The biggest challenge in adopting better interventions is changing existing systems to appropriately support innovations. Executives are responsible for connecting with staff and stakeholders at all levels to ensure that their vision for organizations are being actualized and experienced as intended. To fully understand the challenges involved with achieving successful outcomes, executives must assess all critical areas of organizational performance and capacity. Using their organizational assessment results, executives must focus on creating a clear vision and setting a course for the future of their organizations. Executives should be able to identify barriers to success, create space and opportunity for development related to key strategies, and focus their attention on aligning policies, practices, and programming with their visions for the future. The executive’s leadership style has a tremendous impact on the effectiveness of implementing innovations (such as EBPs) and achieving organizational goals. Executives must be clear about organizational goals and create cadres of champions that can spearhead the work. Effective problem identification and solving are critical competencies for executives.

Functional Competencies for Executives: Connection

Motivating staff. Building buy-in and commitment for EBPs is a process, not an event. While it can seem less tangible as a task, it is at the crux of the work of executives to motivate staff in the work. Executives lead by creating a compelling narrative of change, establishing a clear vision for the future and engaging staff in the transformational change that EBPs require. Leaders must be clear about the importance of the things they are asking staff to do. They must define the purpose and value of their organizations, describe what EBPs are, and explain why EBPs are superior to current practices. 

Executives also must clarify agency and staff roles. Implementation of EBPs represents a fundamental shift away from the surveillance and enforcement model that dominated community supervision in the 1980s and 1990s. The evidence-based model is one based on a multi-dimensional role – helping persons on supervision achieve sustained behavior change, ensuring accountability to the court/parole board order, and addressing risk management issues for public safety. To many staff, these models feel mutually exclusive and diametrically opposed. Understanding how staff perceive their roles and responsibilities can help executives identify where gaps exist and how to bridge them. 

Engaging stakeholders. Community supervision agencies do not exist on an island. They are parts of a complex network of organizations in multiple levels of government, as well as in the community, nonprofit and for-profit sectors. These organizations can either support and facilitate or resist and impede the implementation of EBPs. It is critical for executives to engage stakeholders and secure their active support for EBPs. Creating a collective vision that encompasses stakeholders is also a way to insulate the agency and its work from external pressures and political shifts. 

Stakeholders can be internal, including judges, paroling authorities, and the Commissioner/ Secretary of Corrections, depending on the structure of community supervision in each jurisdiction. External stakeholders include elected officials, justice system partners, human services organizations, housing and employment agencies, treatment providers, advocacy groups and faith communities. Mapping the universe of stakeholders, documenting their relationship to and interests in community supervision, establishing priorities, and developing outreach and engagement plans are crucial activities for executives. 

Functional Competencies for Executives: Assessment

Assessing capacity to lead change. Executives’ first assessment task is to examine their own personal readiness and capacity to lead change. Implementation of EBPs is a long-term endeavor, measured in years and requiring significant investment of executives’ time, energy, and personal capital. Implementation efforts that stall or fizzle and fade can have lasting, negative impacts on staff and organizational culture. Therefore, leaders should do their best to only pursue the most important and impactful change efforts for which they feel prepared, capable, and committed. 

Executives also must take a hard look at the missions and philosophies of their community supervision agencies. Are they in alignment or in conflict with EBPs? The degree of alignment will begin to show the extent of the work ahead. 

Assessing organizational culture. Organizational culture is one of the most powerful forces in any organization, and community supervision agencies are no different. Culture cannot be seen or touched but affects everything and everyone. The power of culture should not be underestimated. It is the context within which all implementation efforts exist, and it can either enable efforts or cripple them. Even increasing resources and staffing cannot overcome tradition and the inertia that can exist within certain organizational cultures.  

Alignment of culture is critical. Culture must be assessed in terms of its alignment with EBPs. If alignment does not exist, executives must work to change the culture. Executives must work to create atmospheres of trust where it is acceptable for staff to question executives’ plans, motives, tactics, and/or pace. It is critical for executives to listen to what staff are saying and to take action as appropriate.  

Assessment of organizational culture is multifaceted, and factors executives should examine include:

• Readiness for change. No organization will ever be fully ready for large-scale change and waiting for readiness is not an effective option for using innovations at scale to produce socially significant outcomes. However, leaders can make strides toward creating cultures and processes that support innovation, collaboration, and experimentation, all things that are important in the change process. 
• Staff awareness/knowledge of EBPs. Staff need training and ongoing coaching, support, and feedback to develop competence at and mastery of new skills. Just as critically, they need to be able to see the connection between the new practices they are asked to do and the desired outcomes. 
• Barriers to change. There are many barriers to change in any organization, and executives should identify the barriers and begin to strategize as to how they can be removed or mitigated. Agency policies and procedures should be assessed to determine if they conflict with or do not support EBPs. 
• Resources. Executives must assess the resources available in the agency to support EBPs. These resources include staffing patterns, caseload size, span of control, and overall staff capacities and capabilities related to implementation. 
• Current organizational performance. Executives should assess current organizational performance – for example, what is being done well and not so well – and incorporate that information into implementation planning. 
• External support. Executives should assess the degree of external support that exists for their organizations and document any efforts at interagency collaboration. 

Functional Competencies for Executives: Planning

Conceptualizing implementation. In much the same way that community supervision staff use assessment results and other relevant information to guide development of supervision strategies, goals, approaches, interventions and techniques, conceptualization is the process where executives take organizational assessment information and formulate implementation strategies. 

Strategy development requires clear-eyed assessment of where agencies are and where they need to get to be evidence-based. The gaps between the present and the desired future must be accurate and complete. The conceptualization process must integrate assessment information into coherent implementation strategies. 

Implementation planning. Implementation of EBPs in a community supervision agency is much more than any one executive can accomplish alone. Executives must form implementation teams, broadly representative agencies and comprising members from all levels of staff. Executives should also designate implementation managers to lead the work of implementation teams and closely coordinate with executives. These managers should have experience, credibility, and drive. 

Implementation teams are critical to success. An expert implementation team produces about 80% successful use of innovations in about three years. Executives should work with implementation teams to develop vision statements, missions, goals, and values to drive implementation. Teams should identify major plan components, develop sequencing, establish timeframes, identify resource requirements, and designate responsible individuals for all components. Teams should have the autonomy to rewrite rules and/or provide policy suggestions. 

Functional Competencies for Executives: Supervision

Implementation monitoring. Executives should regularly monitor the implementation process via written reports, participation in implementation team meetings, attendance at training sessions, discussions with staff, and informal observations and discussions. Executives also should solicit feedback from and provide feedback to staff, internal and external stakeholders, and the media. 

In addition, executives should build the management and leadership bench of their agencies, ensuring that there are qualified individuals ready to move into management and leadership positions in the future. Executives should regularly observe supervisory and management staff and provide developmental assignments, coaching, and targeted training opportunities. 

Promoting sustainability. Executives must ensure sustainability of EBPs over the long term. In a sense, EBPs are about managerial mindsets. Implementation is not a project with a fixed start and end date, like a grant; it is an infinite game requiring a long-term commitment on the part of executives, other senior managers, and organizations. Executives should strengthen their organizations’ implementation capability (e.g., the knowledge, skills, abilities, and experience of staff) and capacity (e.g., implementation savvy managers and staff, information infrastructure, supportive culture, and collaborative partnerships) to ensure the continued success of implementation. 

Activities that promote sustainability include:

• Continuous quality improvement. Executives should establish the expectation that fidelity and quality will be monitored and addressed.
• Feedback. Executives should continuously seek and provide feedback and ensure that feedback in integrated into implementation. 
• Removing barriers. Barriers to practitioners making full and effective use of innovations should be removed as quickly and as permanently as practicable. 

Preparing for resistance. Executives should confront resistance and cultural barriers as soon as they are identified.