MANRRS is the nation’s top organization for the recruitment and cultivation of diverse talent in agriculture, natural resources, and related sciences. At its national conference in March, known as #MANRRS38, the Executive Committee opted to expand the group’s operations through the creation of a CEO position.
This position will place MANRRS leadership on par with peer talent development organizations and will empower MANRRS to grow and scale at a modern pace to meet the needs of the industry and its membership.
“MANRRS has grown to the point where we now have a full-time staff dedicated to the daily operations of the organization. What started as purely volunteer roles, have evolved into essential positions that keep the organization running and competitive daily,” said Dr. Derris D. Burnett, MANRRS’ national president, in an email to stakeholders on Monday. “As a member-based organization, we depend on the entire national office team to work on the business so that the executive leadership can work in the business on behalf of the membership. To operate in an everchanging and increasingly competitive environment, we must empower this team to make the daily decisions that enact the vision and meets the needs of the MANRRS membership.”
The role of the CEO will be to:
- Help craft and execute the strategic vision and direction of the organization and provide consistency year over year.
- Sustain the growth trajectory and maintain the cutting edge of the organization in this sector.
- Execute the operations and business of the organization with appropriate reporting and accountability structure.
- Create continuity for the organization without losing the membership experience and professional development focus that differentiates MANRRS from our peer organizations.
The essential job functions of this position are broken out as 50 percent Strategic Vision and Leadership, 20 percent Operational Infrastructure and Performance, 20 percent Partnership Development, and 10 percent Program Development. The full description is available here.
MANRRS has offerings for our pre-collegiate, collegiate, and professional membership, and with its explosive organizational growth come intrinsic constraints that the group says must be addressed to continue this trajectory. MANRRS says its constraints can be summed up in the following 3-S’s:
- Speed: The demand for MANRRS talent and services is immediate and persistent. Our current structure constrains our ability to respond to this demand in a manner that keeps us competitive and cedes our competitive advantage in many cases.
- Scale: MANRRS has built a deliberate pipeline that ranges from pre-collegiate to professional. Our ability to support and serve more students and professionals at the national, regional, and local levels is hampered by scalability constraints. And delivering more MANRRS programming to the target audiences and MANRRS family.
- Service: Our ability to provide the highest quality experience for each of our membership groups is the top priority of the MANRRS organization and is a differentiator from our peer contemporaries. To reach this level of service, we must adapt and optimize our business operations and our membership services. This requires modifications to our organizational structure to optimize our attention to the business and service to the body membership body.
The MANRRS’ national office currently consists of a chief operating officers, business manager, program manager, and junior MANRRS coordinator.
The new CEO position “will empower the organization to grow and scale at a modern pace to meet the needs of the industry and our growing membership,” Burnett said.
