Position: Lead – Women’s Enterprise Support System (WESS)

Organization: WESS

You will enjoy this role if you:

• Care deeply about gender equality, and social inclusion, and have the patience to work with wicked problems in the social entrepreneurship space
• Believe in the need for financial sustainability of businesses
• Have passion and interest in helping rural/urban poor women-owned social enterprises
• Interested in social entrepreneurship, social impact, venture to invest, and blended finance
• Identify having an entrepreneurial approach to work
• Enjoy working with people, and leading a growing initiative

What the role is:

• Working as cohort manager – who is responsible for ensuring business growth of participating enterprises by supporting the development of business plans and monitoring their growth
• Recruiting Industry experts as Mentors for participating enterprises; managing the mentoring relationship to ensure outcomes
• Being directly responsible for the business outcomes of 3 businesses incubated by WESS, and for their future growth plans
• Developing the business model of WESS itself, and determining its 10-year plan
• Raising a corpus to reinvest in new businesses
• Developing new pilots under WESS – like peer learning platforms
• Developing services that can be adopted by Government programs enabling entrepreneurship
• Being the primary advisor to the WESS Board on all matters, most importantly on the growth of WESS.
• Managing a mix of fundraising, grant management, reporting, team coordination, project management, and administrative responsibilities

What we are looking for:

• At Least 7 to 10 years of relevant work experience
• Women who are looking to shift from the private sector/corporate/startup ecosystem and switch to the social-impact space OR women who have experience in running socially driven businesses
• Experience in driving growth in business outcomes OR experience of running your own business, or intrapreneurship within an existing institution (minimum 3 years)
• Past experience in leading multi-functional teams and managing people (minimum 3 years)
• Past experience of working with grassroots organizations or in the social impact space (preferred)

Required Skills:

• Vision: Co-design vision, articulate goals, pitch it to internal and external stakeholders and be unafraid to reimagine when needed
• Strategic Acumen: Ability to spot high-potential opportunities relevant for the participating businesses or for WESS
• Ability to be a bridge: Constantly act as a bridge who can translate the motivations and needs of grassroots and professionals.
• Developing networks: Identify useful collaborators, facilitate introductions, and partnerships, and maintain the relationship
• Inclusive: Co-design solutions, believes in consensus building, and encouraging diversity in the workspace as well as pushing to solve intersectional issues (gender equality layered with caste, religion, sexuality, and any other form of marginalization)
• Supporting colleagues and senior leaders: History of thriving in a role where your success is highly dependent on your team’s success, where your first responsibility is to provide outstanding leverage and support to your colleagues, including successfully and smoothly “managing upwards” by helping to guide and set-up things for your manager to be efficient and effective.
• Process Management and Results Orientation: Strong project management skills, deadline management, sense of responsibility and accountability, the ability to manage multiple responsibilities, adjust and adapt along the way.
• Interpersonal Savvy: Great at making and fostering relationships inside and outside the organization, keen intercultural appreciation, inclusive style, comfortable around senior leaders, can represent SEWA well