Promoting managerial skills
in the production environment

1 Introduction

“One day’s training is enough for our shift supervisors, and it can be attended to on a weekend, outside of their working hours”, said the managing director of a major mid-range enterprise in connection with leadership training for the company’s shift supervisors. Such opinions are not uncommon among managers at manufacturing companies, many of whom are unwilling to invest time and money in further developing the managerial skills of their shop floor supervisors. They underestimate both the importance of wellfunctioning production for a company’s success and how challenging a job it is to lead factory workers and machine operators.

2 Mid-level leadership issues

Leading operative staff is a very demanding job. In day-to-day operations at the shop floor level, many supervisors lack the heart to talk straight to their subordinates, so they enlist the help of their own superiors, e.g., the plant manager.

Shift supervisors and industrial foremen are frequently confronted with shop floor leadership issues for which there are no easy solutions. For example:

How do I keep my capable people happy, and how do I deal with “loafers”?

What can I do about my team’s frustration with things like hearing that part of the assembly scope is scheduled for outsourcing to a foreign country?

How can I get my shift to “volunteer” for working on Saturday to remedy a delivery bottleneck?

What can I do about temporary workers whose hopes for permanent employment have been dashed, with the result that our rejects rate is increasing?

How should I deal with communication and coordination problems resulting from a poor command of German?

How should I react, when a worker turns up with alcohol on his breath?

How can I address bad social behaviour and poor performance in a manner to keep the worker in question from going on sick leave?

This list of tricky leadership problems to be contended with by shop floor supervisors could be extended indefinitely. Leaders have to keep heterogeneous groups of people together: skilled and unskilled workers, permanent and temporary employees, loners and self-promoters, family men and single mothers, people of diverse nationality, young and old.

Shift supervisors must

cater toward compromise and mutual understanding

implement managerial decisions in which they themselves were not involved

enforce rules of safety and quality assurance

familiarize and train employees

hold meetings and work toward improvement

keep everyone happy, even if the work to be done is loud, monotonous and stressful

keep an eye on – and achieve – the company’s production goals

3 Non-office people skills called for

As experienced business leaders know: Good foremen keep production up and running. Few of them, however, are aware of how demanding it is to lead operational staff.

Workers prefer plain-language announcements over longwinded discussions. The latter take up good working time and reduce the output. Operatives also have respect for superiors who are able to show them how things need to done. A shift supervisor with weak practical skills who “beats around the bush”, though, will soon be “done for”.

Shift supervisors also have to be willing and able to step in and help out when the going gets rough. That is why many of them do not see themselves as a “supervisor”. Any newly installed shift supervisor who is told not to “act the big shot” right after his first bold statement is going to need lots of courage and clear-cut role clarity to keep from backing down. But the way to win respect as a leader is not taught in school or at seminars.

4 Sandwich position requires role clarity

Shift supervisors are at the pulse of the enterprise. They know what is really happening. Good foremen have an enormous amount of influence on motivation and productivity. They represent the company at a central point – namely, right where the value is added. They can exert a positive influence on the employees’ sentiments and loyalty, and they can show top management where the shoe pinches. No other level of management can get so close to so many people in the course of a day. They explain, substantiate and interpret the company’s goals and represent its values and culture – much more so than any bulletin-board notice or any speech by the CEO at a works meeting. When a shop floor supervisor stands up for a decision, the shop floor workers will go along with it, too.

This, of course, presumes that the supervisor in question has earned their respect and is not considered a buddy, a fixer or the COO’s deputy. It is all about leadership qualities. Without human maturity, aplomb, tact, clarity of communication and a genuine interest in people, nothing of the sort could ever be achieved at the shop floor level. It is accordingly important, then, that the right people be chosen as leaders. That makes for a good foundation. Then comes good, sound qualifications to optimize their profile.

5 Shift supervisors have a different way of learning

“Time just flew by, and I was always totally involved”: That is about the highest praise a trainer could ever expect from a shift supervisor. As soon as a training session becomes too academic about leadership, industrial foremen start to snore. If the substance has little to do with their own daily routine, it bores them. Trainers have to use clear-cut, intelligible language. And “psycho stuff” makes their audience defensive.

Moreover, anyone trying to train shop floor supervisors should keep in mind that they will need their first light-bulb moment within three hours at the latest. If they can see the practical connection, they will be fully enthusiastic. And if they feel a good personal connection to the trainer, he can get right down to brass tacks. Giving them a sense of achievement is also important as a motivator. A good rule of thumb for gearing training measures to shop floor supervisors reads like this: 70 % dynamic, practical training, 20 % pragmatic input and 10 % transfer.

Correctly approached, industrial foremen are, as a rule, quite willing to learn and to at least reconsider their ways of thinking and behaviour patterns. As pragmatic, hands-on doers, they have a keen instinct for what might still be wrong with their own leadership. Also, they perceive any and all encouragement from the company as a sign of recognition and appreciation – much more so than white collar employees tend to do. This is because, unlike many “knowledge workers”, do not consider it only natural for their superiors to regard them as individuals and to periodically send them off for more training. That being so, providing active assistance and encouragement to shop floor supervisors greatly helps to fortify their identification with the company. In these times, where highly qualified, well-motivated industrial foremen are something of a rarity, that is a factor to keep in mind.

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