Photograph of Jeanette James

SLP Supervisor Orientation: Improving How We Serve New Leaders
Ujima Donalson

This September POD is introducing SLP Supervisor Orientation, a stand-alone training that will replace the HR Basics segment from Level 1 of the Strategic Leadership Program. Over the years we’ve learned that SLP is most successful when it is delivered at the optimal time in a leader’s career, and this change will allow new or newly promoted supervisors to gain a deeper understanding of their role in human resources administration in a timely fashion. A workshop dedicated to HR fundamentals will also enable leaders to more fully delve into the material and ask questions of subject-matter experts. Finally, it gives us the opportunity to unify the messaging that supervisors receive in regard to HR operations and to support the larger HR and UW strategies of centralizing information and making pertinent tools and services more readily accessible.


New or newly promoted supervisors often face a steep learning curve when trying to understand how human resources works at the UW. For instance, they might be unsure about the role of an HR administrator in their department versus the HR consultant assigned to their department. Supervisors also must be able to understand and apply a myriad of policies related to everything from ethics in public service to working with unionized employees. Missteps or gaps in knowledge can jeopardize a leader’s credibility, put the University at risk, or result in employees being given misinformation or even being treated unfairly or inconsistently. Needless to say, we want to avoid these situations by getting supervisors up to speed as quickly as possible.

Exploring their responsibilities as agents of the University, discovering how to partner with UW Human Resources, obtaining information from key HR units such Labor Relations and SafeCampus, and learning about human resource fundamentals best serves supervisors in the first six weeks of their new role. Not only is this material advantageous for supervisors to receive early on, SLP Supervisor Orientation is a natural fit with other onboarding processes new supervisors may participate in. In fact, POD’s David VanDeusen, who leads our in-person New Employee Orientation program, will be the primary facilitator for SLP Supervisor Orientation.

The launch of Workday in 2017 will provide new tools for inviting newly promoted or hired supervisors to Supervisor Orientation and for recommending or requiring onboarding activities within specific timeframes. In the interim, supervisors will be mandated to register for Supervisor Orientation when they register for SLP Level 1, and POD will follow up with invitations via email as needed.

There's no need for existing SLP alumni to attend this new workshop as the majority of this content would have been covered during their SLP workshop. Supervisors who attend SLP beginning next month will be asked to register for Supervisor Orientation in addition.

The SLP Level 1 workshop will also benefit from this change because moving the HR Basics material to Supervisor Orientation will allow us to dig deeper into other key content areas. The facets of SLP that explore leader's self-awareness, tactical fundamentals, and strategic approaches to working with people and teams are more effective when supervisors have served in their new role at the UW for two to six months. Time and again, we’ve seen that supervisors who attend in that timeframe reap the most benefit from their SLP experience. Our long-term objective, which should be bolstered by Workday, is to encourage attendance at SLP Supervisor Orientation and then the Level 1 workshop at the optimal times.

Summer 2016 | Return to Issue Home