It is not exactly a news flash that many manufacturing leaders are on the verge of a well-earned retirement. Upskilling your frontline supervisors to develop leaders in-house is one way to ensure critical knowledge isn’t lost when your current management team retires.
However, supervisors have a tough job already, as keepers of your company's operational knowledge and as people managers. Their job requires problem-solving, strategy, and quality control. It is no small ask for supervisors to participate in leadership training.
Successful leadership development requires overcoming obstacles such as:
- Lack of bandwidth: Many small and medium-sized manufacturers (SMMs) lack the in-house bandwidth to invest in leadership development. They are understandably focused on running the business.
- Underestimation of investment: Manufacturing company leaders often underestimate the substantial time and resources required on their part, including their roles during the coaching and training of new leaders.
- No clear goals/objectives: Supervisors are usually promoted because they successfully hit KPIs. However, they often lack clear objectives for advancing their skills, with no access to in-house training content or an effective instruction process.
As the Director of Arkansas Manufacturing Solutions, part of the Arkansas Economic Development Commission (AEDC) and the MEP National Network, I help manufacturers overcome these challenges with a transformational approach to leadership development, called Transformational Leadership Improvement (TLI).
Here is a scenario I often use to explain TLI. I will call this new supervisor Fran, who was just promoted to department supervisor at Shotz Bottling Company. Fran’s manager, Mike, thinks she is capable of doing his job in the future because she knows the equipment and processes in the bottling department better than anyone.
Mike believes that the company must invest in Fran to develop her leadership skills. But while Mike is an expert on filling and capping bottles, he knows he is not an expert on leadership development. He also lacks access to leadership training content, including an established coaching process that will provide Fran with new goals and a measurable baseline to assess her progress.As a seasoned TLI coach, I have helped many manufacturing leaders like Mike overcome these challenges. TLI is a process, led by a coach like myself, that challenges and encourages employees to innovate and improve for the company’s success.
Part of this process involves classroom instruction. But unlike some leadership training where the training stops after the classroom, the TLI coach supplements the classroom training with coaching sessions. These sessions include hands-on experiments where Fran can take what she learns from the classroom and apply it in a real supervisor's situation.
This experimentation is the engine that drives TLI because it requires ongoing discussions and planning to remove obstacles. In this article, I will share five steps for overcoming some of these common obstacles in leadership development.
Step 1: Overcome the Absence of Learning Tension and Support
To explain this obstacle, I will return to our Mike and Fran scenario.
Mike works with his TLI coach to develop a plan for establishing goals for Fran and a development path to help her achieve those goals. Mike begins this process by meeting with Fran to discuss her career desires and to see if she is interested in moving up to his role in the future. Once he knows she is interested, he offers her the opportunity to participate in leadership classes at the company.
Rather than simply ordering Fran to attend new training, Mike is empowering Fran to articulate her own, clear vision of what she wants to achieve. This learning tension is important because if Fran only attended the training because of “boss’s orders,” she would not likely be engaged. Learning tension sets a different level of expectation and engagement at the beginning.
Mike communicates his expectations to Fran to fully engage in the training because he is investing in her. He also makes it clear that he will be supporting her during this training, along with her TLI coach. He explains that the training will consist of modules focused on different aspects of leadership, including some in-between session coaching and skills practice.
By communicating his expectations and working with Fran to set goals, Mike demonstrates his support for her development and creates a sense of learning tension in Fran that will help her stay focused and achieve her goals.
Step 2: Identify the “What” for Improvement
Leadership may seem like an abstract concept to a new supervisor like Fran. Mike needs to give her the “handles” that she can use to pick up her leadership skills and move them forward. She needs specifics on the “what” to improve.
Fran works with Mike and her TLI coach to develop a competency model with key actions for her leadership. They then set up a 360-degree survey process to get feedback on her current use of these competencies and key actions. Fran invites her manager Mike, a few other supervisors, and several of her direct reports to give her feedback to focus her improvement efforts.
Some of this feedback could be a little surprising, but it helps Fran recognize how helpful it is to hear from others on the areas that need improvement. For instance, Fran rated herself highly on coaching but the rest of her feedback cohorts rated this as one of her lowest areas. Because of this feedback, Fran now has a clear picture of what she needed to work on. This is the “what” she needs to work on for skills improvement.
Step 3: Provide the “Why” for Improvement
As training and development providers, we have to help the leader make the “business case” for why they would trade in their time to work on developing new leadership skills, versus focusing on the daily tasks that are demanding their time and attention. Per the 360 survey feedback, Fran’s supervisors and co-workers suggest that she needs to improve her coaching skills. The feedback tells her “why” she needs to move out of her comfort zone for how she works and supervises. She was promoted because she was doing a good job. Now she has the context for why she needs to further develop her skills.
Her TLI coach develops mid-term and short-term goals to move her toward the vision that she and Mike previously developed for her eventual leadership role. Fran can identify obstacles keeping her from achieving her goals, such as how to carve out a little time in her busy schedule to work on her new skills and techniques.
Step 4: Overcome Fear and Insecurity With Experimentation
At this stage, Fran may be apprehensive about applying her new techniques in the real world. Her TLI coach helps her overcome this insecurity by creating small experiments. Calling each practice an “experiment'' makes the process less intimidating and builds Fran’s confidence and lowers her risk of failure.
For example, in one experiment, Fran wants to write a plan for how to do a line changeover for her team member, Joe. To do this, she must overcome an obstacle, which in this case is her unfamiliarity with a discussion planner. The planner is a new tool she is learning to use as part of her leadership training. She hypothesizes that she will get better at using the discussion planner and will help Joe get better at doing the line changeover.
Fran uses the discussion planner to have proactive conversations with Joe before the end-of-week changeover, and reactive conversations after the changeover. She then finds out how the changeover went from Joe’s perspective and determines if Joe needs additional support.
Fran discovers that the discussion planner keeps her conversations focused with Joe. Through these discussions, she learns that Joe was new to line changeovers and was nervous about performing the task without help from a more experienced operator.
In this manner, Fran continues to experiment as part of her leadership development. She picks short-term goals and plans experiments in an interactive way with team members to overcome obstacles.
Step 5: Achieve and Maintain Focus
As I noted earlier, supervisors are busy. Fran may find it difficult to work on her leadership development goals while trying to do her current job. Her coach uses a visual aid (see below) called “spend time in the wedge.” The wedge represents proactive improvement activities and the goal is to spend a little time in the wedge every week – ideally every day.
The visual helps Fran achieve focus and helps her understand that she can work on one or two goals at a time with coaching support. This method allows her to keep her focus over time as she makes steady progress, which adds up to significant improvements.
Why Upskilling With TLI Is Different Than Traditional Training
As I noted earlier, many manufacturing leaders like Mike lack the in-house resources to focus on leadership development while running the business. He could search for management training courses online. However, it is difficult to find effective content in today’s internet information overload. Much of this content involves very traditional methods of putting everyone in a room to learn as much as they can in a few days.
As you can see from the five steps above, TLI is different. With TLI you get:
- Access to a coach: Your coach is your “trail guide” in the transformational journey and builds hands-on best practices, applications, and breakout sessions based on real-world manufacturing scenarios.
- Effective content: Your TLI coach can put together a development process with content that includes in-class skills development, real-world experiments and exercises, and supplemental on-demand learning.
- 360 feedback: The 360-feedback surveys provide a measurable baseline for goal setting. The 360 reviews are powerful; they include honest feedback from Fran’s closest co-workers and supervisors on areas she needs to improve.
Creating Awareness Is Key to Successful Supervisor Upskilling
One challenge with upskilling new supervisors like Fran is that while she is highly skilled at improving processes, she is not trained to strategically work with people to drive those processes. This is where a TLI coach can help Fran move out of her habitual mode of operating (her comfort zone) and challenge her to start growing and innovating.
The focus of TLI is to bring awareness to your new leaders. This begins with knowledge transfer in classroom training. The TLI coach helps the new supervisor establish a measurable baseline for leadership through 360 feedback. The coach works with the new leader to set goals in the areas where he or she has the most interest in improving, and together they plan to reach those goals. The new leader – who is also the learner – conducts real-world experiments, and gets ongoing feedback and support through coaching.
Fran is now on her way to transformational leadership improvement. While Fran is not real, her story represents the process that Arkansas Manufacturing Solutions has developed to help hard-working managers and supervisors transform the way they lead. The investment that people like Fran make in improving their leadership represents better results for the business and a better quality of life for the teams they lead.
Ready to Upskill Your Future Leaders? Reach Out to Your Local MEP Center
Fran’s narrative is just one example of how new supervisors can successfully upskill into leadership roles with the right resources and support. Reach out to your local MEP Center for leadership development content, consultation, training, and other resources to help you build your leadership talent pipeline.
About the Author
Keith Gammill, Director of Arkansas Manufacturing Solutions, is a 30-year veteran of the manufacturing industry. During his tenure as an Operations Manager with a local manufacturer, he led an underperforming division from “worst-to-first” in eighteen months, resulting in a $1.5 million swing in profitability for the division. He now leads a team of 11 professionals to help Arkansas manufacturers grow their businesses by providing training, consulting and coaching.
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