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For many members of staff the crucial moment in career development is that first move from being a team member, to being a team leader, a supervisor or a manager. We all know that this suddenly presents a whole new set of challenges for an individual and for an organisation. Skills and competencies not previously developed or deployed must now be called in to play.
Suddenly team leaders, supervisors and managers are expected to be experts in significant management skills such as (among many others).
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First Time Supervisors
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First Time Managers
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- Planning and organising work
- Managing oneself
- Leading meetings
- Quality Control
- Health and Safety
- Time management
- Project Co-ordination
- Motivating the team
- Decision making
- Monitoring performance
- Reporting
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- Problem solving
- Decision making
- Leadership
- Budget control and mannagement
- Staff appraisal and recruitment
- Project Management
- Work force and business planning
- Quality Assurance
- Presentation and reporting skills
- Managing customer service
- Negotiating
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This for many can be a daunting prospect.
It can also, for the company, be a lost opportunity or at the very least a slow and inefficient process. Often this will be remedied by sending staff away on generalised training courses. Sometimes it may be supported by official, or unofficial, mentoring/coaching. Many times it will rely on line management to ‘sort something out’ with the individual.
We do appreciate that many organisations take a structured and methodical approach. However, we would also say that range of solutions has grown considerably over the last few years and approaches that are now based on the latest ‘blended learning’ techniques offer many opportunities that were not available even a short time ago.
The challenge, we believe, is to identify the need to focus specific programmes on first time managers and ensure that the solutions meet the needs of the individual and the business requirements and culture of the organisation.
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