When you promote a high performer to their first managerial position, you aren’t just making one shift in your organization.
You’re adding another leader to an impactful group of supervisors. And that group of supervisors? Well, they are collectively responsible for the performance, productivity, and engagement of 80% of your organization’s workforce.
You read it right… Eighty. Percent.
We know these frontline managers are extremely important to achieving a high level of customer satisfaction, improving productivity, and engaging employees. (Here’s an HBR study that says so!) And, we also know the primary reason any individual contributor gives for leaving their job is their relationship with their boss. And when they leave, it will take roughly 50 percent of an employee’s salary to find and train a replacement. High turnover and poor leadership practices can be costly, not only on the bottom line but on your employer brand.
Are we promoting individuals prematurely to become leaders? The answer is probably not. The challenge is that we are not equipping these leaders to lead. When individuals transition from frontline worker to frontline leader, they can often feel unprepared for the transformation. Many frontline leaders do not receive their first leadership development training until four years after they become leaders.
What’s the rub?
Why are we delaying providing essential leadership development to the frontline? Turns out there are very REAL and very VALID reasons for why we choose not to invest in our frontline leaders. Here are the top five… and what to do about them.
1. "I can't take my supervisors off the floor."
The pandemic brought to light the critical role that frontline staff and their supervisors play in day-to-day business operations. However, participating in leadership training typically requires a significant time investment, making supervisors inaccessible to their teams and customers. Not surprisingly, some companies are reluctant to pull supervisors off the floor for extended periods of time to give them retreat-style development training traditionally offered to mid-level and executive leaders.
What to do about it: There are alternatives to sending your leaders off on a week retreat to learn critical leadership skills. Provide your frontline leaders with access to virtual, flexible online learning solutions (such as eLearning, online instructor-led sessions, etc.) that are agile but where the learning will actually stick. The best part? Your frontline leaders can work through the eLearning at their own pace, going back to concepts that stuck with them or pausing when they need a break.
2. "We don't need a program. We need a [fill in the gap] workshop."
You might hear through the grapevine that a certain department or team needs communications training. Or time management. Or a routinely favorite – Emotional Intelligence workshops. Whatever the topic may be, we can be tempted to hear the need and tackle it head on with an efficient, one-and-done, targeted solution. The problem with an “experience” workshop is that awareness of something does not typically translate into sustainable behavior change. Sure, participants may learn a few tips and tricks, but if they don’t anchor these skills and practices into their real jobs, then they will be forgotten the next time a fire drill hits, there’s a resource shortage, or a new deadline looms.
What to do about it: Training is the most successful when participants can reflect deeply, learning from their peers, and are supported by their supervisors. We know from adult learning theory we learn best when we experiment with information in diverse ways. Having a strategically spaced, multi-modal learning experience sets participants up for success to not only retain their learning, but to actually apply it and make it their own as well. The rise of self-paced e-learning can be a powerful tool for this when used as a primer for participants to get their first pass at new models and concepts. With this introduction out of the way, participants can dive right into the application and experimentation while still in the psychologically safe space of a live facilitated lab/session. Pair this with some self-assessments, application assignments, and eLearning modules in between sessions to help them think through how to make their new skills authentic to their leadership, and you’ve got a powerful learning combination. This kind of spaced, multi-modal approach allows us to absorb information from multiple sources, practice in safe and realistic spaces, and promotes sustainability, transfer of learning and return on investment.
3. "We hire MBA grads. They teach leadership in business school, don't they?"
Some organizations may opt to hire frontline leaders with leadership experience from outside, rather than invest in leadership development internally. These supervisors either held leadership positions at other companies or earned an MBA and were educated on the basic principles of leadership.
But can the “ready-made” route be a sound substitute for providing frontline development training? The answer is both “Yes” and “to a marginal extent”.
Managers with an MBA showed only a minor increase in leadership ability and preparation. Additionally, these leadership skills are not developed within the specific context of your business, your ecosystem, and your culture.
What to do about it: Develop your frontline leaders in the
context of your organization. Take Qantas Airways, Australia’s leading airline, for example. They take training their pilots and cabin crew extremely seriously and not only because of the high-risk, highly-regulated industry they operate within. When in voyage, pilots are recognized as the leaders of the aircraft. Qantas wants these leaders to develop in the context of Qantas. Even if you have been a seasoned aircraft pilot of the high-tech double-decker Airbus A380 with another airline, when you join Qantas Airways you are required to retrain and restart as Second (or at best First Officer). It is why Qantas’ pilot training program is one of the highest regarded in the world. The Airline ensures that all pilots have a consistent understanding of what it means to be a pilot and maintain a standard of leadership excellence within Qantas, especially when required to communicate in high-pressure situations. Similarly, your leaders need to understand what it means to be a leader at your company and have a consistent leadership lexicon when having to run fast.
4. "I don't have the budget."
The higher an employee ranks in the corporate ladder, the more likely a firm will invest in her leadership development. Most firms invest heavily at the top because they view more senior leaders as the best bang-for-their buck: a significant impact on organizational strategy with a smaller leadership bench. Training a few executives does seem easier (and less expensive) than a few hundred supervisors. In some cases where HR and Learning Development practitioners invest in their frontline, they opt for budget-friendly supervisor training by compromising on quality. Yet the new generation taking on early leadership positions (looking at you, millennials and Gen-Z) value their own development. When firms fail to invest in top talent early in their careers, they run the risk of losing these leaders.
What to do about it: There is more of an urgency in today’s training industry for high-quality, high impact but low-cost training solutions to develop and retain frontline leaders. One way HR and L&D teams get around cost is by licensing program content from external providers and delivering the program in-house. Having your delivery team certified in a credible third-party train-the-trainer solution may be a great cost-effective option if you want to speed up the road to training delivery. Do some research, ask your HR network and seek out training partners that provide innovative, high-impact and low-cost training solutions without compromising quality.
They do exist.
5. "I don't have the resources to pull this off."
One of the biggest challenges to delivering training to frontline leaders is resources to support the program. Providing a quality learning experience to hundreds of frontline leaders across multiple cohorts (and multiple sites/regions) requires a feat of meticulous planning, scheduling, communicating, and following up. Ineffective project management can impact the experience and engagement of the learner. Once these programs are executed, L&OD must ensure that they collect metrics about these programs' performance. All of this requires dedicated support. Delivering a training program for mass deployment can become exhausting and time consuming.
What to do about it: It’s important to have experienced personnel who have strong project management and communication skills and who excel at stakeholder management to help make the experience for all involved a smooth one. If you are facing internal resource constraints, it may be advantageous to seek external support from third-party training suppliers, who have proven experience and a system for delivering impactful training and development across multiple regions and sites. Look for trusted partners who have a solid project management solution. Inquire about their team and the delivery process to ensure a high-quality learning experience for you as a program sponsor and the frontline leaders who will receive the training.
Do these objections sound familiar to you? Us too.
Despite the very real and valid barriers to their development, your frontline leaders remain the fuel that powers your organization -
eighty percent of it actually. Which is why we designed
CLARITY, a robust turnkey and fully-virtual learning solution that is as powerful as it is empowering for your frontline leaders. Simply put, we’ve thought of everything so you don’t have to.
CLARITY optimizes the leader’s development through a multi-modality learning approach that includes:
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Engaging live, virtual instructor-led sessions
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Highly-interactive eLearning modules
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Behavioral preferences assessment(s) administration to drive self- and other- awareness
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Professional leadership development planning for every individual participant
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Supervisor involvement and support built into the program
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An interactive workbook that becomes the leader’s custom playbook
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Access to an online cohort learning portal to drive application of learning and encourage positive cohort effect
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Gold-standard project management support with a dedicated delivery team that provides consistent premium service and support from launch to graduation
Prefer to deliver the training in-house?
Our train-the-trainer (ClarityT3) option allows you to deploy CLARITY in house--with all the added bells and whistles (including a comprehensive project management solution that is fully integrated with any learning management system). Go through the first round with us, and then take it from there.
Want to see how it runs? Take it for
a test drive. Click
here to learn more about how to receive a free CLARITY demonstration.