Companies invest in management development to drive business performance, but are you spending those dollars wisely and on the right people? Frontline managers run your company on a daily basis, but too often companies do not adequately invest in their development.
These managers are leaders on the line because they guide and direct daily operations and because they put themselves on the line every day. Management development activities bear the most fruit when focused on frontline managers.
The hiring/promotion and development of your Leaders On The Line will be most effective when they're focused on the two critical managerial roles. First, managers run a company within your company. To define success for a team is to create the job description for its manager and to establish the basis on which managerial performance should be judged. The broader organization is like a holding company that entrusts significant organizational resources to them, and holds them accountable for their team's contribution to the company's overall success. This is the idea behind a manufacturing work cell or a health care interdisciplinary care team.
Second, Leaders On The Line are the human resource generalists for the people who report to them. The adage that people join organizations and leave supervisors has merit given that how supervisors assign work, orchestrate training and development, manage employee relations and address performance issues is the primary determinant of a team member's everyday experience.
Tie Training to Management
The further you remove management development from the actual running of your company, the less likely it will help your company. The focus must be improving managers' abilities to know why, where and how to positively affect overall team success-everything closing the gaps between current and desired business performance. Because building personal and organizational competency of any sort takes time, management development strategies that involve experimentation and commensurate reflection are most helpful. This can be done in two ways:
1. A management mentor or coach
Whether a mentor/coach is internal or external, is engaged on a formal or informal basis, or has regular or occasional meetings, this approach works best as an apprenticeship. An effective mentor/coach helps a manager reflect on situations and teaches tools and techniques to increase his/her effectiveness.
2. A management course or program
Whether internal or external, these are most effective when they involve multiple sessions over a number of weeks, ask participants to apply their learning between sessions (action), and discuss with participants what they learned (reflection).
As important as these can be, they are not substitutes for learning, feedback, and encouragement from a manager's manager. The ability and willingness to manage and develop managers, therefore, should be a key requirement for hiring or promoting someone into middle management.
The Effect of Company Policies
Company management systems, policies, and procedures have a huge impact on a frontline manager's effectiveness. Policies and procedures that interfere with a team's ability to get the work out the door will likely be ignored, used sporadically, or watered down. Similarly, information management systems that don't consider the running of the business often make it more difficult for frontline managers to do their jobs.
When frontline managers are part of developing an HR policy, reconfiguring space or a new database system, it may take a bit longer, but the results are more user-friendly, business-relevant and supported by these managers.
So we end where we began. If running your company well over time is your goal, then your management structure, systems and development efforts must focus on the central place your Leaders On The Line have in the running of your business. Too often, we leave them to do the best they can. Imagine how much more effective your company would be if it consciously and effectively hired, promoted, supported and developed frontline managers with these principles in mind. N
Bruce Mast is president of Bruce Mast & Associates Inc., an organizational and leadership development firm in Portsmouth that also partners with Business NH Magazine and NH Businesses for Social Responsibility on the Best Companies to Work For in NH competition. He can be reached at 603-772-4488 or bmast@bmaleadership.com.