Help! I’m Hiring New Senior Staff And I Want Them To Be CLA-Savvy!

As a sector, international development organizations are increasingly recognizing the importance of effective collaboration, organizational learning, and adaptive management competencies in achieving results. The evidence bears this out: CLA is strongly and positively linked to employee satisfaction, engagement, and empowerment, and USAID’s evidence base for CLA demonstrates its contributions to achieving better development results. 

We see this recognition borne out in USAID solicitations that highlight the importance of CLA throughout implementation and more and more in key personnel requirements that emphasize strong management capacity in addition to technical know-how. This is critical because CLA integration in programming starts with how we staff the program. 

All positions on a team need some level of CLA-savviness to complement their other technical or operational skills. We know, for example, that Chiefs and Deputy Chiefs of Party must be skilled collaborators with internal teams and external stakeholders. Technical team leads need to facilitate learning and adapting within their work units to achieve the best possible outcomes for the activity or project. All leaders with formal authority also heavily influence whether there is psychological safety, a key ingredient for team and organizational effectiveness. 

We’ve created a new resource to help recruiters and hiring managers hire for such CLA-savvy skills, particularly in senior leadership roles. It includes specific position description language for both the responsibilities and qualifications for each senior leadership position in a typical development project: Chief of Party (COP) & Deputy COP, Director of Finance and Administration, Technical Directors and Team Leads, and Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) Director. 
 

Here are some brief examples from the tool:

We hope this short resource fills a gap and provides plug and play options for those responsible for hiring senior leaders on development projects or even at central levels. In addition, USAID and other donors can play a role by highlighting the importance of these responsibilities and qualifications in their solicitations. By focusing on these CLA responsibilities and skills up front, we hope that organizations will recruit learning-oriented and adaptive staff and create the enabling conditions for CLA and, thus, better performance.

For those interested in this topic, check out the companion piece, A Guide to Hiring Adaptive Employees, to identify the competencies necessary for each position and sample interview questions.