How to divide up roles fairly among a counselling team

In my practice, I use a collaborative and transparent approach to dividing up roles and responsibilities between my team members each year. This process promotes fairness while making the best use of each member’s strengths and preferences. The hope is that, working together, we can improve the effectiveness of our team.

Our current high school counselling team includes five members: four full-time counsellors and one counselling secretary. Each counsellor works with students comprehensively, across all four domains: academic, socio-emotional, career, and global perspective and identity development.

Roles and responsibilities

The role of a high school counsellor is multifaceted, reaching so many other offices and departments in a school. We are a large part of the admissions process for new students. We contribute to articles about college admissions results or features of our counselling curriculum and programmes. And we discuss with teachers everything from individual students’ concerns to suggestions for writing more effective recommendation letters. We also engage with administrators regularly and often for a multitude of reasons, planned and unplanned.

To engage with more stakeholders and improve our communication and collaboration with all the different parts of our school, we have developed a multi-step process to determine each counsellor’s strengths, interests and overall preferences. The aim is to allocate fairly the leadership roles and responsibilities for each upcoming year.

Collaboration and negotiation

The process begins during the late spring of each school year, when our team updates an Excel sheet with all the various responsibilities and roles, the name of the counsellor currently responsible for each role and updated notes.

This collaborative review allows us to balance the team’s workload fairly and make best use of each counsellor’s expertise.

For each item, we review and update an “intensity level” number between one and five, which indicates how much time, energy and challenge the role entails. The roles range from designing the visuals of our college acceptances display board each year (level 1), all the way up to taking on the lead role in running our annual university fair, which includes representatives from more than 130 universities and more than 1,000 guests from our school community and the wider city (level 5).

As a team, we negotiate and review each item, especially giving voice to whomever last held the role.

Full disclosure

Once we come to an agreement on the Excel sheet, we each respond to an online form where we can share our preferences: which roles we are most interested in taking on for the following year, and which roles we are least interested in.

These responses sit in our department’s OneDrive, so they are visible to everyone. This transparent process fosters trust and allows for open discussions, ensuring that each counsellor’s workload aligns with their strengths and interests.

Once all members have completed the form, we review our responses together, creating a new tab in the Excel sheet for the upcoming school year. Through negotiation and open discussion, we strike a balance among the intensity totals for each counsellor. Often, this means that we change some of the roles to include more than one counsellor, or even remove roles altogether if the team agrees.

Highlighting our liaison roles

One especially interesting category of responsibilities comprises the liaison roles. There are four counsellors in our team, and we have four liaison roles for the following groups: marketing, admissions, parent leaders and Korean parents. (Korean parents tend not to attend general counselling meetings, because of the language barrier. And Korean-national students often apply to Korean universities, meaning that they have distinct needs.) Thus each counsellor must be assigned a liaison role, and become the point person for that stakeholder population.

Part of our agreement regarding these roles is that the work must be done as a team, so other members are always copied in on important emails. However, the liaison is responsible for responding to requests, updating the team as needed and taking the lead on building positive connections with that group.

For instance, the liaison for admissions might streamline the process for new students, represent the team on admissions committee review meetings and be the point person when the admissions department has questions regarding our counselling programme. For trickier questions, the liaison for the relevant group would bring the issue for discussion at our biweekly counselling team meetings.

Communication and empathy

The entire process outlined above is additionally complemented by our team’s overall diligence and consistency when it comes to keeping detailed meeting minutes for each of our biweekly department meetings (a total of three hours per week).

We consult and communicate with one another often, resolve conflicts when they arise, and do our best to stay professional, flexible and empathic to one another.