Watershed Partners Proposal Manager

The Watershed Way

In today’s world, organizations, communities, and even societies struggle to identify shared opportunities and negotiate sustained outcomes successfully. Often the challenges appear too complex and insurmountably frustrating. As a result, these challenges remain unsolved as communities and organizations default toward approaches that are slow, expensive, and adversarial, resulting in a diminished probability of reaching a good outcome.

Watershed Partners exists to create space for a wide variety of participants to come together to create shared learning, form new individual and collective identities and develop new and innovative solutions. We offer approaches that profoundly change our clients’ way of understanding the systems they live and work in and the perspectives held in existing mental models and world views. Together, we shape outcomes that can have long-lasting and transformative impacts on individual people, their organizations and communities, and quite possibly the world.

Your work with Watershed will put you at the centre of the world’s most intractable problems. You will find yourself in rooms with communities that have been in conflict for centuries, with organizations that have never previously seen themselves as systems thinkers or collaborators, and with societies who are coming together to seek solutions to the world’s toughest economic, social and political challenges.

Your Role

As the Proposal Manager, you will be responsible for creating and overseeing detailed and persuasive bids on behalf of the organization. Working with other team members, you will lead the process of identifying opportunities in which to submit proposals, devise successful strategies for winning a bid by highlighting our unique value proposition, and understand the organization’s operating and profit margins.

Your Resume

• At minimum 5 years of experience in a Proposal Manager or similar role
• Bachelor's degree or certificate in Business Management or Communications, or equivalent combination of education and experience You have a proven ability to ensure compliance with the standards outlined by client procurement teams
• You are known to be extremely results-focused while maintaining good collaborative working relationships with the people you work with
• You are also known for bringing a rigorous and thoughtful approach to building relationships with clients throughout the procurement process

What you Offer

Exceptional Communication & Influencing Skills: You are a confident and articulate communicator with years of professional experience writing a wide range of winning proposals — from small two-page documents for retainer contracts to larger programs in both the public and private sectors. You have a proven ability to synthesize a diversity of content inputs into a coherent document that speaks with one voice, is in line with a brand style guide, and is tailored for a specific audience.

Strategic & Innovative Thinking: You understand the landscape in which we operate and have a strong capability to research current and future market trends. You have a proven ability to proactively identify risks and issues in both the creation of a proposal and in the delivery of a project, and you create meaningful mitigation strategies for them. You have a keen ability to identify the “next best alternative”.

Organizational Skills: You are capable of leading multiple complex bid processes simultaneously and have a track record of proactively planning bid processes to ensure those involved are clear on what is needed by them and timelines required.

Resilience: You will work in a very dynamic environment. The people we work with are facing the most challenging problems that the world offers. It’s emotional work and will require you to be extremely self-aware and self-regulating. Success in this environment will come with the ability to cope effectively with the stress and challenges present when working with other people who may be learning to cope with what’s in front of them.

What we Offer in Return

• The opportunity to focus your work on transforming systems to enable biosphere integrity and build new models for working, thinking, living and being.
• The chance to be an early joiner in a young company that’s rapidly growing into a unique position where we can enable real progressive change in the world.
• A work environment where you can be your whole and honest self. We don’t hide behind corporate facades.
• Significant opportunities for growth and development and financial support for learning and development for people who demonstrate a long-term commitment to the organization.
• Performance-Based Reward structures that are designed in the context of mutually agreed measures.
• A generous home office allowance to help enable you to do your best work, wherever that may be.
• Support for rest and rejuvenation through flexible work arrangements as well as paid vacation up to 3 weeks per year. In addition, the Company is closed for two weeks in December/January of each year, during which time you will be paid for an additional 2 weeks to enjoy the holiday season.
• Extended medical and dental benefits as well as access to Life Insurance and coverage for Critical Illness and Long-Term Disability.

Location: Remote – Canada

Interested in further exploring this opportunity? Email us at careers@watershed.co with your resume and cover letter.