Leadership Lessons: Frontline Managers

Organizational Challenge As Peter Drucker advised us several decades ago, frontline managers are critical to an organization's ability to gain and maintain competitive advantage. These managers understand the skills, activities, and processes that are important to the organization. They also understand the needs of their customers. Despite this, many organizations have not fully tapped into this resource. Is your organization one of the guilty ones? Solution

There are several programs on the market today that do a good job of providing basic supervisory/leadership training. However, there is a major gap in these programs. They typically do not address business process improvement. Business process skills can help frontline managers improve the bottom line by producing clear, measurable outcomes in terms of expense reduction or increased revenues.

Thus, once armed with the knowledge of basic leadership skills, the next natural step is to train these frontline managers with business process improvement skills that help them to:

• Clearly understand the key business issues and goals of the organization
  
• Look for measurable opportunities to align current processes to more effectively meet the needs of the organization
  
• Seek alternative resolutions through the help of customers, vendors, and the organization's employees
  
• Select the best solution
  
• Gain commitment from all parties
  
• Execute a process that produces, clear measurable outcomes
  

Does this seem like a tall order for a frontline manager? Not really, if they are given the know-how, freedom, and support of upper management. Once frontline managers are empowered with the skills and management support, the opportunities to improve processes that produce measurable outcomes for increased revenues or reduced expenses are essentially ongoing and endless. Why? Because change is inevitable, and to stay competitive, your organization will either institute new technology and/or take on new products or services. And, these areas will continually need to be reviewed, tweaked and improved.
Future Implications

Recognizing a need to fill this gap, Robin Byrne, then a manager with Xerox in the UK, developed a business process improvement program. He subsequently refined the program and went out on his own to create Robin Byrne's Measureable Management™. This program is designed primarily for frontline managers and team leaders.

I was recently contacted by Robin who asked me to evaluate the program's content and design. I was very impressed with the concepts as well as the results he has achieved with clients. Consequently, I decided to become one of their founding corporate US licensees. I'm further working with Robin's group to launch an update of this exciting practical and effective program to meet specific needs and expectations of my larger corporate clients. We plan for this update to be completed by December 1st.

One of the things that appealed to me most about this program is their money-back guarantee. Your organization will achieve measureable results in expense reduction or increased revenue equal to or greater than the cost of the program. If that doesn't occur (and they claim that it hasn't happened yet), we will refund the difference between your program cost and your measureable results. To date, their experience has been typically been three to four times in expense savings or revenue generation over the cost of the program.

Stay tuned for more information on this as we get closer to launch. Click on the link if you would like to see the basic course overview and testimonials.

For general supervisory leadership skills, we continue to offer you the award-winning series by Vital Learning. Available in Classroom, Online, or Blended delivery options, the Vital Learning curriculum includes the following essential topics.

• Delegating - understanding when to use delegation and how to make it motivating
• Complaints - being able to effectively manage complaints
  
• Coaching - knowing how to productively coach job skills
  
• Project Management - being able to run projects, both on-time and on-budget
  
• Conflict - understanding how to successfully resolve conflict
  
• Hiring Winning Talent- knowing what to do to consistently hire the right talent
  
• Providing Feedback - understanding how to establish performance goals and standards and give feedback
  
• And more...

For detail go to www.TheLearningEngine.org