Part Two – Deep Dive on People – The Right Kind of Management

source: Linkedin

In our last post, we discussed people; hiring the right people, building a solid distributor-centric onboarding process and the advantages of retaining experienced workers. Today, let’s turn the tables a bit and look at coaching and managing the very life blood of distributors – the people.

Front-line managers make a difference
According to work done by the Gallup organization first detailed in First, Break all the Rules, employees join companies but quit because of bad managers. Realizing the management structure of many distributors appears flat on paper with everyone reporting to just a few people, many of

these front-line managers may not even have a managerial title. We might call them something like warehouse lead, inside sales supervisor, senior buyer, or perhaps they carry no real title but direct the work of others. To a lot of your workers, they are the “go to” person and reflect the day-to-day voice of the company. Oftentimes, they have no training.

What kind of training might be required for these front-line positions?

First and foremost, they should have a keen awareness that their words and actions reflect on the company. An off-the-cuff remark from them carries more weight than they imagine because other employees believe them to have an inside track on information. For example, the front-line guy may quip that business is down, and pay increases will be impossible. Even though the high-performing employee

overhearing the comment was destined for a promotion and a raise, the offhand mention opens the door for an untimely exit.

Front-line managers need to understand how to handle conflict. Emotional outbursts, bullying and relatively common employee disputes create havoc with morale. In the typical situation, job satisfaction drives downward, opening the doors to loss of productivity and potentially the loss of an experienced worker. In some catastrophic cases, an unhealthy or hostile work environment creates an expensive legal situation where the company shells out tens of thousands of dollars and tarnishes its reputation.

With proper coaching, the front-line manager assists in developing employee reviews. They understand when and how to add information to personnel records. Issues with tardiness, work-space cleanup and other matters are properly routed to high authorities along with properly documented updates on overall progress.

Managing the managers
A quick Google search reveals thousands of posts on providing better management of employees, but sadly there are darn few on managing the managers. I believe managers can be the hardest group to manage. Here’s why…

Distributor managers are ultra-busy. Very few are full time managers. Instead, they are involved with dozens of day-to-day activities. They face urgent issues tied to their groups – things like making sales, getting orders out the door and having important suppliers dropping by with new programs. The truth is many of these people see their “real job” as more important than developing people. Developing people, however, has a profound impact on the future and strategic success of the organization.

Reviewing a comment in our last post, exit interviews point to lack of meaningful reviews as a primary reason for employees leaving. Our workers need and want to know where they stand with the company. Further, they feel a strong need to understand management’s view of their potential with the company. At the same time, their managers often procrastinate or ignore the need for a formalized review.

When HR applies pressure on the managers, they often use their clout to push back. Some insist their team doesn’t really want reviews. Others make the case for their “own system” of ongoing informal assessments delivered as part of the normal work day. Either way, this is an example of an important management duty ignored.

Finally, top leadership sometimes sets a poor example. Distributor owners and Presidents rarely develop meaningful

reviews for their direct reports. Many of these “upper tier” employees feel perfectly comfortable without a formal evaluation. While the argument could be directed either for or against reviews at this level, I believe employees need to be evaluated. Further, one part of the review message might include this comment, “Your team needs to be reviewed.”

For discussion, we focused on reviews. However, the same argument could be made for job descriptions and enforcement of policy infractions. Not to dwell entirely on the negative side of employee issues, let’s think of some of the right things managers miss:
• Does the manager know the employee’s career goals?

• Has the manager ever talked about the potential for matching company needs with these goals?

• Is training generic and “one-size-fits-all” in the company or has it been tailored to best match the employees need for development?

• Has the manager provided the employee with a list of potential mentors who might provide low risk insight on career moves? (For situations where the employee has ultimate goals to move to another department in the company.)

• Has the manager ever provided recognition for work well done in a public manner?

• Does the manager nurture employees to the point they are recruited by other managers for other departments?

Some call these the soft skills of management, but experience dictates as long as compensation is in the right range, the people-centric skills are more important than money to most employees. However, there are a few hard skills every manager requires.

Every manager must have skills for the future
Distributors do well with product training. I am constantly amazed at how many product-centric technical details warehouse workers, accounting staff and other nonselling team members actually possess. As a group, however, we often stumble in other skills-based training topics. Sales training gets lots of ink, but today let’s focus on the managerial side of the equation.

Some management skills are general in nature. I believe everyone needs to be proficient in their use of the personal computer; and I’m not just talking about how to turn it on. Research shows that managers often struggle with simple tasks such how to organize files in their system for easy retrieval. Important documents are lost or temporarily misplaced, resulting in downtime while you search or recreate them. .

Email archives in our industry are often messy and hard to maneuver through. Billions of emails carry information that you sent and received throughout distributor land. Some of this is important stuff. Dealings with customers, suppliers and others within the organization rely on proper storage with the ability to find the information at a later date. You can’t do this with 11,000 items randomly hanging in your inbox.

Finally, I can’t conceive of any manager not being proficient at building and manipulating a spreadsheet. Analytics provides a powerful tool. Enterprise resource planning systems seldom easily serve up much of the data required to make better decisions. The ability to project and measure this information is critical for the future.

Putting a wrap on management
Training will pay a critical role in the future of distribution. As an industry, wholesalers have mostly relied on a slow growth mentality for developing people. The demographics of many distributors points to a major loss of talent over the next decade. As baby boomers exit the workforce, the next generation will need rapid acceleration to keep up. Training will become a mandatory skillset of progressive distributors. Next installment, we’ll benchmark a few points tied to training.