Managing and Developing Professional Staff
Credentialed professionals need clear outcomes, sound supervision, appropriate autonomy, and useful feedback. A cooperative also competes for scarce specialists, so hiring and onboarding must be structured enough to be fair, predictive, and repeatable.
What you’ll be able to do
Week objectives
- Translate a role into outcomes, competencies, and decision authority.
- Use a structured, job-related interview and scoring process.
- Create a practical onboarding and first-90-days plan.
- Set expectations for professional judgment, collaboration, documentation, and compliance.
- Use coaching and feedback to develop staff.
Core concepts
Build the mental model
Role scorecard
A role scorecard defines the outcomes a role must produce, the measures that indicate progress, the competencies required, and the authority available. It is more useful than a task list alone.
Structured interview
Candidates receive consistent, job-related questions and are scored against anchored criteria. Structure improves fairness and reduces decisions based on rapport or intuition.
Work sample
A work sample asks candidates to perform a realistic, appropriately de-identified task. It should be job-related, accessible, consistently administered, and reviewed for employment-law and policy compliance.
Onboarding
Onboarding connects mission, relationships, systems, role expectations, safeguards, and early work. It is not a pile of forms completed on day one.
90-day plan
A 90-day plan sequences learning, relationships, early contributions, and increasing independence. The manager identifies checkpoints rather than waiting until formal evaluation.
Professional autonomy and accountability
Autonomy means discretion within clear outcomes, law, ethics, scope, and escalation rules. Credentialed status does not eliminate organizational accountability.
Coaching
Coaching uses observation, questions, practice, and feedback to improve capability. Managers should distinguish skill gaps, unclear expectations, resource barriers, and unwillingness.
In practice
What it looks like
- A diagnostician scorecard includes timely, defensible evaluations; clear reports; district collaboration; accurate documentation; and appropriate escalation—not merely 'complete evaluations.'
- Interviewers score a redacted case-planning work sample against the same rubric before discussing overall impressions.
- A new therapist’s first month prioritizes district contacts, documentation standards, privacy/security, scheduling, supervision, and a manageable initial caseload.
Required viewing
Learn from trusted instructors
3 verified videos · 2 hr 59 min. Watch in order, then mark each complete.
Interviewing Skills for Talent Hiring | 26th Professional Webinar
ASK Development
Walks managers through preparation, questioning, evidence gathering, and evaluation. The course materials add the public-employer safeguards and structured scorecard needed for cooperative hiring.
Supervisory Development: Smart Hiring, Successful Onboarding Webinar recording
Talent Strategy
Connects selection decisions with the onboarding experience that follows. This supports the week’s complete hiring-to-90-day workflow.
How to Build and Manage Teams - Stanford CS183F: Startup School
Stanford Online
Offers practical lessons on role clarity, team composition, management, and culture. Startup assumptions must be adapted, but the principles of clear ownership and team design remain useful.
Apply the ideas
Role, Hiring, and Onboarding Design
Choose one professional role the cooperative expects to hire or redesign within the next year.
Role scorecard
Interview plan
Onboarding plan
Development support
Weekly deliverable
Turn the week into working practice.
A role scorecard, structured interview plan, onboarding plan, and first-90-days plan for one cooperative role.
- Define four to six outcomes and measures for the role.
- Identify job-related competencies and write consistent behavioral and situational questions.
- Create anchored scoring guidance and an interview-team decision process.
- Sequence onboarding across before-start, first day, first month, days 31–60, and days 61–90.
- Add relationship, privacy, compliance, technology, supervision, and service-delivery checkpoints.
- Review the plan for policy, labor agreement, accessibility, and employment-law questions.
The packet defines measurable outcomes, uses consistent job-related selection evidence, assigns onboarding owners, includes 30/60/90-day checkpoints, and flags items for HR or legal review.
Executive questions
Questions worth carrying
- What must this role reliably accomplish in its first year?
- Which selection evidence is job-related and predictive?
- What does the person need to learn, do, and build in 30, 60, and 90 days?
- How will the manager observe performance and give timely feedback?
- Are workload, supervision, and tools adequate for the expectations?
Optional AI practice
Use AI as a thinking partner—not a records system.
Protect sensitive information. Do not upload personally identifiable student information, protected student records, confidential personnel information, unredacted contracts, credentials, or sensitive financial information to an AI system without explicit authorization. Follow FERPA, IDEA, district policy, employment-confidentiality duties, contractual restrictions, records rules, and approved data-security procedures.
Week 6 in one sentenceGood people systems define outcomes before hiring, use consistent evidence, and continue through onboarding, coaching, and evaluation.