Whatever sort of organisation you run, unless you are a one-man business, you will have different levels of staffing. The bigger the organisation, the more levels of staffing there will be. Just take a look at the NHS, where the number of managers is ever-increasing at an incredible rate while the number of frontline staff remains almost static. There are more and more people issuing orders and only the same number of people to carry them out.
Certainly, as an organisation expands, it will need extra levels of staffing, but many of the supervisors of today were the workhorses of yesterday. They have done well enough for their employers to promote them to a level where they oversee other staff but have had no training in HOW to actually carry out the work of managing them. Just because you are a highly trained and skilled engineer and can show others how to carry out the work that you used to do yourself doesn't mean that you know how to handle them when they are rude about a work colleague, show up late for work, or need time off because their four year old son is sick and cannot go to kindergarten.
The problem is that we are all human, and because we are human, we make mistakes. The old phrase "to err is human" is very true. Quite simply, it is a part of our nature. It's the way we are.
So yes, you are a trained and skilled engineer and you know how to operate a machine to produce a first class fingleferk or whatever it is that your company manufactures, and you can train someone else to do that too.
However, do you know how to get your team of workers to produce fingleferks faster? Today, more than ever, production needs to be as fast as possible in order to keep up with what is ever-increasing demand. World population is growing rapidly. To give an idea, in 1900 the UK population was 38 million. In 1950 it was 50 million. By 2050 – that is in only 30 years' time – it is projected to be 75 million. That is a 50% growth in just 100 years – and all those people are going to need fingleferks!
Can your company keep up? Can it produce enough to beat the competition? Here's the crunch: how can you get your team to produce them faster, better and cheaper?
The US government had this problem in WWII. They were conscripting people so fast into the US army that they were being taken off the production lines of factories at the precise moment the War Department needed more and more equipment to fight the war. There was going to be a shortfall.
The government realised that the only way to fill the gap was to train employees in such a way that they produce products faster, at the right quality and above all more efficiently. That meant that managers and supervisors had to learn the skills to manage more effectively, and from that was born companies that today provide leadership development programmes which are, quite simply, designed to train the trainer and front-line leader in the art and skills of managing people, process and businesses.
We are not at war at the moment, but nonetheless those companies who invest in leadership training are the ones that are going to succeed. Back in the day, it was thought that teaching someone in a factory how to operate a machine, or someone in an office how to write up the accounts of the business, was all that was needed.
Today, we understand that is only the beginning. We need managers and supervisors who can not only train in the basics but can look at processes to see where they can be improved, both in speed of work and in quality. They need to be able to deal with workers as individuals. They need to be able to spot potential defects in a system and prevent them before they occur. All of these require skills that are far greater than teaching someone how and when to push a button, which is why today we have leadership development companies that can train leaders how to lead and give them the skills they need for their organisation's success.
Supervisor Academy is a company that provides leadership development programmes designed to bring out the best in managers and supervisors and provide them with the skills that they need in order to excel.