People are often promoted into their first role as a supervisor or manager because they have developed certain skill sets and shown that they can effectively carry out their role and do their job in a proficient manner. As their reward, they are given more responsibility and asked to manage a group of people and expected to get them to also carry out their job in a proficient manner. For some this is the start of a great and rewarding career. For most, it is the beginning of a long road of frustration and the feeling as if they are nothing more than a highly paid baby sitter.

What sends one person down one road and one down the other, and what can we do to avoid the road of frustration and stay on the road of reward for the people that work with us and for us?

The fallacy that people are either natural born leaders or they aren’t has caused frustration and trouble for many organizations. Are some people more charismatic and naturally comfortable talking and interacting with people than others? Of course they are, but that doesn’t guarantee them being effective as a supervisor or manager anymore than anything else will.

One thing that will help them is Leadership/Management Training and Development. Just as people have to be trained and learn the ways of your business and its product and services, managers and supervisors will benefit from learning the fundamentals and nuances of supervising, managing and leading groups or departments of people.

The natural course of action for most in their role as a supervisor or manager, whether they are a new or have been doing it for 30 years, is to tell others what to do, how to do it, and then expect people to just do it that way. Nothing could be further from the truth. That style of management or leadership didn’t effectively work 40 years ago and it certainly isn’t that effective today.

People today have much higher expectations of how they expect to be treated in the workplace, and customers certainly have higher expectations of what and how someone does business with them. Together, that puts a much greater emphasis on the requirements of your supervisory, management and leadership staff to create the way of doing business to represent your organization.

While much of this is integrated into our daily activities, a foundation is needed, and that foundation is found in the form of responsible Leadership Management Training.