Supervisory Strategies to Enhance Human Services Resilience
This 2-hour intermediate training session for supervisors, managers, and administrators will offer actionable strategies to address the root causes of burnout and turnover.
Course Overview
The human services sector is grappling with a significant crisis characterized by workforce burnout and high turnover rates, undermining the quality of services to vulnerable children and families. This situation not only exacerbates caseloads for remaining staff but also negatively impacts morale, inflates recruitment and training costs, and threatens organizational reputation. Contributing factors include low salaries, overwhelming workloads, repeated exposure to trauma, and extensive documentation requirements, creating a cycle of attrition that burdens supervisors and managers alike.
This 2-hour intermediate training session for supervisors, managers, and administrators will offer actionable strategies to address the root causes of burnout and turnover. We will introduce the principles of trauma-informed supervision and cultural humility, offering strategies to foster a work environment that prioritizes safety, warmth, wellness and professional growth.
Key elements of a supportive learning environment, including conducting training needs assessments and understanding levels of learning will be shared. You will gain effective techniques aimed at building critical skills and competencies within your team. Attendees will discover that making small adjustments in supervisory practices can lead to significant improvements in team members’ professional development, workplace culture, and staff retention.
Participants will be able to:
Integrate at least 3 strategies of trauma informed supervision with their team.
Utilize at least 3 strategies of cultural humility in supervision.
Integrate primary concepts of the 4 learning styles into their supervision.
Distinguish which supervisory strategies are needed to help their staff achieve each level of learning.
Develop a supportive learning environment action plan for their team.
Mike A. Nowlin, MSSA, LISW-S
Mike Nowlin, MSSA, LISW-S, brings nearly 30 years of expertise in child welfare, behavioral health, and international development. As the Director of Operations at the Institute for Human Services (IHS) and the Child Maltreatment Policy Resource Center, he oversees daily operations and manages the Continuing Education program, which is nationally accredited for social work training.
Through IHS’ organizational development services, Mike also supports agencies to best ensure they have effective infrastructures, streamlined programming, and strategic plans to reach their organizational goals. Since 2022, Mike has been active in the agency’s research about youth on sex offender registries and is co-author of an Issues in Brief titled Sex Offender Registration for Youth With Problematic Sexual Behaviors: What Happened When One State Discontinued This Practice.
Nan Beeler, MSW
Nan Beeler has more than 40 years of experience in the child welfare field, focusing primarily on capacity building and strategic system change in organizations serving abused and neglected children and their families.
Early in her career, Nan worked as a caseworker and direct service provider in both the child protection and children’s mental health systems. In 1986 she became a Core trainer for the Ohio Child Welfare Training Program (OCWTP), Ohio’s newly formed statewide training system to build the capacity of Ohio’s 88 county child protective services agencies. She subsequently joined the Institute for Human Services (IHS), the State Coordinator for the OCWTP, as a training manager. She worked in this capacity for 35 years serving many functions that included researching and evaluating the empirical base for best practice; developing child welfare competencies; assessing training needs; developing training curricula; training and coaching trainers; leading work teams; designing transfer of learning strategies; and coaching other staff members and partners in training system operations.
