Training Agenda For New Supervisors

HR's Training Agenda for the Newly Appointed: A New Supervisor's Survival Kit

08/22/08

The human resources department has the perspective and resources to help new supervisors get off on the right foot from their very first day. HR staffers who share the following suggestions with fledgling managers during their initial training become partners in their success by helping them understand their new roles and grasp certain fundamental skills that every supervisor needs.

A New Perspective
First things first: Help new supervisors understand that they have dual responsibilities. On one hand, they’re supposed to represent and support the people who report to them. On the other, they must also start thinking and acting like members of management. As such, they’re responsible for setting goals, making plans, disciplining employees when necessary, and delegating work.

Their new roles require them to reconcile the interests of both superiors and subordinates—which can be challenging if not downright frustrating. Juggling conflicting expectations comes with the territory of management, however, and doing so successfully requires compromise, negotiation, and skills they didn’t need before they left the rank-and-file.

Setting Goals
Newly minted supervisors must set goals not only for themselves but also for their work groups. Goal setting is an art that improves with practice. HR can help new supervisors to do it well by training them to examine proposed goals and confirm that they are:

Realistic. Goals should be feasible using the manager’s present budget, employees, time, and equipment. Supervisors shouldn’t be tempted to set goals based on the promise of more resources. If business takes a turn for the worse or resources are reallocated, higher management may hold them to those goals anyway—which means they’ve set themselves up to fail.

Challenging. Realistic goals should include a degree of challenge as well. Challenging goals promote personal and professional growth by requiring employees to cultivate new skills, expand existing ones, and exceed the status quo.

Quantified. Train supervisors to set numerical goals whenever possible. Objectives that are expressed in dollars, percentages, or other quantified terms are easy to confirm. There shouldn’t be much doubt about whether they were reached.

Flexible. Caution new supervisors not to paint themselves into a corner by setting inflexible goals. Changing conditions could make such objectives impossible to reach. They should spell out the circumstances under which their original objectives were set and clarify to higher management that a material change in those circumstances would justify revising those goals accordingly.

Participative. Encourage new supervisors to involve their workers in setting group goals whenever feasible. Employees tend to buy into goals they helped set and reject or ignore those the boss dictates. The more input they have, the more commitment they usually feel.

Making Plans
Goals, like destinations on a road map, are where these new supervisors want to go. Plans are the routes they’ll choose to get there.

Planning requires managers to decide (with input from their work group when appropriate) who’s supposed to do what, when, and where to reach goals. Super-visors typically plan no more than several days or weeks in advance, while middle and higher managers plan for longer periods such as months or years.

Here are some questions to help your new supervisors critique and revise their plans and the goals they’re meant to reach before moving forward.

Did they involve their people in the goal-setting process?
Have they thought about how the plan will affect other departments or groups and met to gain their acceptance?
What measures will they use to assess progress, keep people informed, detect potential problems, and make changes if things don’t go as expected?
Have they gathered support for their plans from their supervisor and key players in the informal organization?
These troubleshooting questions can help to minimize objections and confusion and improve the odds that plans will work as intended.

Disciplining Employees
While disciplining is one of the most unpleasant things managers do, unacceptable behavior can’t be allowed to go unchecked. Supervisors who let it slide sow the seeds of their own failure.

Thoroughly discuss your company’s disciplinary policy with each new manager. Discipline-related grievances often happen either because bosses didn’t understand the company’s disciplinary policy or didn’t apply it as they should have.

Discipline should be corrective, not punitive. It’s meant to reinforce and encourage appropriate workplace behavior. So in addition to impressing new supervisors with the need to follow company policy, HR should also urge them to follow these guidelines as well:

Don’t overreact. When in doubt, review the company’s disciplinary policy to confirm the type of action that’s called for. That may range from an informal water-cooler conference to immediate discharge, depending on the offense. HR, along with the supervisor’s immediate boss, should be available to discuss the situation and offer guidance.

Gather evidence. The more proof they have, the stronger the case for disciplining. Sound evidence can include, for example, deficiencies cited on recent performance evaluations, timekeeping data that reveal a pattern of lateness or absenteeism, memos documenting coworkers’ complaints or the supervisor’s oral warnings, and written reprimands placed in the employee’s personnel file.

Stay calm. Things can turn ugly fast if managers act confrontational, shout, threaten, or otherwise embarrass employees in front of others.

Condemn the behavior, not the person.Describe the unacceptable conduct and why it must change. Good people sometimes behave badly because of ignorance or poor judgment. Their behavior must change for the good of the group and the company.

Make policy the scapegoat.Emphasize that supervisors should always blame policy for disciplinary actions. The employee violated that policy, the manager has evidence of it, and that same policy demands that the boss take corrective action. Teach new supervisors to eliminate the words “I” and “me” and “my” from disciplinary conferences. Referring to themselves that way makes them a convenient target for the employee’s resentment and implies that they have more discretion than they actually do.

Make no body contact. Just a hand on the shoulder may set off a worker who’s inclined to physical violence. Body contact could also be interpreted as anything from attempted assault to sexual harassment, especially by employees of the opposite sex.

Delegating Work
HR should sell new supervisors on the importance of delegating work effectively. Delegating routine decisions to subordinates has at least two benefits: It gives supervisors more time to work on unusual problems, and it helps employees prepare to move into management themselves some day. Delegation is really a survival skill, because managers who refuse to delegate are bound to see their performance suffer if higher management broadens the scope of their jobs—something that’s become commonplace in times of downsizing.

Here are factors new managers should consider when deciding what, how, and to whom work should be delegated.

Training and development needs.Delegate decisions and jobs that will help specific employees strengthen or expand their present skills and master tasks they need more experience with. Try not to delegate work that’s beneath someone’s ability.

Criticality.Delegate extremely important tasks or assignments with tight deadlines to the most reliable and conscientious employees.

Need for communication and coordination. Jobs that require little of either might be delegated to task-oriented people who don’t like to negotiate or lack diplomacy.Supervisors who delegate work that demands such qualities, however, should hand it off to their more patient and tactful workers.