First line leaders are key people to improve your business performance. Their role is to help their company to meet goals and objectives by engaging and encouraging the employees. If their leadership is not effective, they will negatively impact employee morale and productivity. Thus, a very crucial role in a company.
Being a frontline leader is not an easy job but it is extremely rewarding as you get immediate feedback through day-to-day achievements compared to leaders that work with long-term projects or tasks.
Unfortunately, many first line leaders come into their roles without formal training or a background in how to lead and manage others. For many of our clients, we set-up and run a simple but practical training program for the leaders, adapted to their baseline and their needs. What we want them to achieve is:
Grasp their own accountability in how to reach department and company goals –using Daily Control, Strategy Deployment
Solve problems – using Daily Control, Systematic Problem Solving, Continuous Improvement
Embrace standard work – using work standards, training employees, follow-up
- Increase their skill to communicate and ensure that employees understand what is expected of them – Lean Leadership
Being able to give clear and constructive feedback, and also handling conflicts in a constructive way – Lean Leadership
Being comfortable with change and help team members effectively understand and deal with change – Lean Leadership
Build relationships to ensure a strong team – Lean Leadership
The ability to motivate others – Lean Leadership
Of course, to understand how work is done is important but being skilled in leading people is a much higher rated ability to achieve a sensible and productive work environment. The first line leaders are usually the ones that are hardest to remove from daily operations to train but are also the ones needing to be trained most of all if you want to reach your goals. A strong recommendation is to set-up a practical training program to combine training with actual operations – get result in parallell with trained leaders.
