“I lost a good lineman and gained a poor supervisor!”

By Dean B. Wisecarver 

During our consultations, we are often asked about supervisory training we may offer. We have several sessions we conduct at your request on topics that are all part of developing managers and supervisors, but the objective I believe most people are seeking when the subject is supervisory training for developing new, inexperienced supervisors. For several years, we’ve offered such a training package and we call it Supervision From A To C. The goal of this article is to give you a solid description of this package by addressing some basic FAQs.

Why this package?

Supervision From A To C is an initial training package designed specifically to help newly appointed supervisors make the transition from being a peer group member to becoming the team leader.

Without some initial guidance and direction, newly promoted supervisors tend to get “polarized” into one of two typical forms of behavior. Either they tend to become overly dominant and bossy (“They made me supervisor because I know what I’m doing. Now, shut up and do what I say.”) or they abdicate their responsibilities to remain just “one of the guys.” Either pole is ineffective and, in your business, potentially dangerous.

We created Supervision From A To C specifically to help the most critically important transition – the person promoted from lineman to crew chief. This transition has significant impact on the entire company. A poor supervisor in this role can be literally a danger to his/her crew. Plus, it is this position about which we most often hear managers say something like, “I lost a good lineman and gained a poor supervisor!”

What does it cover?

We believe there are six very important aspects to being an effective supervisor that new supervisors need to think about immediately. The six are: getting the work done through others, making decisions, monitoring the crew’s activities, addressing and solving work problems, motivating by using praise, and being a good teacher. Sure, there are many other aspects to being a good supervisor, but our experience tells us these are the ones new supervisors struggle with the most and the ones that need immediate attention. This package is called Supervision From A To C, not A to Z. We recognized that developing truly excellent supervisors ultimately involves more than we have tried to cover in this package!

How is the training in this package actually administered?

We have designed this package to provide an outline of initial key training that can be administered one-on-one within your own company. You don’t need an outsider to do the training, and we believe you really don’t want an outsider to do this kind of training. The subtle aspects of teaching a new supervisor how to become effective should come from your own team and should reflect, at least to some degree, your company’s own culture and policies. Thus, our package is set up to allow a competent, experienced, existing manager or supervisor in your company to become the trainer.

Furthermore, the package is designed to be administered by the designated trainer in one-on-one sessions with the new supervisor. We don’t believe the initial training should be done in a classroom with multiple students and multiple instructors, although there are many such training programs out there. We believe that the initial training and guidance of a newly appointed, first-time supervisor is most effective when it is very personal. That’s why we designed our package to be done one-on-one by one of your own people.

There are some spin-off benefits to our approach. The training can be scheduled to fit your own time frames, as quick or as lengthy as you wish, depending only on the student’s ability to grasp the material and concepts. The training is relatively inexpensive so you can use it with people you are considering promoting to supervisor – something few companies would do if there were large costs involved or outsiders involved. The trainer, if he/she takes his/her role as instructor to heart and strives to do an excellent job with the material, will probably learn as much as the student. That means you have now improved two people in your company, not just one. If an outsider did the training, you would lose this advantage. Finally, we believe that this kind of training is far more effective, and is likely to be taken seriously by the student, if it comes from your own people than it could ever be when done by an outsider.

What does your package include?

There are two workbooks that contain all the material – one for the trainer and one for the student. The two workbooks are essentially identical except that the trainer’s book has training instructions, objectives for each lesson, and training notes to help the trainer evaluate the various questions the student is asked to answer during the training.

The training notes and the other instructions for the trainer are in green print to distinguish them from the content that is in the student’s workbook. The notes after each question are not intended to be the “right answers” but rather to be guiding information that allows the trainer to understand the intent of the question and what answers to expect. The trainer certainly can (and should) add his/her own spin to the answers.

Is there anyone who can help us as we get started?

Yes, as valued customers in the national insurance program administered by NHA Power, we make the training package available to you and we’ll help you get it implemented. Usually, this help can be accomplished over the telephone. As you select and designate a trainer to work with each newly promoted supervisor, one of our experienced people can be available via telephone to answer the trainer’s questions and offer tips and suggestions on how to use the material. Frankly, we would welcome this involvement because it helps us see what is most challenging to the trainers so we can make changes to the package to enhance it for others.