Supervisor Management Skills Training Course - 2 Days

The role of the supervisory manager is to get the best performance from every member of the team, and to achieve the organisational goals.

The way to succeed in your role is to develop the special set of knowledge, skills, emotions, attitudes and language that will allow you to get the best from yourself and others. This course is designed to give you those skills, which fall under six major headings: Goals, communication, planning, conflict, self-management, leadership.

We ask you to score yourself out of ten, against the set of six key skills. Assuming you are not perfect, you will have stronger and weaker parts to your performance. The aim of this course is to eliminate your weak points, and to build on your strong points.

The primary purpose of a supervisor is to facilitate the achievement of goals. So we start with learning all we need to about goals.

We learn a special eight-part goal setting formula that will allow you to set a goal, communicate it to others, and begin the planning process that will lead to the achievement of the goal.

Goals must be clearly communicated. So now we turn our attention to the issue of communication skills. As a supervisor you must be always clearly understood. In order to do that, you must use specific language. If you use Non-specific, (ambiguous) language you will create misunderstandings which will lead to confusion and error.

You will learn two terrific methods to clarify your language so that your exact meaning is always crystal clear.

As a supervisor you must learn to think logically about the problems that face you. We will show you how to be more logical in your approach to all problems, so that you can quickly find the answers to your problems.

As a supervisor, you must be able to inspire positive emotions in others. We will show you how to develop the principle of “rational optimism”; which is an optimistic outlook based upon clear goals, planning and positive mental attitude.

You may have some negative types in your team, who tend to drag people down, emotionally. We will show you techniques to transform your negative types into an asset, instead of a liability.

We do this by asking “Instructive questions” that turn negative people’s brains into “problem solving machines” instead of “problem creating machines”.

The general principle of supervisory management is clear, rational and affirmative language.

Many people use the opposite, unclear, irrational and negative language.

We will finish the morning on how to give only affirmative instructions, and how NEGATIVELY worded instructions, can act as an unintended “embedded command”. “DON’T PANIC!” inspires panic. “Don’t worry” inspires worry.

We will replace negated language with affirmative language. We will teach you how to use words with precision and purpose.

Conflict management skills are important because occasional conflicts are inevitable: Why?
Because People have their own ideas, and they don’t always correspond to yours.

People don’t always do what they should do.
People don’t always agree with the plan.
Miscommunications and misunderstandings cause conflict.

So, we can say with certainty that you WILL have conflicts to manage.
HOW you manage conflict is important.

Conflict management skills are important because, if you mismanage conflicts they blow up in your face and become disastrous for the team.

If you handle conflict well, you will quickly resolve issues, and everyone can get back to work, adding value to the customers.

Let us look at how people manage conflicts.

People mishandle conflict in three different ways.

1. They get angry and aggressive and come on too strong.
2. Their approach is too weak, and they don’t come on strong enough.  
3. They avoid the whole issue and run away from conflict situations.

What happens as a consequence of taking these three approaches?

The correct way to handle conflict, is through the use of REASON.

We need to develop a Rational approach to conflict management: One based upon, logic, facts, rational negotiation and a clear purpose.

The rest of the afternoon is devoted to explaining HOW to do that.

Don’t use angry words, don’t use upset words, don’t use antagonistic language.
Instead use objective, fact-based language.

We will give you full instruction on how to transform your language to objective language.
Then you use the objective, rational approach to script the conflict situations we have lined up for you.

Now we have learned objective language, you will have the opportunity to practice your new skills by scripting five conflicts situations. You will figure out how you would best word your message so that you avoid triggering a negative emotional response in the mind of your listener, and instead, you trigger a rational response.

Science relies on clear definitions. And we will give definition to “reasons” and “excuses”. It is a vital distinction because there is a massive difference between a reason for not doing something and an excuse.

Clarify that difference by defining each term.

You give concessions ONLY to “reason- givers”.
You give NO concessions to “excuse givers”.

(What would happen if you gave concessions to those who give you excuses?)

Should you compromise or stand your ground?

We need to distinguish between when to compromise and when not to. Obviously, compromise is necessary in certain situations. You cannot have everything your own way, all the time. You will have to compromise.

On the other hand, if you compromised too easily, if you gave way on every issue and compromised your integrity and your authority, then what would be the final outcome. 

We will learn when to compromise and when to stand firm.

Always appreciate good work. We have learned “What to say when people are NOT doing it right”.

We finish the day on “What to say when they ARE doing it right”
We discuss the issue of thanks praise and appreciation.

It is essential that you give positive appreciation for their efforts, whether or not those efforts resulted in progress. It is easy to forget to appreciate people, and some supervisors DO forget. They are quick to criticise and slow to praise. They are “All stick, no carrot”.

The lack of appreciation is not “a zero”, it is often the cause of a lot of “bad blood”.
Therefore, we must, give appreciation for THE GOOD.

Appreciation and praise are both examples of “social motivators”.

As a supervisor you need to know about the social motivators.

You have learned a lot today. Now we review our notes and pick out the most important points and commit to applying them in our work practices.

We will ask you to pick out four things from today that you will definitely apply to yourself, and others.

Time management is an essential skill for the supervisory manager, because NOT everything can be done simultaneously. Consequently, supervisors have to organise tasks into order of priority in respect of:

1. Value of the task
2. Deadline pressure.
3. Logical sequence.

Many people don’t prioritise properly, instead they do whatever happens to drop in front of their eyes.  Many people do;

1. The easiest things first.
2. The pleasant things first and
3. They put-off doing unpleasant things

This habit is called Procrastination - Procrastination is a very common bad habit.

We discuss what happens to anyone who tends to procrastinate.

We will show you a terrific method of prioritising tasks according to their value and their logical sequence.

We will show you how to do it on paper, then we will show you how to use our unique prioritisation App. that you can download onto your phone or mobile device.

Then for the rest of your life, you will always be doing “the right things in the right order”.

Just imagine how great life would be, if everyone did the right things in the right order.

In the real world, people waste time. So, we want you to identify the main causes of time wasters where you work, and then we want you to “plug the holes”. We categorise time wasters into three classes:

1. Your own bad habits.
2. Other people’s bad habits
3. Inefficient systems

This is a terrific exercise in time management that you will enjoy and learn a lot from.

As a supervisor you need to make quick decisions. We will show you how to classify your decisions into five major types:

1. Yes or No decision.
2. Which one / What kind. decision.
3. What is the most valuable?
4. What is the correct sequence?
5. What are the main causes and possible solution to our problem?

Remember, as a supervisor you are not paid for doing all the work yourself. You are paid to get the work done! And in order to do that, you must make excellent decisions.

We expand on the issue of problem / cause / solution. We show you how to increase your powers of analysis and problem solving. We do this by showing you a process called “Problem cause solution mapping”.

You are not paid to do it all. You are paid to get it all done. That means you should master the art of delegating. Delegating is the art of entrusting a task to another. You will learn:

1. The reasons for delegating.
2. How to delegate.
3. Why supervisors who should delegate often fail to delegate.

By the end of this section, you will be a “master delegator”.

You will know how to delegate the right task, to the right person, at the right time, in the right way.

Presumably, you are constantly peppered by interruptions, and it wrecks your plans and time management. Consequently, you need to know how to “get the maximum value from the interruption, in the minimum time, without causing offence.”

We show you how to achieve this illusive goal, by using the 80/20 rule. The 80/20 rule suggests that  20% of the others interruption contains 100% of its value. 80% of their interruption is a waste of time. Your task is to find the high value 20% and reduce the interruption to one fifth of its original size whilst obtaining 100% of its value.

You dispose of the irrelevant 80% (trash talk).

In this section of the course you have learned a huge amount and you have acquired new techniques for prioritising, planning, problem solving, delegating, decision making and overcoming procrastination. We ask you to review the notes and select those four items which make the biggest difference to you, if you applied them every day to your work and home life.

Emotional management is a set of personal attitudes skills and techniques that allow you to influence yourself emotionally, so that you are almost always feeling strong, optimistic and goal focused, irrespective of the particular events of the day.

In other words, your mood is NOT determined by other people and forces outside of your control but rather, your mood is determined by yourself.

Self-determination; self-control; self-confidence; self-motivation.

What a wonderful list!

If you had more of each of these, what could you achieve?

As a supervisor you need to motivate and give confidence to others. But the question arises: Who motivates the motivator?
Answer: Nobody. You must motivate yourself.

We will give you explicit instructions that will allow you to brew your own confidence, motivation and enthusiasm. Never again will you be at the mercy of circumstances, because you will learn how to strengthen yourself from the inside, out.

This is the art of emotional management. Or another word for it is “Self-mastery”.
The great philosopher Plato said: “The first and greatest victory is self-mastery”.

This afternoon you will gain the greatest victory.

Once you know the principles for developing self-confidence, you simply apply the same principles to other people, and you thus trigger the same set of positive emotions in the minds of others.

You will learn how to speak to others and use words in such a way that the images you create in their minds, trigger positive emotions.

Everything you say creates “pictures in the mind”. And people respond emotionally to the pictures they have in their minds.

When you learn how to use your language to purposefully paint positive pictures in the minds of others, you will know how to invoke the positive emotions you need them to feel.

This is what we call, “Conversation control” and “The language of leadership”.

Continuous improvement is both “a state of mind” and “a specific five-part process”, that results in never ending progress.

The concept for the state of mind is “Happy but never satisfied”.

We want you to be always happy but never complacent. Never satisfied because you know that improvement on the current condition is possible and should be taken.

This is the emotional basis for the continuous improvement process.

The continuous improvement process is based upon five words: Purpose, plan, action, feedback, change.

• Purpose – What you want, your goals
• Plan – How you intent to achieve them
• Action – Intelligent implementation of your plan
• Feedback – Carefully observe the positive and negative results your recent actions have created
• Change – Make adaptions and improvements to your plan

For every action there is a reaction, which we call FEEDBACK. Feedback is information that relates the results of your recent actions to your goal. Everything you ever say or do will bring you feedback in the form of: Progress, NO progress or Regress.

Perfect knowledge is impossible, so most plans do not work first time. Notice where your current actions are “on target” and where you are “off target”. Then party or ponder. Never mistake criticism, setbacks or temporary defeat as permanent failure. Instead, regroup, ponder the meaning of the result and bounce back stronger with a better plan.

This afternoon we discussed the most important of all subjects; How to inspire ourselves and others to feel more optimistic, confident, goal focused and happy.

This course gives you some amazing techniques that you can use immediately to help get the best from yourself and others.

When you use these methods, you are guaranteed to be successful in your role of supervisor manager and beyond.

We will do a final review of the material and ask you to tell us which parts of this course has been the most impactful. How will you apply these methods? With whom, When?