The posting
About Us
Climate Lead empowers philanthropic leaders everywhere to take immediate and far-reaching climate action. Climate Lead equips new climate philanthropists with the information and insights they need to drive transformative solutions by serving as an impartial guide. We cut through the complexity by curating roadmaps in partnership with a diverse network of experts to help philanthropists make a bold impact on climate from day one.
Summary
The Manager, Advisory serves as a strategic partner, proxy, and force multiplier for the advisory-related work of Climate Lead’s President, Jennifer Kitt.
The focus of this role is on the President’s impact across advising and donor engagement by coordinating cross-functional workflows, establishing clear tracking systems, and ensuring high-priority donor engagements, ambassador relationships, and organizational initiatives move with speed, rigor, and clarity. On a day-to-day basis, this position prepares presidential briefings, tracks follow-through across teams, synthesizes post-meeting insights, handles data entry, and builds scalable processes.
Reporting directly to the Associate Director, Advisory, this role serves as the critical operational bridge linking the President’s priorities with the broader Advisory Team. Sitting at the intersection of strategy and execution, the ideal candidate combines high-signal coordination, startup-style operational agility, executive presence, exceptional writing, and the ability to influence without authority.
This role has no direct reports or managerial responsibilities.
Core Responsibilities
Coordination & Stakeholder Partnership
- Information Synthesis: Gather inputs from across the organization and distill the information into clear, prioritized context and actionable next steps for Presidential initiatives.
- Advisory Team Collaborative Workflow: Partner collaboratively with the Advisory team so the President enters high-stakes engagements equipped with context, while ensuring post-meeting insights and agreed-upon action items are synthesized and seamlessly routed to leaders for ongoing stewardship.
- Coordination & Execution: Serve as an operational bridge across teams by coordinating deliverables, driving follow-through on cross-functional commitments, and resolving workflow bottlenecks before they reach the President.
- President’s Office Team Orchestration: Serve as a key connector across the President’s support ecosystem, partnering seamlessly with the Associate Director, Executive Operations (Board & executive operations) and the Executive Assistant (logistics/calendar), to drive unified information flow, alignment, and execution.
Strategic Project Management
- Drive Strategic Velocity: Turn ambiguous executive ideas and high-level strategic conversations into structured, trackable workstreams with clear owners, deliverables, and deadlines.
- Process Design & Streamlining: Maintain and improve processes and leverage Salesforce, Asana, and modern productivity tools to track the President’s portfolio, donor commitments, and key deliverables with high precision.
- Efficiency & AI Integration: Identify opportunities to integrate strategic automation, AI tools, and digital workflows that maximize executive efficiency and information velocity.
High-Stakes Proxy & Executive Synthesis
- Meeting Presence & Capture: Attend select donor, partner, and ambassador meetings alongside the President to capture strategic nuance, synthesize insights, and drive follow-up.
- Executive Writing & Communications: Draft presidential-level briefings, donor summaries, and follow-ups that authentically capture the President’s strategic voice, tone, and intent.
- Routing: Serve as a strategic filter for the President, routing internal and external advisory requests so time is reserved for the highest-leverage decision points and donor opportunities.
Key Competencies for Success
- Stakeholder Coordination & Diplomacy: You excel at capturing complex information from multiple stakeholders, separating signal from noise, and building collaborative, trust-based alignment across teams.
- Operational Rigor: You bring structure to ambiguity and delight in turning complex workstreams into smooth, predictable processes.
- Global Context & Stakeholder Nuance: You navigate high-consequence environments and ultra-high-net-worth relationships with exceptional discretion and high emotional intelligence.
- Executive Tone & Writing: You write with clarity, gravitas, and nuance, quickly adopting an executive’s voice and converting dense discussions into concise executive summaries.
- Agile & Tech-Forward: You naturally seek out modern tools, AI, and digital workflows to eliminate friction and multiply your personal bandwidth and organizational impact.
Qualifications
- 5–8+ years of experience in strategic operations, Chief of Staff support, customer success, impact investing, or high-touch gift advising/fundraising.
- Domain Context: Prior climate or philanthropy experience is welcome, but not required. We strongly encourage applications from fast-paced corporate, startup, or consulting environments where candidates demonstrate rapid domain learning, complex stakeholder coordination, and execution rigor.
- Global & UHNW Stakeholder Experience: Demonstrated poise, discretion, and effectiveness navigating complex environments and engaging high-stakes stakeholders, such as ultra-high-net-worth individuals, global influencers, or executive leadership.
- Proven Project & Systems Management: Strong fluency in CRM tools (e.g., Salesforce), project management platforms (e.g., Asana), and modern AI/productivity platforms.
- Location: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid: Tuesday–Thursday in-office).
Salary Range: $ 144,000 - $160,000
Work Environment
Climate Lead is headquartered in San Francisco, CA. This position operates in a hybrid environment and is based in our San Francisco, CA, office. Staff in the San Francisco Bay Area currently work in the office Tuesday through Thursday each week and typically work from a home location on other days.
At the Climate Lead, we value diversity and always treat all employees and job applicants based on merit, qualifications, competence, and talent. We do not discriminate on the basis of or traits historically associated with race, color, religion, religious creed, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, sexual orientation, veteran and/or military status), domestic violence victim status, political affiliation, and any other status protected by state or federal law.
