GreenSearch People: Is Your Company Growing Faster Than Your Managers?

• Who will manage all this?



• How soon will they be ready?



• How can I help get them ready?

Developing managers is not just a matter of having a great pool of raw talent and ability at your disposal. It is also deals with the types of real life on-the-job experiences to which these people are exposed and how they handle those experiences.

Here are some of examples of how to use some on-the-job experiences as valuable management development tools.

• Look for jobs in which a person has to make a series of small independent decisions to get a task done within a specified time frame and deal with unforeseen hardships such as equipment breakdowns all alone.



• Put a person in the front line supervisory job that requires more than just good technical skills. One requires an ability to deal with real people issues and problems including persuading people to do things they may not want to do.



• Special projects and assignments in which a person is required to get others over whom they have no authority to cooperate with them gives a person an opportunity to understand and deal with different points of view. Another valuable lesson learned here is how to deal with the pressure of knowing that the project could fail or fall short of expectations.



• Opening a new office or facility can give a person a keen appreciation of what leadership is all about and how lonely a position like this can be when everyone looks to you for all the decisions.



• Assign a person to shape up a department or crew that is having performance problems. This is the type of experience that teaches a person how to be tough and persuasive as well as how difficult it is to rebuild a poorly performing operation.

Research has shown that exposure to certain on-the-job experiences is a powerful tool in grooming people for more responsible management positions later on. The situations that are described above are events that can and do occur in the day to day operation of most businesses. Using these opportunities as learning and teaching experiences for development purposes gives you two important results: a solution to the problem and an opportunity to test the potential of a person who could become a key player in your growth and expansion plans.

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The above article was developed by GreenSearch which provides key management search, web-based job posting and management consulting services to the green industry and allied trades nationwide.

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