Qualifying in sales process for supervision

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[Music] so this week i'm covering a few tips for new supervisors that can help you motivate your team and increase efficiency and if you're not a new supervisor these tips can still be very helpful even if you're in an upper management role or if you're an entrepreneur or if you're in a senior leadership role a lot of times we tend to kind of overlook the things that are really important in building that trust and building that morale and these are some things that can help you get back to kind of the grassroots of your organization and really create that type of team culture that you're looking for now this is a continuation of our soft skills series if you recall in the first year in the first session i talked about what soft skills are and why they're important in in just about any role in any organization then we divided the skills into segments we talked about leadership skills and management skills we've done that over the last couple weeks um this week we're talking about supervisory skills and then next week we're going to talk about interpersonal skills those are the people skills that are important in just about any career that that you're in so in this session i'm going to focus on a a list of of supervisory skills things that we really need to know if we want to be a good supervisor if we want to be a good coach for the people that work for us and work with us and as as we talked about in the soft skills session supervisor skills are there they're a subset of managerial skills you know and for instance if in the very first couple of sessions that i covered on on this topic we we talked about how leaders kind of create the vision for the new path these are the folks that this path didn't even exist before the leader came up with it and so it's a it's a new route it's a new path that we're taking and then the manager picks up where the leader leaves off and makes the navigation of that path more efficient well supervisors have the same goal as the manager however a lot of times the supervisor doesn't yet have the authority to make changes to that process or to the personnel and so a lot of times supervisors are often they're i kind of call them managers in training they're responsible for the results however in many cases they may not have a lot of authority yet and as a result people skills are going to be way more important to their success a good example this by the way outside of kind of normal business structures would be like non-profits a lot of times directors and folks who work at a non-profit they're they're dealing with volunteers these are people that are volunteer volunteering their time to to help the cause and so a lot of times these folks will have have responsibility for for what these volunteers are doing but not necessarily authority we can't make the volunteers do something we can ask them and we can use good people skills though and that's why these this type of skill set can be important in a lot of different different ways in different organizations so the supervisor and the manager by the way because they have the same goal they share two key skills they share organizational skills and time management however the remainder of the important skills for for supervisors are quite different than the manager skills and so let me give you the five things that i've identified as really key skills for supervisors so the first two skills are the same as the top two skills for managers as well it's organizational skills you have to be able to organize things and time management skills you have to manage your time and the time of the the people that work around us work for us the third one though is a little different than the managerial skills it's communication skills you got to be able to communicate a lot of times the supervisor is going to be the conduit or the the go between between management and the workforce and so they have to be excellent communicators the the fourth area is training skills they have to be able to get the people that work around them work for them to a higher level of performance and a more efficient way of performing in their job duties so they have to be good trainers as well and then the last one is the one i talked about in the intro which is people skills you have to be able to motivate and inspire the folks on on the team to to do a really good job so let's cover each one of these skills in just a little bit more detail so starting with tip number one or skill number one it's organizational skills we have to look for ways to help our teams become more efficient so so first time supervisors often inherit inherit their teams right most of the time somebody else has hired these folks and a lot of times other people have have actually trained them but we we're kind of jumping in so it's an it's it's an inherited team so if you're a first-time supervisor a lot of times you you you may not have the ability to hire and build your own team and if you do by the way if you if you have if you're a first-time supervisor and you're able to build your own team if you're able to hire your own team members you're like a unicorn it's like it's just very very rare so supervisors have to really master the skill of organizing a team that someone else created and by the way those who can do that supervisors who can do that they excel very very quickly in in all kinds of different organizations so i'll give you a good example a few years back our marketing supervisor decided to hire some young people to help us with social media right i mean we're all the the marketing team by the way is a fairly young team so they're they're kind of into social media that kind of stuff that's that's why we we hired them but um even the it's still very difficult to keep up with all the new trends um and the the longer that the older that we get the less trendy we are i mean i know i'm i'm a dad right so so basically what she decided to do is hey let's hire some brand new you know uh high school graduates uh college graduates to come in and help us with social media and that way we're staying on the cusp of being the the trendsetters and one of the one was a graphic artist who kind of knew social media inside now because she grew up on it however she had very few programming skills so she she wasn't really well versed in websites and stuff like that so the things that the supervisor was asking her to do they were actually fairly simple tasks but they involved a lot of repetitious steps and for somebody who's brand new in that task it was it was kind of challenging for for the young per young person so to help this this new employee the supervisor typed up a checklist and and created a flow chart and then posted them in like a three ring binder it was a really low low-tech solution to kind of a high-tech problem but that little checklist that the supervisor created served as a reminder for what kind of task to do when this new person was had completed a project a lot of times when someone new comes into the organization and they they can kind of speed through projects much more quickly because they don't have as many time constraints and if the supervisor is busy then that person can kind of be sitting around going god what am i supposed to do now i'm not really sure but by simply creating a a list the supervisor kind of increased the efficiency of the team member and also reduced idle time because now that person had she had something to do when she had finished her next project so a good supervisor is kind of the proverbial oil can that makes the machinery run more smoothly it's just that the machinery here is they're team members so so basically if you want to be a good supervisor use good supervisory skills look for ways to organize your team in a more efficient way so the second skill that is really important for new supervisors any supervisor really is time management your goal is really to have no wasted time in your your team members no no idle time so and in fact this is one of the most critical skills time management is really one of the most critical skills for supervisors and the what's critical about it is that a good supervisor will first want to prioritize activities that are done within that group that department whatever it is that we're supervising um one of the best exercises by the way that ever came across was from stephen covey and i'm i'm not sure if he actually created it that was the first place that i kind of saw this but his advice was to was to to divide a piece of paper into four equal quadrants in the in the first quadrant you would write down things that are both important and urgent and then in the second quadrant you would write down things that you do that are important but not yet urgent so so quadrant number one things that they're really really important and they're urgent we have to do them right now these are important things that have to be done right now in quadrant two those are things that are also important but they haven't yet gotten to the point where they're urgent yet right and so those would be things that we would we would plan for and then third the third quadrant you would write down things that are urgent they're things that we have to do right now but they're not really important and so a lot of times these are kind of wasted time things and then finally in the last quadrant you would write down things that are neither important nor urgent they're they're not urgent and they're not important at all but a lot of times those are things that we tend to get bogged down in so when you create your chart by the way spend some time listing the tasks and and the jobs that that you or the people on your team do each day and then place them in the correct quadrant on the chart you you'll be shocked by the way at how many of your activities fall into that quadrant for the last quadrant um and when you find those activities those are things that you want to absolutely stop doing you don't those you don't want to be doing those things in that quadrant at all um and those quadrant four activities by the way they would include things like scrolling through social media or or chatting with coworkers that kind of thing now i'm not saying those things aren't important i'm just saying that a lot of times we will use those as distractions we'll we'll we'll come up with a good idea and then we'll pop into a co-worker's office interrupt the co-worker and and and get off topic so instead of just relaying the idea to the co-worker now we start chatting about everything in the sun and now we've wasted 22 minutes that's the kind of stuff that we really want to avoid as a supervisor keep our our team motivated and on the right track the third quadrant by the way would include things like that that should be minimized really or avoided you know for instance i i just on my own cell phone i used to have news alerts i still do by the way but i just don't look at them as often but but i used to have these news alerts that would appear on my phone and the the news alert when when the feed would alert the uh my my phone it would create an alarm it was identical to the message alarms from my clients so when i would hear the alert i'd stop what i was doing even if it was something really really important urgent i would immediately go and look at my phone to see what was what was what the alert was about and um because and at the time by the way it seemed urgent because there was alarm attached to it however really the the the thing that was being alerted to me wasn't really important at all you know it was it was it would be a a headline that didn't apply to me didn't apply to my business but i would take time out of my day to go and look at it so one of the things that i did was i just kind of changed the alarms on my on my phone to make it to where i'm only getting especially during the business day i'm only getting distracted by things that are urgent and important and it really helps so once you've identified these items that are in the in quadrants one and two especially really all of all four quadrants but the ones that are in one and two those are the things that you want to schedule with your team you want to start with the quadrant one items because those are the things that have to be done right now they're urgent and they're things that are important to the success of our group and then for the quadrant two items we want to plan and organize and strategize on the things that are in quadrant two because we want to make sure that those things get done before they become urgent so those would be the things that hey once these urgent projects are done we're going to spend some time organizing the the quadrant two things to make sure that they never become urgent so that that reduces the stress increases morale and and it makes it a whole lot easier and then the last thing that i would suggest people do is identify the triggers for the not important but urgent items and then just eliminate them kind of like i did with my with my with my phone feeds those triggers those things that are triggering that item to become urgent if you can eliminate the triggers a lot of times you can save some time and make yourself more efficient and make your team members more efficient as well so anyway so those would be the things that i would kind of suggest to kind of really help you get better organizational skills with your team if you do those things you're going to increase productivity pretty dramatically also reduce stress and reduce the increase morale at the same time so lots of good benefits for doing those things so the third skill that is really important and this is where we start to differ a little bit with the managerial skills is that as a supervisor you are the conduit between management and the and the team so you want to really work on your communication skills so as a supervisor by the way that that conduit you you're you're you're between management and your your team so you're the one that you're you're the um the the path that good communication comes through so when you're getting information from management it's important that you pass that information along when it's appropriate and vice versa when you're getting information that's important to the decision making process for management you pass that along to them as well so your commit your communication skills by the way have to just be top notch if you're in a supervisory position these skills by the way include providing that needed information to your team in a timely manner when it's appropriate in addition though a major part of the of especially first-time supervisor skills is to listen to your team your observations are critical to helping management make more informed decisions like for example let's say that a that management creates a brand new policy to fix a a challenge that we've experienced in the past so we've this we this is a big problem and so as a result we've changed a policy in order to fix that problem now because you know your team really well because you're a good supervisor you anticipate that your team is going to react negatively to that change so because a lot of times they're going to react negatively to any change so if you just go to your team and just tell them hey management created change the policy then you're right they will they will react negatively to that change so instead what you may want to do is kind of meet with your team and and tell them about the problem that is trying to be solved by this policy change before you actually tell them that the change the policy is being changed tell them about the problem get them to focus on that problem and then you can soften the blow by explaining how management created the new policy to solve the problem and then the final thing that you want to do to to because this is where your role as a supervisor can be very very beneficial to the company as a whole is ask the people that are on your team these are the folks that are on the front line if they can think of any better solutions if they come up with one then you bring that solution to management now you're the hero and your team's the hero on the other hand if they don't come up with a better solution then at least they'll know why management has changed the policy and they'll be much more open to that that policy change so all of those things are really really important interactions and communications like this they really keep the team from experiencing the old us versus them mentality that tends to happen in a lot of organizations so the supervisors are the conduit to make sure that that mentality doesn't get created in the first place fourth skill that is really really important for supervisors is the skill to train your folks the success of your team really depends on your ability to train the people that work for you work around you work with you in fact this is really one of the most important supervisory tips to to to really strengthen and become really good at because as a supervisor you really have to focus on two important components related to this skill the training skill first you have to be able to assess the knowledge and the skill level of your team members remember a lot of times we're inheriting these team team members and so as a result we have to kind of figure out who's really good at what and then second once you identify any needed training you have to be able to help your team members gain those needed skills or that needed information so this process by the way can take a little time but the effort will be absolutely well rewarded you're going to get some phenomenal results if you if you kind of go through this process so one of the things that i would suggest that you do is make a list of the skills and the knowledge that are needed for each job description within your team you know like for instance we at our company we have account managers that they're they're i don't want to call them salespeople because that's not really what they do they're more like consultants so they're they're helping our clients make good decisions with uh with their with their training dollars and that kind of thing but the the position has a lot of different roles these are experts in the industry and you know for instance they do things as simple as answering customers questions you know if a customer has a question they'll answer that but they also consult with the the customers to help them create good decisions they also provide good customer service so um they're helping with scheduling and all kinds of stuff like that in addition to those normal kind of consultation roles they also serve a marketing role within the company as well so they do a lot of our marketing and and social media because they're they're kind of on the front line and then and then the last part is they also have administrative duties meaning that that when when contracts are are um are sold or when they're when they're written up that information has to be passed along to the appropriate people so that the so that the programs get implemented properly and that invoicing is done properly and all that kind of stuff so there's cost reports there's revenue reports and things like that that they're also responsible for so anyway a lot of different roles within that so once the supervisor has the list of roles and responsibility kind of like what i laid out for our account managers the next step is now to assess the team in each of these areas each team member each person that we have on the team is going to be really really really really good at some of those tasks and they're also going to be not so good at other tasks right like for instance you may be for our sales team or our account managers we because they are sales people because they are consultants they may be really really good at at working with customers customers love them they're really good at helping solve problems that kind of thing but maybe not so good at paperwork right and so they may have challenges within the reports so um so what you want to do is is once you have that list of of items or job responsibilities you want to go through and rate each member of your team based on where they are now in each one of those job roles for instance you might just rate them on a scale of 1 to 10 or some people like to use like high school letter grades you know this is an a a plus a minus b b plus b minus that kind of thing um i i like just 1 through 10. it makes it really really easy one means that they're not very good 10 means that they're excellent so for instance one of the one of the things that our customer or our account managers have to do is they have to be able to answer questions for customers so let's say i've got a person named joan that has a lot of experience she's been with the company for a number of years and she's an 8 out of 10. however jim a newer guy he's he's only been in the position for less than a year so currently he's a 4 out of 10. not because jim isn't as smart as joan it just means that she's been here a lot longer she's got more experience and so she's more skilled in that particular area um so so basically once you kind of identify where each person is on that on that list the the last thing you want to do is go through your team list one more time but this time assess each one of those people on their potential in each of those areas so going back to the the previous example with joe jones and jim joan is an 8 out of 10. however she is the most senior person on the team and she's kind of set in her ways so as a result her potential may also be an 8 out of 10. she's probably because she's set in her way she's not up to changing or growing or doing things differently most likely she's going to be an eight next year and the year after and the year after and the year after right jim on the other hand because he's new and eager he's a four now but he wants to learn and so he may have the potential of being a nine or a ten so if that's the case then the supervisor once we kind of have these roles outlined and where people are where our team members are in each one of those roles the supervisor in that situation would want to spend more time training ben on that specific um responsibility so that he is more likely to reach his potential sooner he's not going to go and train joan for custody she's already awesome at it so he's not going to spend a lot of time training the whole team he might pull ben aside and say hey let's see if we can help you in this area and now the the supervisor is helping ben become more productive so really good supervisors are able to identify where their people are and where they need help and sometimes it's just a matter of organizing it in a way so that you can find the right solutions at the right time so the last skill that is really important for supervisors is people skills because supervisors they they have to stay in rapport with both the team member and the management all the time which can be really really challenging by the way we'll kind of talk about that but before i get into that let me let me i recently heard a quote from dave ramsey he's the guy that does the uh the radio program on financial plan teaches people how to get out of debt really really smart guy and on one of his shows he he made this really profound statement about education and people skills and and he basically said he said i think the lie we've told people in the marketplace is that a degree gets you a job a degree doesn't get you a job he said what what gets you a job is the ability to carry yourself into that room shake a hand and look someone in the eye and have good people skills in the process those are the things that cause people to become successful and i couldn't agree more with with that statement um because for supervisors especially as the as the conduit between management and the team members we have to really stay in rapport with both of those groups and this is going to require that you have great people skills right human nature tells us that when someone slights us we've got to respond in anger you know some somebody oh my god i can't believe that person did that to me right um however a person with really good people skills will often kind of pause and then think about a proper response there's a real big difference between reacting to something that somebody said or something that they did and responding and ultimately the more trust that the other person has in you the more the other person is going to like you as well i i'll give you a really good example from my own kind of personal experience this is like from my younger days but my first boss um this is back when i was in high school and uh and but my first boss was a guy named jeff and he was a retired military officer i liked him a lot and everybody did everybody that worked for him and he basically after he retired from from the army he uh purchased a franchise and and i he hired me as as one of these employees so as a retired military officer he knew the value of building his team members so he and his wife they were partners in the in the company and they created this really fun rewarding environment we were growing um as as people and and it was a real friendly place to to work and and the folks that worked for for the for these two folks um really and we enjoyed going to work even though the work was kind of hard it wasn't really the work itself wasn't hun fun but the people that we worked with were fantastic right well a year or so after i had um i'd started working for the the company um jeff sold the franchise back to the company and he retired again so the the company that um that owned the franchise is they decided to use this location as a as a training ground for new managers since it was now company owned they started sending in some of their managers that had just graduated from from college or from their from their internal school and each of these managers by the way had four years of university university training in this specific industry so they were totally qualified to to run this franchise the problem was is that none of them really had any real practical experience supervising anyone so they were they they were basically skipping the supervisory level and jumping right into management and so they hadn't yet built that rapport with their team members and the the contrast and environment was just absolutely torturous probably the best way to say it because morale just plummeted and within six months the entire staff that i worked with that had turned over almost 100 percent the only there were maybe one or two people that that stuck on those are folks that have been working for the same company for like 20 plus years or so and it was their career but all of the part-timers like myself the high school kids man we were gone we we jumped ship pretty pretty um early because it was no longer fun we didn't enjoy it um so the the key thing to keep in mind about this is that is that the the people skills that we have the the better we are at building that trust and building that rapport with our team members and also with management the better of a conduit we're going to be between those two entities to make sure that we're we're keeping morale high that we're keeping um that that people are are having fun and we're creating that that team culture and so if you happen to be a business owner and you're seeing challenges within your organization if you're seeing situations where where morale is down or there's conflicts repeatedly in your organization it's quite quite possibly means that the supervisors that you have probably need to be retrained they need they they're going to need some help and the more help that you can give them the better morale is going to be so next week by the way we're going to conclude the series on soft skills and i'm going to do an entire session on interpersonal skills or people skills basically what we've covered in the last couple minutes we're going to cover and we're going to cover by the way some of the challenges that the managers in training that i just mentioned what they what they created and i'm going to show you some really cool ways to to fix that so we'll see you next week on high impact leaders bye y'all you