Job Description
Role Purpose
- The Chief of Staff (COS) is one of the most strategic roles at Kaltani, a force multiplier for the CEO and the entire executive leadership team. This is not a traditional support role.
- The CoS will function as a strategic operator: owning critical cross-functional initiatives, ensuring organisational alignment, eliminating execution gaps, and serving as the connective link
- between the CEO's office and every function of the business. This role is built for a high-calibre operator who combines sharp analytical intelligence with
- exceptional interpersonal influence, thrives in complexity, and is driven by the ambition to shape one of Africa's defining green infrastructure enterprises.
Key Responsibilities
Strategic Planning & Execution Management:
- Serve as the primary architect of the CEO's strategic agenda translating vision and highlevel objectives into structured, time-bound execution plans across the organisation.
- Own the design and management of Kaltani's corporate strategy calendar, including quarterly business reviews, annual planning cycles, board preparation, and investor engagement timelines.
- Monitor execution of strategic initiatives across all functions, proactively identifying bottlenecks, misalignments, and risks before they escalate to the CEO.
- Develop and maintain an enterprise-wide OKR (Objectives and Key Results) framework, ensuring all departments are aligned to organisational priorities and accountable for delivery.
- Lead post-decision tracking: turning CEO and Board decisions into clear action registers with owners, timelines, and accountability metrics.
CEO Office & Executive Enablement:
- Manage the CEO's bandwidth strategically structuring priorities, pre-empting demands, and protecting time for the highest-value decisions and engagements.
- Prepare and co-author high-stakes executive deliverables: Board reports, investor presentations, strategic memos, government briefs, and leadership communications.
- Lead briefing preparation for all major CEO meetings, ensuring the CEO enters every engagement informed, prepared, and positioned for optimal outcomes.
- Act as a trusted proxy for the CEO in cross-functional meetings, executive working groups, and external engagements where delegation is appropriate.
- Ensure consistent communication of CEO directives across the organisation, following up to confirm understanding and execution.
Cross-Functional Coordination & Organisational Alignment:
- Serve as the primary integration point across Kaltani's functional leadership teams Operations, Finance, Technology, HR, Government Relations, and Business Development.
- Design and lead the cadence of cross-functional leadership forums (weekly leadership syncs, monthly performance reviews, quarterly strategy offsites) ensuring they drive decisions, not just discussion.
- Identify and resolve organisational silos, interdependency failures, and communication breakdowns that impede execution speed and quality.
- Facilitate alignment on critical resource allocation decisions, competing priorities, and inter-departmental trade-offs, escalating only what genuinely requires CEO adjudication.
- Steward the organisational culture: model and reinforce Kaltani's values of accountability, excellence, and innovation in every operational touchpoint.
Special Projects & High-Priority Initiatives:
- Conduct deep-dive analyses on critical business challenges: operational inefficiencies, growth opportunities, competitive dynamics, or risk exposures and present structured, actionable recommendations to the CEO.
- Lead or co-lead high-priority, time-sensitive projects.
- Act as project management office (PMO) for CEO-sponsored initiatives, ensuring rigour in scoping, resourcing, tracking, and closure.
- Drive scenario planning and contingency preparation for high-stakes decisions, providing the CEO with clear options, trade-offs, and recommended paths forward.
Governance, Reporting & Board Relations:
- Lead preparation and coordination of all Board of Directors meetings: agenda setting, pack development, logistics, and follow-up action management.
- Maintain a comprehensive governance calendar and ensure all statutory, regulatory, and investor reporting obligations are met with precision and timeliness.
- Manage relationships with Board members, investors, and external advisors on behalf of the CEO's office, ensuring responsive, professional, and substantive engagement.
- Build and maintain an institutional knowledge repository decisions log, strategic commitments tracker, partnership agreements ensuring organisational memory is preserved and accessible.
Stakeholder Management & External Relations:
- Represent the CEO's office in high-level engagements with government agencies, development finance institutions (DFIs), ESG investors, and strategic partners.
- Coordinate Kaltani's participation in industry forums, conferences, and policy dialogues managing positioning, messaging, and follow-through.
- Support the development and execution of Kaltani's external communications strategy, including press engagements, thought leadership content, and impact reporting.
- Build and manage a structured stakeholder mapping and engagement system, ensuring the CEO maintains high-quality relationships with the people and institutions that matter most to Kaltani's growth.
Organisational Development & Culture:
- Partner with the CEO and HR leadership on organisational design decisions, leadership appointments, and succession planning for critical roles.
- Lead or support the design of high-performance culture initiatives: leadership development programmes, employee engagement strategies, and accountability frameworks.
- Act as a sounding board and advisor to senior leaders across the organisation facilitating honest dialogue, surfacing systemic issues, and building cohesion within the executive team.
- Champion diversity, equity, and inclusion as embedded features of Kaltani's talent and culture strategy, not peripheral commitments.
Data Intelligence & Decision Support:
- Build and maintain an executive intelligence function: synthesising data from across operations, finance, HR, and commercial functions into coherent insights for CEO decision-making.
- Develop and manage a CEO-level performance dashboard providing real-time visibility on Kaltani's most critical strategic, operational, and financial metrics.
- Spear head quality-control research, benchmarking, and competitive analysis to inform strategic options and sharpen Kaltani's positioning.
- Champion the use of AI and digital tools within the CEO's office to improve the speed, quality, and traceability of executive decision-making.
Requirements
Education:
- Bachelor's degree in Business Administration, Economics, Engineering, Law, Social Sciences, or a related discipline (required).
- MBA or advanced postgraduate degree from a globally recognised institution (strongly preferred).
- Certifications in project management (PMP, PRINCE2), strategy, or leadership are strongly advantageous.
Experience:
- 10 –12+ years of progressive professional experience spanning strategy, operations, management consulting, or executive leadership with demonstrable impact at each stage.
- Minimum 3–5 years in a Chief of Staff, Strategy Director, Senior Executive Advisor, or equivalent role within a complex, fast-scaling organisation, development finance institution, or Tier 1 consulting firm.
- Proven track record of managing and delivering complex, cross-functional strategic initiatives from scoping through execution to measurable outcomes.
- Experience working directly with C-suite executives or Board members is reuired.
- Experience in high-growth, mission-driven organisations operating at the intersection of commercial performance and social impact is especially valued.
Skills and Competencies:
- Exceptional strategic thinking and systems-level problem solving: able to see the full picture while managing granular complexity.
- Outstanding written and verbal communication: able to craft compelling Board reports, CEO speeches, investor narratives, and internal memos with equal fluency.
- Superior project management and execution discipline: skilled in structuring ambiguous problems into clear workplans with owners, timelines, and KPIs.
- High political intelligence and executive presence: comfortable operating at the intersection of internal power dynamics and external stakeholder relationships.
- Analytical rigour: proficient in data analysis, financial modelling, and translating complex datasets into clear strategic insights.
- Deep discretion and unimpeachable integrity: the CEO's office handles the most sensitive information in the organisation absolute confidentiality is non-negotiable.
- Adaptability and speed: able to pivot seamlessly between long-term strategy and urgent operational demands, often on the same day.
- Collaborative leadership without direct authority: the ability to align and mobilise peers, seniors, and cross-functional teams through influence, not hierarchy.
- Digital fluency: strong command of productivity, collaboration, and data tools; champion of AI-augmented workflows within the CEO's office.
- Emotional intelligence and resilience: capable of managing high-pressure environments, difficult conversations, and complex relationships with grace and composure.