What If Your Next Great Challenge Is Somewhere You Never Expected?

There is a particular kind of person we are looking for at Chisholm Creek Academy, and there is a good chance she is not currently looking for us. She is probably not searching job boards or updating her résumé, and she may never have imagined herself working in a school. She has already built a career, led people, carried significant responsibility, navigated difficult personalities, made decisions without perfect information, and learned what happens when carefully constructed plans collide with reality. She knows what it means to build teams, hold standards, recover from failure, and develop people. We also know that someone like this may take time to find. That is fine with us. We are more interested in finding the right person than filling a position quickly.

You May Have Already Had the Career

We imagine this person may have spent twenty or thirty years in energy, banking, healthcare, construction, aerospace, commercial real estate, entrepreneurship, operations, or another demanding field. She may have been an executive, COO, vice president, business owner, division leader, or simply the person everyone knew could be trusted when something important needed to get done. Over the course of that career, she learned that people are complicated, talented teams still make mistakes, good ideas sometimes fail, and leadership often requires resisting the temptation to personally solve every problem. She may have reached the titles she wanted, achieved financial security, and proven what she set out to prove professionally. What interests us is the possibility that she is not finished contributing, but that the next challenge needs to mean something different.

We Are Not Looking for a Traditional Teacher

At Chisholm Creek Academy, our adults are called Guides because their work looks different from conventional classroom teaching. A Guide is a coach, mentor, culture builder, operator, question asker, and game maker. Our learners are expected to take ownership of their education, prove mastery, work through conflict, make decisions, solve problems, and gradually become capable of leading themselves. Someone who has spent years running organizations may recognize the philosophy underneath that immediately. If an organization only functions when its leader is personally solving every problem, the leader has not yet built a very strong organization. We believe the same principle applies to young people. Our goal is not to create learners who perform beautifully whenever a talented adult is nearby. We want learners who increasingly possess the judgment, confidence, and responsibility to know what to do when that adult steps away.

Your Experience May Transfer Better Than You Expect

Much of what makes an exceptional senior leader also makes an exceptional Guide. You have probably learned how to establish expectations without doing everyone else's work, recognize potential before it is fully developed, understand when someone needs encouragement and when they need accountability, and adapt your leadership to different personalities and circumstances. You have likely learned to ask questions before drawing conclusions and discovered that repeatedly rescuing people rarely makes them more capable. The setting at CCA is different and the people are younger, but the underlying leadership question is remarkably similar: How do I help another person become more capable without making that person dependent on me? We are interested in someone who finds that question compelling.

Comfort With Chaos, Failure, and Consequences Matters

A Studio will not always look orderly. Learners will disagree, projects will fail, teams will make poor decisions, someone will procrastinate, and carefully constructed plans will occasionally fall apart. We need someone who can remain thoughtful in those moments rather than assuming that disorder automatically means something has gone wrong. She must be able to distinguish between something that is unsafe and something that is simply uncomfortable, frustrating, or difficult. One requires intervention. The other may require patience. We also allow learners to experience genuine failure and natural consequences when it is reasonable and safe to do so. A learner may give the presentation she did not adequately prepare for or discover that a poor decision has limited her options. For highly competent adults, the instinct to fix those situations can be powerful. A great Guide knows that sometimes the more valuable response is to remain available, ask good questions, and allow the learner to carry the appropriate weight of the decision.

We Value Steadiness and Perspective

We are looking for someone who is difficult to rattle, not because she is detached, but because experience has given her perspective. A frustrated learner does not ruin the day. A failed project does not create panic. A difficult conversation does not automatically become a crisis. Years of serious leadership tend to teach that today's catastrophe may become next year's useful lesson. That perspective matters enormously around young people. When a learner says, “I can't do this,” we want someone curious enough not to immediately accept the statement or dismiss it. Perhaps the learner cannot do it yet. Perhaps she is frustrated, afraid, inexperienced, or simply needs another attempt. The Guide's role is to help discover which is true without unnecessarily taking the problem away from her.

This Work Requires a Different Relationship With Leadership

The strongest Guide does not need to be the smartest person in the Studio or the source of every answer. She is comfortable watching someone else solve the problem and receive the credit. In fact, one of the unusual measures of success in this work is becoming less necessary. A strong Guide builds systems, culture, judgment, responsibility, and leadership within the learners themselves, then gradually allows them to carry more. Anyone who has built a capable team that eventually stopped requiring her presence in every meeting already understands the satisfaction of this kind of leadership. We are looking for someone who wants to do that again, this time with young people.

This May Be the Right Season

We recognize that this opportunity will not appeal to everyone, including many extraordinarily successful people. Compensation, advancement, titles, and professional recognition matter differently at different stages of life. We are particularly interested in the woman who has reached a point where those things are no longer the primary measure of an opportunity, but who still has energy, curiosity, judgment, and a desire to contribute. She may not need another conventional career. She may simply want a difficult problem worth caring about, people worth developing, and meaningful responsibility. We are not assuming that person is easy to find, and we are prepared to be patient enough to find her.

There Is Still Plenty to Build Here

CCA is not a finished institution looking for someone to maintain a perfectly polished system. We are still building, experimenting, revising, strengthening, and occasionally discovering that an idea we loved needs to be discarded, and we always will be. The person we are looking for should find that energizing rather than threatening. We want someone who can understand the goal and the guardrails, exercise sound judgment within them, identify weaknesses, improve systems, and gradually take genuine ownership. Our hope is that over time we can look at an entire Studio and know, without needing to check every detail, that it is in capable hands.

Why Young People?

The reason to bring decades of leadership experience into a school is not simply to change industries. Young people are still forming their understanding of responsibility, failure, courage, competence, work, leadership, and what happens when things do not go according to plan. The opportunity is to apply everything you have learned about developing people at a point in their lives when those lessons can become foundational. We are not asking someone to leave her experience behind and become something completely different. We are asking whether everything she has learned might be unusually valuable here.

We Are Willing to Wait

We are serious about finding this person, and we are equally serious about not forcing the fit. We would rather continue searching than convince the wrong person that this should be her next chapter. The woman we are looking for may have never considered working in a school, and that does not concern us. What matters is whether she knows how to lead, develop people, hold standards, tolerate ambiguity, allow appropriate failure, exercise good judgment, and continue building when the path is not completely mapped out.

If reading this creates more curiosity than certainty, that is enough for a first conversation. Send us one or two sentences explaining why Chisholm Creek Academy specifically interests you at this point in your life. We are less interested in why you are qualified than in why this particular work, with these particular young people, might be worth your time now.