Supervisory Skills

Goals of the Sessions

Child Welfare Supervisors are in a very difficult managerial position. Not only must they follow many—and changing—rules and regulations, but they must do so in an environment of very high stress. The costs of "errors" are high for children, for themselves, and for the child welfare system as a whole. Added to these strains, "sups" have managerial responsibilities over staff. Many of the OJT (on-the-job-training) "sups" deal with the regulatory or social work elements of the job. The standard techniques for managing—self, subordinates, peers, and superiors—all too often go by the wayside. It was with these lacunae in mind that the project included a managerial supervision segment. Based on information gathered in a needs assessment with public child welfare staff, the seven training sessions were developed to provide information on different elements of supervision. The seven training sessions were designed to integrate management and supervisory theory into the applied format of child welfare.

Supervising - The Front End
Child welfare workers are involved in work requiring them to meet legal deadlines and intervention requirements both competently and efficiently. Supervisors must have the skills to organize their own workload to meet these requirements and must be able to impart these skills to the workers they supervise. This requires that they and their workers agree about what tasks should take priority, what the appropriate expectations are for the completion of necessary tasks, and how long the completion of specified tasks should take. Supervisors must also know the individual ability of staff and set expectations for task completion accordingly. In order to accomplish this, supervisors need practical methods for achieving these tasks and measuring whether or not expected outcomes are achieved. Thus, training materials identified supervisors' need to differentiate between urgent and important tasks in order to better manage workloads, and taught to start with the end in mind and work backwards. This training session also identified effective methods for dealing with conflicts about expectations for task completion between workers and supervisors.
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Training/Coaching/Teaching/Educating/Mentoring
The Learning Connection. Child welfare supervisors must recognize the steps involved in moving from novice worker to master worker. If workers are not challenged, they can become bored. If they are challenged too much beyond their current skill, they become anxious. Thus, supervisors must be able to evaluate a worker's current skill level and, while maintaining appropriate expectations, provide the proper support to encourage employee growth. This is particularly important in a child welfare setting, where employee turnover is frequent and the pressure of the child welfare setting can push supervisors to expect more from new employees than they should based on their skill level. This session provided tools for assessing the skill level of the worker and the tasks the worker were assigned.
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Supportive Communication: Three Major Conversations
"Sups" engage in three major sets of conversations. Perhaps the most important is self-talk—the conversations we have with ourselves. Then there are conversations with others, and that special conversation—giving feedback. This session addresses each of these conversations. Child welfare supervisors must understand the way in which negative self-talk ("I can't…") and problem constructs ("This problem is dumb") can impact their interactions with others and erode their ability to provide support to those they supervise. Such talk impacts supervisees' ability to perform their job. Internal conversations can inhibit organizational change as individuals complain or blame rather than constructively plan. Supervisors need skills in interpersonal communication. They need to understand the dimensions of supportive communication and know when to provide information (coaching) rather than a counseling response when there is an "attitude" problem that requires intervention. Finally, supervisors need to understand that feedback is different from criticism, and should be focused on the problem rather than the person. The nature of child welfare work—its concern with child safety and family functioning—and the need to carry out legal mandates that may not match employee values and beliefs require that communication between all organizational members be smooth and complete.
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Working With Workers (and Others) With Strong Opinions: Managing Difficult People
People with strong opinions can be a problem for child welfare supervisors, whether they are peers, subordinates, or their own supervisors and managers. Because issues in child welfare involve competing values and beliefs, opinions can be particularly strong about individual situations. Supervisors need tools to deal with individual behaviors that can disrupt and derail the decision-making process during meetings as well as impact individual interactions that take place on a daily basis. One important aspect of dealing with problematic individuals involves emotional self-awareness and an ability on the part of supervisors to handle the emotional reactions of others.
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Decision Making/Problem Solving
The misuse of meetings (for announcements and reports) is a common practice in many organizations, including the child welfare setting. The Agenda Bell was used as a tool to teach this skill. Developed by one of the facilitators, based on many years of research into "best practices for meeting management," it suggests that meetings be organized with the flow of energy and time in mind. Thus, meetings should begin with announcements and minutes. These are followed by items requiring easy decisions. Such decisions are followed by items that require difficult decisions that might be contentious--the middle of the meeting, when energy and attention are highest, is when the hardest items should be addressed. Because difficult decisions can tear at the fabric of group cohesion, it is important never to end a meeting right after a difficult decision. So, when these items have been dealt with, brainstorming for the next meeting or another positive task should take place. Meetings are, of course, the place where decisions are made. There are better practices than are commonly used to arrive at decisions. Decision crystallization is the process through which "sups" assess each issue along five dimensions--breadth of preference, intensity or depth of preference, the wishes of those who must actually carry out the decision, the views of experts (lawyers, etc.), and the views of the powerful stakeholders in the setting. "Sups" then seek to fomulate options that meet and can be shown to meet most if not all of these concern points.
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Supervising - The Back End
(Including Monitoring, Reviewing, and Performance Architecture)
Staffs in child welfare, as in other professions, are made up of people with different levels of intelligence. Some people are facile in language use, while others have logical and analytical skills. Some workers are visual or artistic or have a high degree of physical aptitude. Good supervisors understand the talents of their staff as well as their own talents and shortcomings. With this knowledge in mind, a good supervisor will be aware of others' moods, temperaments, intentions, and motivations. They will also be aware of their impact on others.
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Management of Self
Child welfare supervisors need to understand what creates stress for them and develop means of reducing stress where they can. This involves self-assessments of their own physical and mental health, and establishing a lifestyle that promotes their personal well-being. Part of this process is understanding one's own personality characteristics. Supervisors need to make self-assessment opportunities available for staff under their supervision as well. Discussion of the Myers-Briggs-Assay was used as one approach to this kind of self-understanding issue.
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