Supervisor Training: 3 Effective Methods to
Turn Everyday Staff Into Supervisors

By: Skip Corsini
From: Training – September 2002
Managing Training & Development
Copyright c 2002 by the Institute of Management & Administration (IOMA).

In many organizations, building supervisors and managers from front line employees is a given. Training is critical in this transition, however, because new supervisors who are unaccustomed to managerial roles can easily alienate their former compatriots. Here's how three companies developed programs that successfully transformed employees into supervisors.

Busch's, Inc.--community college partnership. As with many retailers, at Busch, Inc., a privately held chain of 12 supermarkets in Mich., supervisors honed their skills through trial and error as they moved up the ranks. The company's vision is "to be the premier food retailer in Southeastern Michigan." A critical part of that vision is an ongoing education program that encourages professionalism, knowledge, and skills among employees.

As a champion of learning, Busch's training director, Candice Shavalia, wanted to make it easy for supervisors to learn. To facilitate meeting the company's education requirement--between 20 and 80 hours of training, depending on education level--Shavalia instituted several on-site programs with some local educational institutions.

"People quit supervisors, they don't quit companies."

A local college partner. The program she is most proud of is the advanced certificate in management offered through Washtenaw Community College's (WCC) Institute for Workforce Development.

The WCC partnership brought the management certificate program on site to Busch's. The 12-credit certificate program requires that students complete four three-credit courses: Introduction to supervision; performance management; managing operations; and project management.

Busch's supervisors can either participate in the entire four-course certificate program or they can take individual courses within the program. Shavalia makes it easy to participate. Students don't have to apply for admissions, go to the college to enroll, buy books, or attend the course. Everything but the learning is taken care of by Shavalia.

Each course costs $5,000, which is paid directly by Busch's. This fee includes books, faculty, and administrative time for 20 participants. If more than 20 people enroll, the fee is an additional $250 per person.

Results: reduced turnover. Since rollout of the company's continuing education policy, Busch's has experienced an 11% reduction in turnover. While other factors, such as the economy, have played a role, ongoing education has helped. "People quit supervisors, they don't quit companies," Shavalia declares. "By improving managerial skills, we definitely create a more motivating and attractive environment for workers."

Keys to success. According to Shavalia, several factors contribute to the success of the process:

• Strong senior management endorsement of continuing education. The president created the policy, and he offers continuing education as a company benefit.
• Learning tied to the evaluation process. Supervisors are not eligible for raises if they have not completed their developmental plans and required hours of education.
• Offering the course as a closed class. Having only Busch's employees in the course helps build camaraderie and focuses learning on direct application to Busch's.
• Make it easy to participate. The program is offered on Busch premises, and Busch takes care of financing and administration.
• College credit. Giving college credit and a certificate provides tangible proof of academic accomplishment. Boomtown Casino--turning retention principles into training. As supervisors were promoted up through the ranks at Boomtown Casino (Biloxi, Miss.), the company discovered that they were contributing to high employee turnover. Given the disruptive effect of churning and the $1,500 cost to replace each employee, Page Pearson, senior training coordinator of Boomtown, was motivated to look for a solution.

Exit interviews and focus groups of Boomtown employees helped to pinpoint supervisory behaviors, such as lack of respect and recognition, favoritism, and poor communication, that bred employee dissatisfaction and ultimately, turnover.

Inspired by Love 'Em or Lose 'Em by Beverly Kaye and Sharon Jordan-Evans, Pearson decided to turn the book's 26 strategies into a practical, hands-on training program that would help supervisors take a hard look at themselves and identify ways to build better relationships with employees. The result was a twelve-hour training program initially delivered in two-hour segments over a six-week period.

The program goal was to encourage leadership behavior that would help promote employee retention, specifically to help supervisors:

• Examine their leadership style and behaviors and gain awareness of how their staffs view them;
• Identify ways to enhance their leadership effectiveness and build rapport with their staff;
• Recognize that each employee has unique needs, values and goals and identify what each of their employees valued in recognition; and
• Apply their newly learned awareness to better meet employees' needs.

Start at the top. In order to gain sponsorship for the program, Pearson offered it first to the ten directors of the company. Not surprisingly, the leaders, who felt swamped with paperwork and supervisory duties, were reluctant to attend a six-week program.

Despite the initial resistance, the directors enthusiastically endorsed the program after they completed it. One critical exercise asked training participants to ask employees to rate them on various "jerk" behaviors, such as yelling at people, acting superior/smarter than everyone else, giving only negative feedback, and always looking out for number one. For supervisors who had lost touch with their employees this feedback was eye-opening.

Pearson streamlined the format to two four-hour sessions offered on consecutive weeks. This eight-hour version, which eliminated exercises that were not as relevant to the casino, was just as effective and easier to implement.

Results: A 22.9% reduction in turnover (229 employees), at a savings of $1,500 per employee amounts to $343,500 in estimated savings from turnover. While she doesn't attribute all the savings to this one training program, Page knows it was an important part of enhancing supervisor effectiveness. Page estimates that costs for development and instruction for 143 employees were about $41,450.

What contributed to success? "People want to know about themselves," Pearson explained. They gained a lot from the exercises and the feedback from their employees. In some cases they learned what they needed to do differently and in other cases they gained confidence in having their positive behaviors validated by employees.

Pearson found that having a tighter time frame made the program much more manageable. She's learned to chunk programs into meaningful units and to offer them over a shorter time period.

Games Workshop--squad leader boot camp. Since it hires its managers exclusively from its customer base, Games Workshop (Glen Burnie, Md.) must transform enthusiastic hobbyists and collectors of fantasy and science fiction based toy soldiers into supervisors and business managers.

To make the transition from enthusiast to store manager, the company uses a management boot camp of sorts that it calls Squad Leader training. "We had to figure out how to get these guys to a place where they could run a $300,000 business," explains Bert Smith, lead trainer.

The original version of Squad Leader was a five-day program that included leadership principles; teamwork elements; staff development (coaching/discipline); and planning.

A typical training class was five or six prospective managers and two or three instructors. It was a very intense training using role-plays and very straightforward feedback to help trainees develop the skills they need to run a Games Workshop store.

A lot of people think training is helping people out with their weaknesses. That's just damage control. We try to play to people's strengths.

Squad Leader is designed to take people out of their comfort zone, Smith says. "We put them through a series of 15 to 20 scenarios and role-plays related to the work environment, from simple coaching techniques to handling staff theft.

"Then we debrief. We want to see how well they handle those d ay-to-day issues--how they get their guys to jell and become a team; how they get their people to think and act together; how are they, the manager contributing to or solving the problems?"

The training was so intense, in fact, that Smith and his team decided to make some changes when one trainee described the process as the most stressful week in his life, including the birth of his first child.

"We knew we had to turn down the heat a little after that. A lot of people think training is helping people out with their weaknesses. That's just damage control. We try to play to people's strengths."

A revised version. The company's strategic plan--to grow from about 32 to 100 U.S. locations--makes it impractical to continue offsite Squad Leader training, Smith says. He and his team have transferred the role-plays and modules into a training workbook that district managers use to train their own supervisors. "It's slower, but it's working," says Smith. "We just can't turn out new managers as quickly."

Results: An average store, even with a mediocre manager, will earn about $220,000 per year, says Smith. After Squad Leader training, some stores saw an increase in sales to $300,000, a more than 30% jump. "Our focus is to make these guys the drivers of their business. They go back with the knowledge of what they need in their staff, why it's not jelling, and what to do as a team leader." One district manager said he encountered all 20 of the role-plays in the last two years.