About this role
Senior Executive Leader (Chief Administrative Officer / Chief Operating Officer)Full-Time, Permanent | Executive LeadershipCranbrook, British Columbia Strong, healthy citizens and communities, speaking our language and celebrating who we are and our history in our ancestral homelands, working together, managing our lands and resources, within a self-sufficient, self-governing Nation. Ktunaxa Nation Council (KNC) is seeking an accomplished senior executive to translate established Leadership direction into coordinated, accountable, and timely organizational action. This is a significant opportunity to help guide KNC through a transformative period while maintaining operational stability, advancing current priorities, and supporting the continued clarification of KNC?s mandate, governance model, organizational functions, and senior leadership structure. The successful candidate will initially report to the Nasu?kin, with broader governance reporting refined as KNC?s leadership model develops. The role will work in parallel with the Chief Financial Officer and Senior Governance Lead. These leaders have distinct but complementary accountabilities and are expected to collaborate closely, provide constructive checks and balances, hold one another accountable, and support continuity. The final title and configuration may be confirmed as a Chief Administrative Officer, Chief Operating Officer, or another senior executive model based on KNC?s evolving needs and the strengths of the successful candidate. This highly relational role calls for cultural legitimacy, sound judgment, humility, courage, resilience, approachability, and confidence grounded in competence. The leader must be respectful without being passive, decisive without being dismissive, and able to maintain high expectations through coaching, mediation, appreciative inquiry, and clear accountability.What You Will Lead Direction and alignment: Translate Leadership direction into clear operational mandates, priorities, performance expectations, and coordinated action across directors, teams, and resources. Transformation and continuity: Implement approved organizational changes through practical timelines, transition planning, implementation analysis, risk management, and consistent follow-through while sustaining current workplans and essential services. Operational accountability: Establish clear expectations and guardrails; hold directors accountable; strengthen policy, protocol, complaint, investigation, documentation, and evidence-based decision processes. People leadership: Coach and support directors, clarify roles, ensure appropriate capacity and expertise, address performance and relationship concerns early, and build confidence that workplace concerns will be handled fairly and respectfully. Relationships and communication: Maintain close, respectful, and productive relationships with the Nasu?kin, Ktunaxa First Nations? senior management, directors, staff, governments, industry, and United States Ktunaxa/Kootenai Tribes. Provide regular, timely, and transparent reports that support discussion, feedback, and informed decisions. Strategic judgment and execution: Assess complex information and relational impacts, identify risks and policy gaps, distinguish legitimate concerns from unverified information, prioritize the most important issues, delegate appropriately, and move practical solutions forward with urgency and care. Cultural and contextual leadership: Ensure technical expertise and organizational practices are applied through a Ktunaxa worldview and support community-driven, Nation-based priorities rather than individual agendas or default Western assumptions. What You BringWe recognize cultural, academic, professional, community, and lived experience as valuable forms of learning. We encourage candidates whose combined experience closely reflects the following to apply: Significant senior executive or senior management experience in a First Nations, Indigenou