Both leaders with advanced skills and bosses who could use a bit of polishing will benefit by taking account of management areas upon which they can improve, according to Fierce, Inc. Train employees to take stock of their own management style with the information in today’s Advisor.
While there are many different types of bosses, the most common personalities are the Dictator, Cheerleader, Visionary, and the rare Perfect Boss.
The leadership training experts at Fierce, Inc., have worked with them all—across the globe and across multiple industries. The common factor behind all successful bosses is a sincere dedication to improving their leadership skills daily. The result of this development is a discernible improvement in the skills of their employees, resulting from a culture of open and honest communication that builds relationships and better organization.
The Dictator: Often characterized as someone who gives orders, the Dictator’s behavior may be a factor of more than just personality. Combine lack of time and a demanding role, mix with stress, and you’ve got a recipe for a Dictator, someone who seems to simply walk, or sometimes run, around giving orders with little or no appetite for feedback.
You know your managers could do a better job if they were trained, and now there’s a convenient and reasonable way to get it done—BLR’s Leadership Library at the online, 24/7 TrainingToday. Get More Information.
Fierce, Inc., Tip: Proactively solicit feedback from employees and coworkers. Motivate and empower direct reports to employ creative problem solving. It is entirely likely that they have useful perspectives, new insights on issues, and opportunities for innovation.
The Cheerleader (aka the Softie or the Friend): This boss type is easy to work with day to day, but in the long haul, employees become dissatisfied because they aren’t challenged or given enough constructive feedback to make them better at their jobs.
Fierce, Inc., Tip: Avoid cultivating a culture of nice. Talk openly and honestly with employees about both their achievements and areas that need improvement. Be timely by addressing things as they occur and don’t sugar coat it—employees are not children.
The Visionary (aka the Innovator): Focused more on what’s next and what the business will look like in 10 or even 20 years, the Visionary is an inspirational personality for which to work but may not have much input on the day-to-day work.
Fierce, Inc., Tip: Remember to stay grounded with employees. Balance challenging them to think about the future while addressing current performance, accomplishments, and areas for improvement. Ground actions and next steps in the present. Have regular conversations with teams that focus on today as well as tomorrow.
The Perfect Boss: That elusive combination of mentor, leader, and fun-to-be-around person, the perfect boss respects employees and challenges them to be their very best.
Fierce, Inc., Tip: Chances are, if the perfect boss worked hard to earn that title, he or she knows it takes work to keep it. Continue to perfect listening and communication skills, and endeavor to build a culture where employees are motivated and want to be heard.
“When bosses create an inclusive culture where employees are invited to communicate their perspectives and have open conversations, whether it’s with coworkers or the boss, the business wins,” says Halley Bock, CEO and president of Fierce, Inc. “An overly nice, but repressed culture can be as ineffective as a tense militant one, which is why it’s the leader’s responsibility, regardless of personality, to be open, honest, and solicit feedback from employees.”
Worried about ever getting your managers and supervisors trained to be effective leaders? It isn’t easy to fit it in—schedulewise or budgetwise—but now there’s BLR’s Leadership Library for Managers and Supervisors. Train all your people, at their convenience, 24/7, for one standard fee. Get More Information.
To solve the training-is-a-hassle problem, BLR® has created a unique and helpful solution called TrainingToday.
This turnkey service requires no setup, no course development time, no software to install, and no new hardware. Your employees can self-register, and training can be taken anytime (24/7), anywhere, with nothing but a PC and an Internet connection. Courses take only about 30 minutes to complete.
Just as important, TrainingToday automatically documents training. As trainees sign on, their identifications are automatically registered. When the program is completed, the trainee’s score is entered. So, when you want to see who has or hasn’t yet trained on any subject or you want to look at the across-the-board activity of any one employee, it’s all there, instantly available to you, your boss, an inspector—even a plaintiff’s attorney.
These are all motivational, actionable programs—for both employees and supervisors—in such key areas as sexual harassment, the FMLA, diversity, communication, USERRA, recruiting, and many more. The courses are kept up to date to reflect federal and state regulatory changes, and what’s more, we continually add new programs.
The Leadership Library for Managers and Supervisors, for example, provides you with a sensible (and economic) solution.
The Leadership Library for Managers and Supervisors allows you to:
- Train on demand. Employees can complete training anytime from anywhere. All they need is a computer and an Internet connection.
- Reinforce training topics with engaging graphics and quizzes to test their knowledge.
- Monitor and track the results of your training program with the built-in recordkeeping tool.
- Save costs. The more you train, the more cost-effective the training becomes.
The Leadership Library for Managers and Supervisors is a Web-based training tool that can be utilized by any organization. All you need are a computer and Internet access—the library is available 24/7.