MANAGEMENT TRAINING

SUPERVISOR TRAINING

Today, it is critically important for organizations to invest in “how-to” supervisor training to ensure that leaders clearly understand their role and responsibilities in managing people.  We often find that organizations promote supervisors because they are technically competent at the job–but not necessarily good at the people part of a supervisor’s job.  Generally, in small to medium-size organizations, individuals get promoted from within because…well….there usually isn’t anyone else the company can tap on the shoulder to move up.  So, many employees who have been in roles as individual contributors, such as a machine operator turned Supervisor of Operations.  The skills needed in supervision are significantly different–and the job comes with a lot of need for polished communication skills and the ability to manage conflicts.  Every day in a supervisor’s job there is conflict; yet, a lot of supervisors (especially those newly promoted) shy away from conflicts because they are afraid–and they don’t know how to manage conflicts.  The negative impacts are generally lower productivity, and employee behavior and performance problems. Which, if left unchecked, start really affecting service delivery capabilities, customer satisfaction, and the financial statements.  Why?  Because, when supervisors are not doing a very good job of leading, there isn’t adequate direction and follow-up with employees to ensure they are working toward organizational goals.  A good example of this is a supervisor who is just too passive, avoids conflicts, and either remains in his office for most of the day not wanting to be disturbed…or considers himself “too busy” and is in a multitude of meetings all day.    Employees become resentful that they are not being given adequate direction, guidance, feedback, and development.  A level of toxicity usually increases with a work group/team and then usually good people begin to quit, leaving only the mediocre and poor performers.

In our experience a lot of organizations hesitate in implementing training for supervisors because they consider that it “costs too much.”  From our vantage point as an HR consulting practice, we can tell you from our experience that you can’t afford NOT to train supervisors today.  To illustrate this point, a client of ours found us after having paid a $250,000 settlement demand with the Department of Labor.  It was a classic case of “we didn’t know”, which cost the organization in not only financial loss but also the extraordinary amount of time it took the HR and leadership team to participate in the DOL’s investigation and audit.

To provide supervisor and manager training, all it takes is first recognizing some of the behaviors that are causing organizational problems.  This could be a lot of employee turnover, too many complaints to upper level leadership or HR, inventory shrinkage/theft, and generally low morale and a level of negativity and toxicity with employees.  We often here “our employees who work for (supervisor name) just really seem to have an attitude problem”…  Sometimes it is hard to put your finger on exactly what’s wrong, but that is where we come in.  We have a great deal of experience in this area, as we work with organizations of all sizes and across all industry sectors.  We know the questions to ask to do a proper assessment, so we can then prescribe the right training solutions.

The cost for a supervisor training program really varies and is dependent upon a number of different factors such as the number of people who will need to be trained, where they are located, if our training instructor will have to travel to your location or if training will be conducted at our facility, and so on.   Generally, the range for supervisor and manager training will be between$599 to $1,199 per person, and all of our programs are inclusive of the training instructor fees, workbooks, materials, and instructor travel and incidental expenses.  This is a general guideline and for the continental U.S. training programs only.  For multinational organizations that are in need of scheduling a training program outside the continental U.S., we do have the ability to do so.  However, pricing is based on a per-project basis due to cost variables in sending an instructor abroad.

One of our more popular, standard supervisor training programs we provide is our Contemporary Leadership:  Driving Results & Managing Risk Program, which can be delivered in an instructor-led classroom format of six classes in a Learning Track format. Many of our clients create a quarterly learning track, which enables a team to attend training once per quarter, but then have the reinforcement of learning in the following quarter.  Additionally, it enables spreading the cost out over multiple quarters.   For more information about that program, please just click on the link for the program agenda.