Agencies need organizational knowledge and skills in the following seven areas. Not every staff member will need knowledge and skills in every subdimension, but the agency as a whole will need staff with knowledge and skills in each area to successfully deliver effective services to children and families and to guide needed practice and program improvements.

• Child welfare practice: Understanding and knowledge of effective practices for working with children, youth, and families that result in safety, permanency, and well-being. This includes a wide array of practice knowledge across the child welfare continuum—from prevention and family support through child protection and intervention, in-home and out-of-home services, family reunification, guardianship and adoption. It also reflects a number of cross-cutting competencies, such as trauma-informed practice and family engagement.
• Analytics and evaluation: Expertise and skills related to problem assessment, critical reflection, data analysis, outcome measurement, and data presentation. This knowledge and skill set can contribute to constructing theories of change, developing research questions, and evaluating program implementation and outcomes. Competencies here reflect knowing both how to make sense of data and how to use it to inform decisions and improvements.
• Leadership and management: Understanding and knowledge related to establishing and communicating agency vision and mission, setting goals and objectives, developing and executing strategies, and monitoring performance. Skills include planning, organizing, coordinating, prioritizing, delegating, decision-making, and work planning. Leadership abilities include both technical leadership and adaptive leadership (i.e., leading new ways of doing work).
• Policymaking and administration: Abilities to create and implement clear policies, efficiently organize people and resources, and direct organizational activities toward goals and objectives. This requires the ability to work across different parts of the agency.
• Workforce development and supervision: Abilities to support staff in gaining and demonstrating needed competencies. This subdimension includes understanding adult learning strategies and techniques to build knowledge and skills. Abilities here include the design, development, and delivery of curricula and staff training as well as effective supervision and coaching.
• Cultural competence and humility: Understanding of cultural issues and cultural groups, and the skills and techniques that reflect worker knowledge and respect of cultural groups. Cultural humility reflects the recognition of the uniqueness of individuals and their cultural expertise. Cultural competence and humility play an important role in workers’ everyday interactions with children, youth, and families from varied cultural backgrounds. They also factor into an agency’s selection of approaches and practice innovations to serve specific populations and efforts to address racial disproportionality and disparity.
• Change management and implementation: Understanding how to work with others to make change happen. This encompasses knowledge of the change management process—from needs assessment and selection or development of an appropriate intervention through implementation, evaluation, adjustment, and sustaining change over time.

Resources to Learn More About Organizational Knowledge and Skills