Strategic Plan Update: Thriving as an Eagle Rock Staffer
Editor’s Note: Today’s post is the third in a series of updates about Eagle Rock’s strategic plan — Vision 2020. Below, director of professional development, Michael Soguero, provides the Eagle Rock community with an update on our efforts related to the plan’s second domain: Staff Thrives. If you’re interested in learning about the overall aim of the plan, please see News From The Rock: Vision 2020.
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Strategic Plan Update: Thriving as an Eagle Rock Staffer
By Michael Soguero, Director of Professional Development
A key theme that emerged during our strategic planning process was a focus on ensuring Eagle Rock School and Professional Development Center was as engaging and purposeful a workplace as possible. We committed to develop clear statements and strategies addressing how to thrive as a staff member, provide training and support to help staff live healthy professional lives, and to create greater clarity on Eagle Rock’s limitations and reinforce that we are not designed for everyone.
We believe staff members thrive when they expend effort based on their strengths while improving the organizational mission of improving student engagement and serving the mission of making a difference nationally. Eagle Rock strives to be a model; an inclusive organization serving a diverse set of high schools nationally, each with a diverse student body with a diverse staff.
Numerous project ideas were generated as part of our planning process but we quickly realized that in order for any new initiative to succeed we needed to have some fundamentals in place. For that reason we chose to focus our early efforts on developing a robust professional management system and rationalizing the effects of working within a matrix organization — that is, an organizational structure in which the reporting relationships are set up as a grid, or matrix, rather than in the traditional corporate hierarchy.
We believe that once a robust system with clear foundational practices is in place, we could drive almost any other initiative addressing staff engagement and it would have a much greater chance of taking root, disseminating practice and sustaining for the long term. We were initially inspired by a great management resource called Manager Tools. While much adaptation has taken place for our mission driven, nonprofit setting we have remained true to instituting the top three management behaviors: Continue reading…