Five Reasons to Invest in Supervisor Communications Training

My friend Laurel is not having a nice time at work. Fresh off an eight-city, 14-site tour with the executive team, she’s exhausted and frustrated about the lackluster attendance and engagement in her town hall meetings.

“I don’t get it,” she said, opening a second fizzy vodka drink. “We prepped everyone right down to our front-line managers to get their people there, ask great questions and stick around for selfies with the CFO, and it was frigging crickets. I’m going to have to order muffins for the next roadshow.”

Crickets are a problem in executive roadshows, and Laurel’s instincts to go straight to front line managers was spot on. The problem is, those front line managers didn’t have the first idea about how to communicate the importance of the town hall meetings, how to get their people to attend, and how to make sure they asked great questions (CFO selfies are not something anyone can solve).

Laurel’s problem is not uncommon: while front line managers, supervisors and team leaders are the best way to reach employees, they need to be trained as the communicators we expect them to be.

The truth is, in most organizations, first line managers are often promoted based on things like tenure, attendance, lack of bad things in their files and a great attitude. But the fact that someone can manage to take the right bus every day and seems to enjoy planting a tree once a year doesn’t signal a facility as a great manager, let alone a good communicator.

Even where organizations offer new manager training, it generally focuses more on how to work the vacation tracking system than anything really helpful. Which is a shame because it sets even the best of them up to fail, and that failure cascades up the organization a lot better than corporate drivel cascades down. Here are five reasons to give offer front-line supervisor communications training right away.

1. People trust their immediate supervisor
   Employee studies have told us for years that employees trust their immediate supervisor more than anyone else. If the most trusted source of information in your organization hasn’t got the first idea how to share information, or even why they ought to, then you’re in a bit of trouble. If you’re counting on your c-suite to get the word out, you might note that Gallup finds that only about 13% of employees think their leadership is any good at communications.
2. Supervisors are the heart of the resistance movement
   We’ve talked before about the consequences of leaving your middle and front-line managers out of the loop, and it looks a lot like snarky resistance. Remembering to include all levels of manager in your messages is only half the battle. You also need to make sure they understand their obligation to drink a certain amount of Kool-Aid and to help their teams think it’s the best darn thing on the planet.A lot of team leaders, faced with communicating something unpopular or uninteresting, will revert to a them vs. us stance unless they have some training in how to work with contentious information. A great way to get the resistance movement going, by the way, is to cascade your information. That’s where the message from the CEO is sent to her direct reports, who forward it to their direct reports, who do likewise and so-on until three days later when that 25-year-old team leader sees it utterly without context.

3. Supervisors are dysfunction’s first responders
   Executives are always a little surprised to learn of the existence of a rumour mill in their organization. “Surely not here,” they will whine, “in this Camelot of organizational rightness! How could there exist such a thing?” There is always a rumour mill and the further up the food chain you get, the less of it you can see. But your front line managers have a front row seat on that one, and they, not your flak catchers in middle management, are the best people to kill off the untrue stuff, and escalate the unfortunate leftovers. Again, this counts on someone training them in that first responder role.
4. Bad supervisor communication habits start early
   Given that 13% stat above, it seems reasonable to conclude that by the time most of us reach the nice carpets and more frequent air exchanges of senior leadership that we’ve got some pretty entrenched communications habits, most of which are not all that helpful. But fear not! You’re finally eligible for some of that Grade A Leadership Education. Why, we’re going to pack you off for a week of intensive effectiveness training that’ll have you communicating like a, well, a boss, in no time. Plus a friendly coach will swing by once a month to help you with those rough patches. How does that sound?I say it sounds great! We should absolutely be cramming our leaders’ brains full of best practices, terrifying case studies and helpful role plays to build those missing communications skills. We should be supporting the heck out of this with refresher sessions, coaching and third party experts. But I would suggest that all of this is much easier and more effective if we do it when someone is in their first leadership role, and not their 15^th.

5. Good supervisor communications is good for your culture
   Someplace in the cat puke that passes for most corporate values statements, there is something about honesty, something else about everyone being important and another thing about teamwork. All of which is well and good and probably reflects the best of intentions.But the way to dimensionalize those ideas in your workplace is not posters of rowers and clever lucite paperweights, it’s how people are treated day in and day out. When you have supervisors who communicate reflexively and easily, instead of reading scripts and silently plotting an insurrection, you can sort of claim to be credible when it comes to suggesting people will be respected and included and al that nice stuff.

In case you’re wondering, Laurel is now meeting with the organizational development team to find some communications training for their front line supervisors, plus she’s doing a focus group with a few of the team leaders in her location to find out what it will take to get them engaged with the next roadshow. She’s ordering muffins just in case.

Related Posts (or not)

Ten Ways to Mess Up Your Brand
Let’s Stop Obsessing About Employee Engagement

BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help organizations build their brands through great conversations with employees and customers

Drop me a line at ewilliams(at)candlerchase.com
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