Core team

Choose your leadership team

Appoint a key person to be coordinator and link person. They need to:

1. be able to commit enough time
2. willing to call meetings
3. check that things get done as planned
4. give help if people get stuck
5. get help when they get stuck, and
6. be able to provide overall leadership and vision.

Nominate other committee members, and any administrative staff you will need. Note that people who a good at giving overall leadership are not usually also good at the details of routine administration. Consider the kind of people who could be field staff, and whether they are available.

Too many or too few staff is a risk. As a rule of thumb, you need at least two staff for each area of expertise. Remember too, that some people you invite onto staff might not accept.

Trying to start too big is difficult; it can be hard to manage lots of people who aren't really sure how everything will work. If you are a larger program, you might want to start by appointing a core of staff and leave others until a later stage. Although you need admin staff, it's easy to have too many at the beginning when they might have very little to do.

What do you need to do to explain the program to nominated staff and get them on-side?

1. Clarify purposes of their involvement
2. Clarify the program that your plan to offer
3. Clarify their roles
4. Clarify the kind of commitment you are asking of people (esp. time)
5. Ask whether the nominees need to meet together and "digest" planning so far?
6. Ask what kind of support will they need?

 

Clarify commitment

You really need a team that will commit to the project. You might find that some people are entheusiastic, but you can't afford to have many of them opt out when their enthusiasm fades. Ask them to commit clearly to the target people. You will almost certainly face some level of staff turnover anyway; even the most loyal people can get sick and be unable to continue.

You really need longer term people if you will have ongoing commitments to clients.

• Imagine the confusion of a young orphan who changes "parents" every twelve months.
• Or the confusion of a village elder who is reluctant to accept change, but loses his liaison person every time he builds up some trust.
• Imagine the disillusionment of a young addict who frequently changes case manager. (And for that matter, the frustation of a case manager who finds his client list arbitrarily changed just after establishing trust.)

 

Appraise your human resources

1. What expertise do people have?
2. What limitations do they have?
3. Will they need formal qualifications?
4. What support staff will you need?
5. Do you have enough people? A program that depends too heavily on one person is quite risky.

 

Give orientation to your staff and administrators

It is imperative that they all understand exactly what is expected of them. Some things will naturally be unclear simply because you haven't started, so it will be important to get people together fairly often and resolve any problems before they become serious. Meet with staff and mentors to ensure that they understand the program and answer their questions.

 

About teamwork

Building a group of people into an efficient, functional team is one of the biggest challenges you face at this stage. People need to learn to trust each, communicate well, learn together, and build a new ethos. During that process, you will probably have to referee various misunderstandings as you work out what people are good at and not good at.

 

About team meetings

Your team meetings are one of your best training opportunities and should give you an experience of "group learning" and "group memory":

• Analyze problems, propose possible solutions, consider the pros and contras of different alternatives, and make decisions.
• Review particular cases. What did you do right? What did you do wrong? How could you do better?