Whether it’s one person you’re holding out of new supervisor training or an entire group you’re planning not to train, you’re in for some rough times ahead. Here are some of the top excuses we hear for skipping new supervisor training:
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“The job’s been open too long. We need the new supervisor to do the work now.”
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“That department is in a busy season. We need all hands on deck.”
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“That team is underperforming. They need their supervisor to monitor the work.”
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“The team is short-staffed. The supervisor has to fill in the gaps.”
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“We can’t afford to send our supervisors to training. It’s been a slow quarter.”
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“We promote people internally. They’ll figure out how to do it.”
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“The senior managers can mentor and teach the new supervisors.”
None of these excuses for skipping supervisory skills training is reasonable. They are all short-sighted. The problems you’re experiencing now -- open jobs, inability to adequately staff for busy times, poor performance, and a lack of development for employees -- are only going to get worse if you don’t properly train your supervisors.
Let’s demystify some of the myths about the urgency of getting your new supervisors trained.
A Closer Look at the Cost of Avoiding New Supervisor Training
‘We Can’t Afford the Cost of New Supervisor Training’
Can you afford the cost of not training new supervisors? It’s substantial. When supervisors are not adequately trained:
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Employee turnover is significantly higher.
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Talent shortages impair future growth and innovation.
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Customers are less satisfied and more likely to take their business elsewhere.
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Employees don’t work as hard or accomplish as much.
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Expenses are higher due to the need for recruiting, hiring, overtime, etc.
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Revenues are lower due to dissatisfied customers and underperforming employees.
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Profit margins are eroded by higher costs and lower revenues.
The cost of a single employee leaving is, on average, 6 months of that employee’s salary and benefits. If an employee earns $75,000 a year, half a year’s salary plus typical benefits would be roughly $50,000. That’s more than the cost of supervisor training for the one employee alone who could have been retained if a properly trained supervisor were in the management role.
Check out this blog post to read more about these outcomes and the research that backs them up.
‘We Can’t Take Supervisors Away from Their Teams’
That’s the problem. Well-trained managers have well-developed staffs who don’t need constant supervision and micromanaging.
If you want sustainable and scalable growth, your employees have to be able to work more autonomously and to be more trustworthy when a supervisor is gone for a few hours of training.
What happens when your supervisors take vacation or sick leave? You can make similar adjustments to cover the work while supervisors attend training.
‘We Feel We Can Accomplish the Same Results as Training through Mentoring’
If most of your directors and senior managers also came up through the ranks, you have untrained people training new supervisors.
If most of your directors and senior managers were hired from other companies, you will have a variety of training and methods being taught to new supervisors.
Not only that, but your directors and senior managers probably don’t have experience as instructional designers and trainers. They can show and tell how the job is done. But that doesn’t achieve what you really need:
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Knowledge transfer
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Practical application
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Skills building
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Ramp-up
And don’t forget -- your senior managers and directors are plenty busy with their own full-time jobs. When do they realistically have the time to spend training the new supervisors?
A quality training program will equip your supervisors with tools and techniques that make them more effective immediately. They might even become more effective than the senior members of your team who haven’t had professional training and development.
Want Improved Business Results?
If you’re getting the results you need with the training you don’t have, you probably didn’t read this entire post. If you’ve read this far, you might as well admit that you need some help with training. Let’s talk about it today.
