Tribal Leadership in Employment – A One-Day Workshop for Tribal Leaders

Building a Leadership Model in Employment and the Role of HR in Assessing, Creating, and Ensuring Leadership’s Vision for Employment

There are many roads to effective Tribal leadership in employment, and while each Tribe defines for itself what is effective, over the last 30 years we have listened and learned from the Tribes we work with and we want to share what we have learned from them and our experience about the common factors that tend to define effective Tribal Leadership in employment and the role Human Resource Departments play in that exercise of leadership. In essence, we hope to share a system for assessing or building an effective employment leadership model and how to successfully utilize Human Resource Departments in that model.

While employment is only one area of leadership, it is essential to ensuring good government, the provision of effective social services, the creation of resources to support Tribes, and the welfare of Tribal citizens. Being able to attract, retain, and train employees is essential for the maintenance and growth of Tribes. In essence, it is crucial to effective leadership, and it is one of the hardest areas in which to lead.

This one-day workshop will review the authority Tribal leadership has over employment, and the role of Tribal leadership and HR in assessing/establishing goals for employment, reviewing/creating effective HR rules which carry out leadership’s goals, and the challenge of leadership to follow its own rules that may limit its own authority. While there are no absolute answers to these issues, we hope to share what we have found to be effective tools to be a highly functional employer, and how to assess effectiveness in employment systems.