The Business Opportunity –
Select and Develop the High Performance Workforce.
The three essential skills for supervisors, are problem-solving, customer focus and communication. “If they don’t have those top three strengths, you’re going to have to work very hard with them, or you’ll be putting them in a no-success situation.” Every third supervisor hire should be someone from outside the company with different experience. Otherwise, you fall into the trap of, ‘We’ve always done it this way. We’ve tried that before and it didn’t work.’”
Employee and employer costs such as payroll and benefits etc typically make up as much as 60% of a company's expenses. Research shows that if people related costs make up more than 50% of expenses, the business is going to struggle to succeed financially. Leadership skills training becomes essential
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Passion - People - Products
Leadership Cycle
1. Vision
2. Values
3. Planning
4. Tsunami Zone
5. Execution
6. Review
7. Learning Moment
8. Learning
Management
Vision
Many companies promote supervisors from within their ranks, usually pegging their top performers as the perfect candidates. But keep in mind, newly promoted supervisors are moving from a scripted, managed environment to one in which they write the scripts and do the managing. Workers may communicate well with customers, but how about with the people they’re managing — their former peers — and with upper management?
Some of the top areas of concern for a new supervisor include: how to run a center (e.g., hiring, staffing, scheduling issues); how to evaluate workers and work through performance issues; how to manage conflict; and how to reach the customer satisfaction goals set by the center and/or organization.
In any training program the vision needs to be clearly and easily understood and consistently communicated. It should be a place we feel we can get to and the result of getting there should be better than where we are now. Without a clear vision no one goes anywhere.
Values
Most managers have similar reasons for wanting to hire from within. For instance, in some cases, the company wants to create an advancement opportunity for agents. However, oftentimes, the preference to hire from within comes from a desire to maintain status quo.
“A lot of managers don’t want to sit down and talk, They don’t hire supervisors who are good leaders; they hire ‘yes’ people — the workers who everybody likes. And, generally, they’re likeable because they have a hard time challenging management.
Training development values are both personal and organizational for alignment and are hierarchical. It is a platform that empowers people to make decisions.
Planning
Most supervisors who are promoted from within tend to identify much more strongly with frontline agents than with management, “One day you’re an worker; the next day, you’re a supervisor.
Nothing really changes except they move your cube and you have a different set of responsibilities. Newly promoted supervisors often find themselves in a veritable no-man’s land: no longer belonging to the frontline ranks, but not welcomed into the management community.
Planning and executing have always been a core part of management training. However, if we just plan and execute, plan and execute, without review of the execution, we get caught in the Tsunami zone.
Tsunami Zone
This causes stress for supervisors, which is often exacerbated by management’s insensitivity to frontline staff in their implementation of policies and procedures. “In many cases, it creates loose cannons: supervisors who don’t agree with company policies or values, and who contradict them to the team.
That’s usually accompanied by cynicism and a sense of being overburdened. They then build their team around the wrong values, a cohesiveness built on negativity. They’re pushed to meet stats and answer calls, and they don’t really have a perspective on the bigger picture.”
Without Training Development of our leaders, this is where we end up doing more and more of what does not work and we destroy the business. We avoid it by flowing through The Leadership Cycle.
Execution
The move is not one that everyone can make successfully — at least not without the right type of support. Offering supervisor training and development is a good start. Many of them are green; a lot of them are first-time managers. It’s a high-pressure job, but without executive leadership’s willingness to look at the position and conduct a job analysis, it’s not realistic to assume that you’ll get better results from training.
In your training seminars by reviewing the planning and execution to avoid the Tsunami zone, we create the learning moment.
Review
Pull Supervisors into the fold. To combat this downward spiral, managers and executives have to escalate the value of the supervisor within the organization. “This is the person who is at the table with your customers every day, If marketing wants to know what the issues are or how to sell something, if sales wants to know what products are needed, or senior management wants to know why we’re losing customers, ask your team supervisors, because that’s what they’re working with every day.
Failing to tap into supervisors’ hands-on knowledge of the customer base costs upper management a lot of valuable insight.
In any training program you ask the questions. What did we set out to do? What actually happened? Why did it happen? What are we going to do next time?
Learning Moment
Grooming supervisors to be more business savvy can take a lot of the strain out of organization-wide communication and free valuable time by streamlining problem-solving in the center, as well as the analytical process for upper management.
Teaching supervisors to pass information up and down is very important. When a supervisors comes to you with a problem, write it up along with a proposal for how to fix it. They’re learning what to say and with whom to communicate.”
As more and more organizations realize the value the team has on the bottom line, they should also look at how they are investing in one of the most valuable cogs in the machinery.
From leadership skills training in the review we discover the learning moment's point of realization-that can be positive or negative but never bad! A learning moment culture allows "mistakes" based on the value that the mistake is a learning moment from which a positive outcome can make us a better company-a learning moment culture is rigorous as well as respectful.
Learning
Learning is the final outcome. A learning organization is one that is renewing itself on a daily basis. We beat the competition and make ourselves more competent by embracing the learning moment, which creates the learning culture. With the right products, the right people that are passionate, and The Leadership training cycle (which creates a culture where passion is enhanced), you have a MAGNIFICENT organization that is applauded by profits.