New supervisors are typically set up to fail.
They’re thrust into difficult situations with little or no training.
Supervisors want to do well, but aren’t exactly sure what to do.
Like military people, they need to make decisions and lead others to make the right things happen.
As a Marine rifle platoon leader and company commander in Vietnam, Fred Smith, FedEx Corporation Chairman, President, and CEO, learned important basic leadership lessons.
A young Marine lieutenant told him,
“To be an effective Marine you must do three things:
You gotta shoot.
You gotta move.
And you gotta communicate!”
Our supervisors “lead the charge” every day on the “front line” in our companies.
This “shoot, move, communicate” message applies to them too.
Shooting
Like military personnel, supervisors need to find “problems” and “neutralize them” as they say in military parlance.
They need to take calculated risks, and be proactive and decisive.
Also, like military shooting, supervisors need to aim actions carefully. We need focused action; time is precious in both situations.
Movement
Like military leaders, supervisors and their people must get into motion!
It’s not enough just to think and plan.
Planning’s important, but we can’t get into an “analysis paralysis” and not move and take action.
Results come from action.
We need to plan the movements we’re going to take, the objectives to achieve, and specifically what needs to be done today.
Then, we need to “shoot” and “pick off” the items on the “to-do” list.
Communication
It’s not enough just to tell somebody to move, especially when you’re working together as a team.
Which leads us to communication.
The real power with communication is coordination. The ability to achieve a “force multiplier” effect as they say in the military.
Communication not only drives clarity on “who’s doing what, by when,” but allows supervisors to adjust and coordinate as things unfold.
So What Can We Do To Set Our Supervisors Up For Success?
The military provides a good model here in terms of how to provide the framework people need.
In many companies, Gainsharing provides this framework and the following benefits:
- Each week, an overall plan for the week is developed that shows the performance necessary to earn a bonus. This plan is broken down to clarify what needs to happen each day for a given area to be “carrying its weight” towards the big goal.
- Gainsharing provides feedback systems in the workers’ areas so they can see how they are doing as they progress towards the goal for the day and the week.
- It gives them mechanisms to spotlight problems and put fixes in place.
- Gainsharing also gives them an overall communication so they can see the “big picture,” their piece of that and how it all is coming together as they move through the day, week and month.
This framework simplifies the supervisors’ task of “shoot, move and communicate.”
It clarifies the targets.
It gives a way to eliminate problems as they show up.
All this allows them to adjust “on the move” as things change in real-time.
Without a Framework
Without the framework, things are much more difficult to communicate and coordinate.
People need to know what to “shoot at,” what to aim for.
You can’t hit a target you can’t see.
So when we lay out what a given supervisor is accountable to achieve on a given day, it gives clarity to the targets and the movement we need to “carry our weight” towards the overall bonus goal.
Without a common framework, all the supervisors and workers are going about things their own way, which leads to endless chaos.
This chaos is the enemy we’re trying to avoid/elmiminate.
The framework also allows supervisors to keep score and give feedback to people so they see their progress as they sweat and hustle towards the goal.
Summary
In both business and the battlefield, leaders need to make things happen.
They need to get our people to move, take initiative, be decisive, and coordinate together.
Leaders need to translate a complex situation into a simple message.
They need to both communicate the big picture and answer the individual worker’s or soldier’s question, “So, what do you want me to do?”
To properly set our supervisors up for success, we need to give them a framework that streamlines and simplifies this task.
Then they can confidently take action, with everybody on the same page, at the same time, moving in the same direction . . .
