5 Skills of Highly Effective Supervisors
Lessons from Training Within Industry
Great supervisors are the key to great operations performance. If they grow, so do our front-line teams and our process performance. If they don’t, there are tremendous costs to the business and ourselves as managers.
Just think about all the times you spend getting dragged into the details of the daily running of production or the office. We are forced to organise basics or put out fires that should have been dealt with independently by our supervisors and their teams. This distracts us from our own work and slows down innovation and growth, thus affecting progress of our business.
To break out of this unproductive pattern, as managers we should increase their efforts in developing the leadership capabilities of our supervisors. Because they are the key to how our operations perform. First-line supervisors have one of the toughest jobs in a plant or an office. Operations performance rests on their shoulders.
If you think about it, shouldn’t supervisor development be a strategic concern, high up on the agenda of any management team?
In Training within Industry, a high-impact leadership training program, we say that great supervisors should have first class knowledge of the work performed in their area and their own responsibilities. And they need to master a set of foundational leadership and improvement skills that enable them to grow their teams’ capabilities and build stable, well performing processes.
Training within Industry, a power-pack of supervisor development programs, covers the 5 skills of high-performance supervisors.
TWI Job Instruction (how to accelerate on boarding of new team-members and raise individual work performance)
TWI Job Relations (how to motivate team members and improve attitudes and relationships)
TWI Job Methods (how to simplify and improve process performance and reliability)
TWI Job Safety (how to break the chain of safety incidents by preventing their direct and indirect causes in processes and people)
TWI Problem Solving (how to fix complex problems quickly and for good by removing their true causes)
By mastering these 5 skills supervisors transition from good supervisors to exceptional leaders. TWI Job Instruction, TWI Job Safety and TWI Job Relations create stability in processes and people that provide reliable performance without fire-fighting. TWI Job Methods and TWI Problem solving enable supervisors to drive rapid, continuous improvement of their area.
So let’s get started helping our supervisors grow. It is mission-critical. And, honestly, it’s not hard. The training within Industry programs have been around for some time, and they have proven their worth many times over. That’s why Training within Industry is the most successful training program in the world.
So where to start?
Which training program to start with depends on the circumstance of your organisation. Do you have unstable processes or need to onboard a lot of new workers? Then TWI Job Instruction would be a great starting point.
Do you have low staff engagement or high absenteeism? TWI Job Relationship will make a huge difference here.
Do you need to involve more people in continuous improvement? TWI Job Methods is your choice.
Do you work in a high-risk environment where people too often get hurt? Perhaps start with TWI Job Safety to eliminate risks proactively and build a safety culture,
Do your supervisors fire-fight the same problems day after day? TWI Problem Solving will helps you break out of the vicious cycle.
No matter where you start, the Training within Industry programs will give your operations a tremendous boost and before long you and your people will enjoy the benefits of increased stability and a re-energised workplace.
Ultimately, what matters most is, don’t delay!
Contact Supervisor Academy today to start levelling up your supervisors.