizations. You will join a collaborative team that has the courage to be vulnerable on their way to building trust. You will receive proper support and onboarding to catch up with the transformation journey and support your journey towards belonging.

Role Contribution

This role, reporting to the Transformation Steward (Executive Transformation Officer), is broader than project coordination and narrower than executive transformation stewardship. The Director/Sr. Director, Transformation Integration develops the whole-system picture with Country Teams, Catalysts, and those closest to the work, and shares useful insights and support back with them. The role also provides durable integration and transformation adaptation and advancement capability, connecting distributed transformation work without centralizing ownership of it.

This role does not own transformation activities or project-manage them in the traditional sense. It creates the connective mechanisms that allow Heifer’s transformation to work as one system: seeing the whole, connecting interdependencies, sequencing work, sensing progress and organizational load, enabling decisions and integrating transformation activities, and translating learning into adaptation.

The role maintains an integrated, evidence-informed view of Heifer’s transformation and helps the organization move from design to activation without fragmentation, duplication or overload. The Senior Director makes dependencies, progress, risks, organizational capacity and implications visible so that the role and appropriate stewardship bodies and capability owners can co-create solutions.

Key Collaborators

• Internal: Transformation Steward, TSC Core Team, Transformation Stewardship Committee, CEO, distributed transformation capability leads and circles, Network and Node Leaders, Learning & Experimentation and Human Potential & Culture Catalysts, and relevant functional and enabling teams.
• External: Local and organizational partners, Board members, transformation consultants and advisors, specialist capability partners, and other organizations engaged in locally led, networked and organizational transformation.

Core Accountabilities

Transformation Integration & Coherence

• Maintain the integrated transformation architecture and whole-system view across Program Model, Operating Model , Business Model, Culture, governance, experimentation and activation all emerging as an RNO.
• Connect initiatives, capability groups, experiments, decisions, resources and interdependencies so the organization can see how the pieces fit together.
• Surface contradictions, duplications, gaps, competing signals, and unintended consequences across the transformation portfolio.
• Coordinate with the Transformation Steward, TSC, and capability leads to strengthen coherence in terms of shared language, activities, sequencing, understanding, enabling conditions, etc. without becoming the owner of their work.

Sequencing, Prioritization & Organizational Load

• Maintain a practical transformation roadmap showing priorities, major decisions, experiments, capability-building work, independencies, communications and activation milestones.
• Assess sequencing and organizational capacity, identifying when work should accelerate, pause, combine, or be re-timed through an evidence-based approach; facilitate decision-making process for transformation activities and provide substantial recommendations.
• Help prevent transformation activity from becoming a collection of simultaneous initiatives that overwhelm teams or compete for attention.
• Connect design choices with the conditions required for responsible activation and coordinate transformation activation activities.

Sensing, Learning & Adaptation

• Establish rhythms and mechanisms for sensing progress, readiness, tensions, divergence, and unintended effects across the organization.
• Work with the Learning & Experimentation Catalysts to synthesize evidence and ensure learning feeds back into design, governance and activation.
• Identify patterns across countries, networks, ecosystems and functions and connect them back to transformation design, governance, and activation.
• Ensure learning becomes adaptation and decision-making rather than documentation alone.

*Note: Clarification of Boundaries around learning loops within the TSC work:

• Learning & Experimentation works with teams and circles to frame experiments, reflect on experience, and share learning that is useful locally and across Heifer.
• The Transformation Integration Enabler connects that learning with other work and evidence across the transformation. Working with those closest to the experience, the Enabler identifies patterns, tensions, and possible enterprise implications and brings choices to the appropriate decision makers.
• Governance capability works with affected teams and leaders to develop and test changes to decision rights, guardrails, and operating mechanisms, within the authority of the appropriate decision bodies.
• Together, these capabilities close the loop: decisions and changes are shared with the teams whose experience informed them, and those teams help assess whether the changes work in practice.

Transformation Advancement & Evidence

• Develop a focused set of meaningful indicators that show movement in operating logic, capability, agency, behavior, coherence, and activation.
• Maintain an integrated picture of progress and provide concise synthesis to the Transformation Steward and Committee, and TSC.
• Track key transformation decisions, assumptions, open questions and dependencies so the organization does not repeatedly reopen decisions or quietly treat hypotheses as settled.
• Use evidence to inform organizational readiness, prioritization, resource deployment, experimentation, and adaptation.

Decision Enablement

• Help frame enterprise decisions by making the choices, evidence, implications, interdependencies and risks visible to the appropriate stewardship body.
• Distinguish matters requiring enterprise-level stewardship from matters that should remain distributed to capabilities, networks, ecosystems or country nodes.
• Coordinate decision follow-through and ensure implications are visible across the transformation system.

Distributed Transformation Capability

• Connect Learning & Experimentation, Human Potential & Culture, Governance & Operating-System Design, Facilitation & Narrative, Communications and other transformation capabilities into a functioning system.
• Create common rhythms, information- flows, and integration practices while preserving distributed ownership.
• Build and strengthen internal capability for integration so that Heifer becomes progressively less dependent on any one individual or central team to hold the transformation together.

Shared Accountabilities

• Transformation is carried collectively across Heifer. The Integration Enabler helps distributed transformation capabilities operate as a connected system while preserving ownership with the appropriate teams, networks, nodes, and stewardship bodies.
• Transformation Coherence & Decision Support: Shared with the Transformation Steward and Stewardship Committee to maintain visibility across the transformation, surface interdependencies, and enable informed decisions.
• Learning, Adaptation & Progress: Shared with Learning, Human Potential and Culture capability leads, and initiative leads to connect evidence and learning across the portfolio and translate it into implications for adaptation.
• Distributed Activation & Capability: Shared with Network and Node Leaders, capability leads, and initiative leads to support sequencing, information flow, and coordination while preserving distributed ownership and accountability.

Critical Capabilities:

Core

• Systems thinking & integration
• Synthesis, sense-making and adaptation
• Transformation integration & sequencing
• Relationship cultivation & connectivity
• Risk intelligence and decision enablement
• Commitment to locally led development

Behavioral

• Influence without authority
• Collaborative & distributed leadership
• Curiosity & deep listening
• Comfort with ambiguity
• Cultural agility and sensitivity
• Detail orientation with a whole-system lens

Technical

• Enterprise transformation knowledge
• Organizational capability sensing and analysis
• Road mapping, sequencing & organizational readiness
• Evidence & learning synthesis
• Facilitation & decision support
• Transformation communication & information flow

Candidate Profile

• Bachelor's degree in Organizational Development, Organizational Psychology, Business Administration, Management, Social Sciences, International Development, or a related field; or an equivalent combination of education and relevant professional experience.
• At least ten (10) years of experience in organizational transformation, strategy execution, organizational advancement, adaptability, operating-model work, or comparable enterprise change.
• Exceptional systems-thinking, synthesis and ability to make complex interdependencies understandable.
• Strong executive judgment and influence without relying on positional authority.
• Experience in project management, integrating portfolios of interdependent initiatives, and managing organizational capacity and sequencing.
• Strong facilitation, sensing and adaptive-learning capability; able to listen to what is happening beneath formal reports.
• Ability to translate evidence into clear implications, choices, and action.
• Comfort working across cultures, countries, functions and ambiguous or evolving environments.
• Experience working with senior leaders in a global, multicultural and distributed organizational environments
• Ability and willingness to travel internationally, up to 30%

Preferred

• Experience with transforming or working in a networked or regenerative organization; familiarity with living system principles
• Proficiency in other languages is a plus

What success looks like for this role

Heifer has a clearer whole-system view of its transformation, fewer competing signals, better sequencing, visible learning loops, stronger decision support, and growing internal capacity to integrate and activate transformation without depending on one person to hold it all.

How to Apply

Applications should consist of:

1. A concise response of no more than two pages in total to the following two questions:

Tell us about a time when you were responsible for connecting multiple interdependent initiatives, teams, or workstreams during a significant organizational change. How did you make sense of the whole, identify critical interdependencies or competing priorities, and help the organization adapt or make decisions? What did you learn from the experience?

Heifer is moving toward a model in which transformation capability is increasingly distributed across countries, networks, ecosystems, and functions. How would you create enough integration, visibility, and coherence for the organization to move together without centralizing ownership of the transformation? Drawing on your experience, what principles or practices would guide your approach?

2. An up-to-date resume; and

3. Names and contact details of three references (although references will only be approached at the final stage of the process, and only with your express permission).

Application deadline: EOB November 6, Friday

Position and Compensation Details

This is a full-time, global role with a flexible base location. However, it will require significant international travel up to 30%, including time spent at Heifer International’s head office in Little Rock, Arkansas, and in the 19 countries where we operate. Compensation for this role will be determined based on the candidate’s location, experience, and qualifications, with a commitment to fair and equitable pay that reflects both local market standards and the value brought to the position. Please indicates your salary expectation on the Application Form. Employment is contingent on satisfactory references and background checks.

As a global employer, Heifer International is committed to the well-being of our staff and offers competitive, locally relevant benefits tailored to each country’s context. Our Total Rewards package supports diverse employee needs and promotes long-term engagement. We are also committed to inclusive recruitment practices—if you require this document or the application process in an alternative format or need reasonable adjustments for any stage of the process, please contact us at jobs@heifer.org. Heifer is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer, welcoming qualified applicants from all backgrounds and identities.