Becoming a New Supervisor -- What are the Challenges?

During May, Hugh Alley published a book that introduces the central skills that any supervisor must master with, at least, a basic working competency: instructing, leading, and making improvements in their own area. It is entitled Becoming the Supervisor
Achieving Your Company's Mission and Building Your Team, and it presents some of the more widely used tools that a new supervisor may need. More importantly, it ties these tools and skills to solving particular problems.

I spoke with Hugh this month and asked him: “What are the common mistakes many new supervisors make?” Here is his complete response:

I’d say that there are three common mistakes among new supervisors.

First, they are not clear enough with their employees when they assign work. They’ll describe what need to be done, but they’ll skip over the details of how the work is to be done. These details are what set the orders apart, and they are where the mistakes happen. You need to go over them with your employee. And you need a conversation about how long the work will take. When that happens, both supervisor and worker can agree, and the supervisor’s stress goes down.

Second, they act without thinking through a situation when something is amiss. Usually that’s because they don’t have a structured way to approach this sort of problem. In the book, Julie, the GM, introduces Trevor, the young supervisor to the Job Relations approach, which gives a nice structured way to think about any situation. I’ve seen team leads charging across the floor to “deal with” someone stop in their tracks and reconsider when they remember the steps of the Job Relations program. It’s very powerful.

Third, they don’t pay enough attention to standard work. They don’t make sure that people are using the best way to do a job that the organization currently knows. That consistency will typically increase productivity by 10%. The best route to that is a good job breakdown, and the concepts of the Job Instruction module from Training Within Industry are very helpful here. In the book, Trevor learns how to do this, and it solves several problems. I’ve seen it reduce the time to get new staff up to speed from three months down to one month.

If new supervisors can get those three skills nailed, they’ll be much better off. From there, they can learn all the other skills. 

What is the quality of the leadership training within your organization? Do you agree with Hugh's assessment of common mistakes by new supervisors? Has your company experienced the benefits of a training within industry (TWI) program?

The Training Within Industry (TWI) Programs -- Are You Using Them Correctly?

An important new book by Donald Dinero just recently hit the streets titled The TWI Facilitator's Guide: How to Use the TWI Programs Successfully. In it, Don explains how practitioners of TWI (Training Within Industry) often alter the programs without understanding the underlying principles. These changes, he contends, have made the programs less effective. During a recent conversation with Don, I asked him specifically: "How have the TWI Programs been recently misused?" Here is his complete answer:

The TWI “J” Programs have many success stories -- those recorded both in the initial period of 1940-1945 and also in the contemporary period after they had been re-introduced. On the other hand, there have been instances in which the TWI Programs have not achieved their intended objectives giving people the idea that “TWI won’t work in our facility because we’re different.” If the TWI Programs are not yielding the intended results, they are not being used properly. Here are some ideas about how these programs are misused which subsequently leads to their being ineffective.

Each of the TWI Programs teaches a skill and each skill is learned for a specific purpose. Just in Time (JIT) teaches us how to transfer knowledge. Job Methods Training (JMT) teaches us how to see waste and improve a process. Job Relations Training (JRT) teaches us how to effectively prevent and deal with personnel issues. For a given program to be seen as useful, the problem that it addresses must first be identified, defined, and quantified. If this is not done, we won’t know whether or not we have achieved what we set out to achieve.

Another area of misuse is when people underestimate the effort and time required to master the skill necessary for the program’s proper use. Outwardly, each program is simple because it is represented by a four-step method. Many practitioners do not realize that it usually takes many hours to fully understand and get a “feel” for how to use each program. Attending a 10-hour session will introduce you to the concepts and methods of each program, but it takes many hours afterward to gain mastery of each program.

A third area of misuse is when practitioners attempt to change a program either to improve it or to have it fit a time schedule or some other parameter. The programs were designed to fit people’s needs and as those needs change, the founders believed the programs should also change. A key point here is that there are some principles in the programs that should not be changed unless society’s behavior changes. Ignoring these principles leads to their being ineffective.

What do you think of Don's thoughts on the misuse of the TWI programs? What have been your experiences when implementing TWI?