The trick to retaining good supervisors and molding them into great managers begins by hiring the right form of ambitious people, aligning your vision with their life goals, micro-managing till you trust them, allowing them an interruption-free platform, letting them make their own mistakes, training them constantly (from trainers or by yourself) and then delivering on your promise when they deliver on theirs.
In the SME environment, a lot of people have a rough vision of what they want to do with their company in the next few years but neither do they use it as a tool for growth nor do they realise it can be the problem solver for all their managerial manpower issues. I'd like to clarify upfront when I say SME I mean small manufacturing units, retail outlets, small service providers and not start-ups which are usually the result of someone doing an MBA. Not dissing MBA, I myself have one.
I'd like to take my personal example to explain what I did different and how it helped us achieve our goals while not having to care about managerial attrition. The first thing we did differently was to hire ambitious young people. Ambition is a tricky thing, in those with the highest integrity ambition is a boon to the employer if they can tap it. Only someone who is not satisfied with an average personal yearly growth can drive your company to stupendous growth. It is upto the employer to align their vision to the vision of the company, repeat it, re-inforce and ingrain it into their very being. Selling your vision is not a one time sale, it needs to be re-sold everyday.
Once an employee at a managerial/supervisory/sales position aligns their vision with yours, the employer needs to make sure they provide a smooth enough runway for them to take off. Another thing that is probably is the biggest growth-limiter is owners not empowering their employees to work the way they want to (after micro-managing till the point they get it). People hire supervisors, managers and start using them as executive assistants instead of letting them do what they came to. In a family business environment it is worse because if the more-deserving employee does the managing what will your uncle's fresh-out-of-mba-daughter do, work under the employee, preposterous, eh?
People also love to scold and abuse their managers for any minor loss or mistake. One bad meaning word can take away ownership from the managers. If you need to scold someone for a mistake, you are assuming they are not already feeling the pinch of the mistake and that takes them from being owners to feeling like employees. You can and should tell them that they made a mistake that was not expected out of them, but you can never deride them for something that they realise as a mistake, let them learn, let them improve while feeling that a mistake caused them a personal loss instead of their company's owners loss.
Training is another absent subject for managerial staff in small enterprises. I don't know any business owner from 0 to 10 crore in sales who has spent money on training of their managerial staff inside factories and I can bet there are hardly 1 in a 1000 companies at the micro-small level who do this for their managers/supervisors. Mostly the reason for not doing something like this lack of understanding of what a training will do for their business. Lack of information on the importance of 6 sigma, Kaizen, 5s, lean or soft skills, communication or advanced excel etc. is mostly the reason why owners don't understand the benefits of the same.
Lastly, once your people have achieved the short-term vision they must be rewarded according to the success level of the company, not according to what their salary is, for example, if someone is given a target of achieving 10% reduction in wastage along with 30% increase in night production, a one time award should be according to the money they saved for the company in a month and not a percentage of their salary. Most business owners, specially of the previous generation don't want to reward disproportionate to people's incomes because they feel if someone is earning 10k and are given 100k they may leave because their short term demands are met, but what they don't understand is that these are some of the issues linked to non-ambitious people. Ambitious people who are sold on your vision (provided your vision is big enough and your team's skills are enough for them to believe you will achieve it with or without them) are never going to be satisfied by one bonus, they will always want more and a bonus will only instill the confidence that they are going to be well rewarded for their work.
That is how we have managed zero managerial attrition in the last 7 years, although we are a small company with 4 factories in and around Delhi but retaining staff when you can't afford to pay them good salaries by sharing your vision is a learning that we understood very well.
In the SME environment, a lot of people have a rough vision of what they want to do with their company in the next few years but neither do they use it as a tool for growth nor do they realise it can be the problem solver for all their managerial manpower issues. I'd like to clarify upfront when I say SME I mean small manufacturing units, retail outlets, small service providers and not start-ups which are usually the result of someone doing an MBA. Not dissing MBA, I myself have one.
I'd like to take my personal example to explain what I did different and how it helped us achieve our goals while not having to care about managerial attrition. The first thing we did differently was to hire ambitious young people. Ambition is a tricky thing, in those with the highest integrity ambition is a boon to the employer if they can tap it. Only someone who is not satisfied with an average personal yearly growth can drive your company to stupendous growth. It is upto the employer to align their vision to the vision of the company, repeat it, re-inforce and ingrain it into their very being. Selling your vision is not a one time sale, it needs to be re-sold everyday.
Once an employee at a managerial/supervisory/sales position aligns their vision with yours, the employer needs to make sure they provide a smooth enough runway for them to take off. Another thing that is probably is the biggest growth-limiter is owners not empowering their employees to work the way they want to (after micro-managing till the point they get it). People hire supervisors, managers and start using them as executive assistants instead of letting them do what they came to. In a family business environment it is worse because if the more-deserving employee does the managing what will your uncle's fresh-out-of-mba-daughter do, work under the employee, preposterous, eh?
People also love to scold and abuse their managers for any minor loss or mistake. One bad meaning word can take away ownership from the managers. If you need to scold someone for a mistake, you are assuming they are not already feeling the pinch of the mistake and that takes them from being owners to feeling like employees. You can and should tell them that they made a mistake that was not expected out of them, but you can never deride them for something that they realise as a mistake, let them learn, let them improve while feeling that a mistake caused them a personal loss instead of their company's owners loss.
Training is another absent subject for managerial staff in small enterprises. I don't know any business owner from 0 to 10 crore in sales who has spent money on training of their managerial staff inside factories and I can bet there are hardly 1 in a 1000 companies at the micro-small level who do this for their managers/supervisors. Mostly the reason for not doing something like this lack of understanding of what a training will do for their business. Lack of information on the importance of 6 sigma, Kaizen, 5s, lean or soft skills, communication or advanced excel etc. is mostly the reason why owners don't understand the benefits of the same.
Lastly, once your people have achieved the short-term vision they must be rewarded according to the success level of the company, not according to what their salary is, for example, if someone is given a target of achieving 10% reduction in wastage along with 30% increase in night production, a one time award should be according to the money they saved for the company in a month and not a percentage of their salary. Most business owners, specially of the previous generation don't want to reward disproportionate to people's incomes because they feel if someone is earning 10k and are given 100k they may leave because their short term demands are met, but what they don't understand is that these are some of the issues linked to non-ambitious people. Ambitious people who are sold on your vision (provided your vision is big enough and your team's skills are enough for them to believe you will achieve it with or without them) are never going to be satisfied by one bonus, they will always want more and a bonus will only instill the confidence that they are going to be well rewarded for their work.
That is how we have managed zero managerial attrition in the last 7 years, although we are a small company with 4 factories in and around Delhi but retaining staff when you can't afford to pay them good salaries by sharing your vision is a learning that we understood very well.
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