Your business is growing and you’re either ready to hire your first manager position or you’re planning to promote from within to a supervisor or manager position. But what happens next? What sort of training should you plan for a new manager to ensure they’re set up to succeed?
Here are three key areas of training that are essential for new supervisors or managers.
1. Conflict resolution
Conflict is going to happen in any company eventually. Even if you’re a small team and work really well together, conflict happens. And your supervisors and managers need to know how to deal with it.
It’s not easy, and it can be uncomfortable at times. But ignoring the conflict only makes it worse and can end with good employees leaving your company because of the negative culture you’ve created by ignoring conflict.
If you have a human resources manager or a consultant, they can be a resource, but your supervisors need to be equipped to deal with conflict directly. And that training might look a little different from one employee to the next. If you have a supervisor who naturally shies away from conflict, they may need some extra training to succeed in their new role.
2. Goal setting
Managers and supervisors help lead their team to support the company in achieving its goals. But simply restating the big goals for the company and then expecting magic to happen among the team doesn’t work.
People need measurable, attainable goals that directly apply to them. And their supervisor needs to help them set those goals and measure them throughout the year. Those goals feed into the employee’s evaluation, of course, but it should be a regular conversation and feedback loop to talk about those goals and each employee’s progress toward achieving them.
3. Communication skills
Managers and supervisors need to know how to have effective conversations. They need to learn how to connect with employees and understand their motivations and desires and how that plays out in their job. That also requires having systems and processes in place to maintain open and ongoing communication with employees.
Stepping into a management role is not easy. An employee transitions from making widgets to overseeing people who make widgets, and that’s a drastic difference. Overseeing the process is all about communication. If you don’t take the time to train a new manager on what effective communication looks like, you’re asking for trouble.
An effective training program for new managers should include all three of these components, which will increase the success of your new managers and improve or sustain your company culture.
Need help developing a training program for new managers and supervisors? Contact Why HR today to discuss how we can help.