What is your agency’s perspective on coaching and talent development? Have you ever come across an agency policy you didn’t know about but wish you did? Do you use a supervisors file for all your one on one meetings? Do you know if your agency will cover damages to your personal vehicle while you are using it for work or carpooling to a meeting?

The County of Santa Cruz Personnel Department is glad to share our insights and lessons learned from developing our annual 5-session Supervisory Academy and our new 8-step Coaching model. We developed our academy to build confidence in leadership by providing toolkits to support:

• Best practices in employee coaching;
• Lessons learned to improve employee engagement;
• How to navigate the complex maze of personnel policies and processes; and
• Who are the other agency leaders that can support you in your role.

Like many agencies, the County of Santa Cruz has a complex work environment influenced by politics, bargaining groups, and by procedures that have been handed down through workplace generations. To support development of engaged and inspiring managers and to create a positive organizational culture, our County developed in the early 90’s the Supervisor and Manager Academy series. Its primary purpose is to ensure supervisors and managers have adequate tools and resources to function across our 23 departments.

As a Personnel Department we are uniquely positioned to address overall training needs regarding supervising and managing within our County. Our position as consultant to departments allows us to keep a pulse on skill gaps and the types of training that would best address these gaps.

Curriculum

Our curriculum was developed over time with an eye to providing participants with a basic understanding of the areas they are likely to touch as supervisors and managers with the County of Santa Cruz. We suggest you start with an emphasis in these critical areas:

• Hiring including selection & reference checks
• Making performance evaluations meaningful
• Employee safety including workplace violence preparation
• Worker’s Compensation & leaves of absence
• How to mitigate risk and lower self-insured liability costs
• Your own version of a training platform (for example, our online and robust learning platform “Santa Cruz County Learns”)
• Awareness of Grievances & Unfair Labor Practices
• Understanding the Equal Employment Opportunity, Americans with Disabilities Act & Respectful Workplace Policies
• Successfully navigating through corrective actions

Once you start framing in your curriculum, give some thought around how you might make the best use of your participants dedicated time. For example, we assign and rotate multiple presenters for each session. This is a win-win-win as it gets more of our staff connected with agency leaders, shares the burden of presenting, and the rotation of presenters keeps participants more engaged.

Networking

With an intentional approach to growing engagement, our team recently expanded the networking component to drive collaboration and teaming across our County. Participants now develop relationships with key managers across the County while also actively learning. This is done by:

• implementing a network component into ice breakers throughout each day
• using a rotating seating chart that drives one-on-one connections
• seating participants into small work teams
• hosting a networking luncheon on the final day

The ice breaker gets people up and moving throughout the room in exercises like, “meet and run”, which asks participants to pair up and spend three minutes learning everything they can about one another. When the timer chimes, participants find another partner and spend three minutes with that person…and so on and so forth.

Our seating chart is also designed to get participants moving and is set up in pods of six per table; two people, side-by-side on three sides of the table. This set up eases people out of their comfort zone, allowing for new connections to be made.

Timing

We suggest you give thought to the time of the year for your academy and how many segments it can be broken apart into. For us, we evolved into 4 segments of four-hour sessions from 8:30 to 12:30 with a final full day segment that includes a hosted lunch. Our Academy is scheduled to avoid busy times of the budget season, holidays, and summer vacation that can impact all operations.

Bonus material – 8 Step Coaching Model

To further develop our academy curriculum, we recently launched Supervisory Academy 2.0 for our Fall ’19 cohort. After completion of the Supervisory Academy, the cohort and academy alumni are invited to attend a half day coaching training. The premise of this training is that you can’t be a great supervisor if you’re not a good coach. Participants in Supervisory Academy 2.0 are introduced to an 8-step coaching model and learn tools to conduct productive 1:1 meetings with a development approach in mind.

Imparting this knowledge to our leaders is only the beginning of our training. The Academy is a starting point for building relationships across County departments and approachability to our subject matter experts (SMEs). The true success of the Academy not only appears when leaders are faced with difficult situations and reach out to the SMEs (our academy presenters) for guidance, thus allowing us to proactively get in front of problems rather than playing catch-up, but also when Academy graduates apply what they have learned to shift their workplace culture to one of open communication and collaboration.