Managing Leadership Turnover While Supporting Your Workforce Project

A successful child welfare workforce project needs support from the family-facing staff as well as the decision-makers at the top of the organization. A lot of attention has been paid to staff turnover, but what happens when there is leadership turnover? The Quality Improvement Center for Workforce Development identified this issue as a challenge in all eight of their workforce development study sites, over the course of the project. Their recommendations, described in The Impact of Leadership Turnover on Child Welfare Workforce Initiatives, include:

• Plan for leadership turnover. Tools like a teaming agreement, project charter, and project overview can be used to orient a new leader to the project and clarify their role.
• Document your workforce project. New leaders need to understand not only what you’re doing, but why you’re doing it, and what kind of progress you are making. Written materials like evaluation and implementation plans, and visuals like a data dashboard can help bring a leader up-to-speed on the project.
• Build buy-in from within and outside of the organization. Having project support from staff, managers, and partner organizations can help sustain a workforce project, even when leadership changes.

New leaders often have their own priorities that they want to address. Listen to their priorities and consider how efforts to stabilize or strengthen the workforce can help them meet their goals. Managers who are engaged in the workforce project are instrumental in introducing new leaders to the project and need to be prepared for the likely situation where agency leadership changes. Having a plan, documentation, and the support from key stakeholders can help managers sustain their workforce project when there is a change in leadership.