Let’s face it. If you’re running a business, you can’t be everywhere, and you can’t do everything.
Let’s say that you began your business in your home with three other employees. They’ve been with the company since the beginning, so they know and share your vision. They’ve been more like colleagues than employees. It’s easy to stay in touch with them, since you work with them every day.
But what happens when customer demand begins to exceed what the four of you are able to produce? You need more employees, and you need a bigger space. You now have the added responsibility for locating and preparing an office and attracting and hiring new employees. Life suddenly became a lot more complicated.
You decide that you can’t do it all. You contract with a fractional human resource manager to handle recruitment.
You interview and hire four more employees and orient them to the company. They are going to report to you, as will the original three employees. The original three are disgruntled because they don’t have immediate access to you anymore and they don‘t like being treated as employees instead of colleagues.
You quickly learn that people management is not your forte. As a matter of fact, to keep the work coming in, you will need to spend a lot of time away from the office promoting the business.
It’s time you found someone to supervise the employees on a daily basis. You consider promoting one of the original three, but none of them have supervisory experience.
Let’s stop there. Is that a good idea? Technical expertise doesn’t automatically turn into management skill. Hoping that management skill will eventually evolve is wishful thinking, with potentially harmful results. Competition for a promotion can lead to difficult work relationships. They can be healed, but it takes finesse. Maybe one of the new employees would make a better supervisor.
It is important that all potential candidates receive pre-supervisory training if at all possible. Then, as the company expands further, you will have a pool of individuals who understand what it means to supervise others and want to do it.
Without pre-supervisory training or immediate training upon hire, your new supervisor is three times as likely to fail. Can you afford that?
Help your potential supervisors gain the skills they need to be successful. Contact us for a list of supervisory training topics.
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