Staff Management Essentials

Strong management and supervision skills and tools build trust, increase engagement, and are a foundation for your organization’s work—investing in these skills is crucial. This toolkit provides a framework of five core elements of management, systems, and behaviors to develop a culture of feedback in your organization, and practical tools for delegating and decision making that help create transparency and clarity within your organization.

Toolkit Resources

Foundations of Management

Most conservationists and activists don’t have degrees in management, so we can struggle to create processes to set our staff up for success. This tutorial walks through a straightforward, five-part process that demystifies supervision and increases your ability to create a foundation for your staff that leads to more impact and less time spent dealing with personnel challenges.

Core Elements of Management

Your people are your greatest asset, and creating supportive supervision and management relationships is necessary to retain this asset. Investing time cultivating these relationships for success can improve staff retention and development to strengthen an organization.

Creating a Feedback-Rich Culture Webinar

In this webinar, we show the power of feedback. We demystify what it really is, provide key skills in both giving and receiving feedback, and share ideas on how to create a practice in your organization that supports developing a feedback-rich culture that people can learn to love.

Creating a Feedback-Rich Culture

Feedback isn’t about “once-and-done.” An effective organization strives to create a feedback-rich culture which takes both organizational systems and leadership behaviors that are applied consistently over time. Systems support and sustain behaviors. Behaviors bring systems to life. Use this list to see where your organizations thrive and identify where you might need to focus on improving.

Delegation

Wondering when to delegate, when not to, and how to delegate in a way that sets people up for success so that you get the results you’re hoping for? This tutorial walks you through how to set your team and staff up for success through clear, intentional delegation, which not only builds your organization’s ability to increase your impact and achieve results, but also builds the skill and the strength of the movement more broadly.

Delegation Agreement

Delegation is a crucial part of every organization. It fosters efficiency, effectiveness, and learning throughout it. When done effectively, delegating gives staff members opportunities to develop new skills, empower others, and keep staff focused on the tasks that require their unique talents. However, for delegation to be successful, there needs to be understanding of the assigned work. This resource helps both parties ensure clarity of work and is a valuable tool to support the delegation process.

Delegating Resources & Tools

This guide will help you determine where and how you can delegate aspects of your job to keep your time focused, build staff capacity and otherwise strengthen the management of your organization. This article examines the benefits of delegation, common reasons why delegation is avoided and what should not be delegated.

Decisiveness and Decision-Making

Decisiveness is one of the most valued traits in a leader. Learn more about the process of how we make decisions, where we can get hung up, and how to become more decisive, as well as to create clearer decision-making processes amongst your team. In this tutorial, Kristi also unpacks the ways that our identities affect our relationship to decisiveness.

DARCI Decision Making Model

The DARCI Decision Making Model clarifies your organization’s decision making process by explicitly naming who is involved in decision making. If used early and often at your organization, your team will have clear expectations for their role in each decision or project and will feel more connected to and engaged in their work.

Background Image: American Rivers | Scott Bosse