Our Management Training Seminars

By introducing our Management Training Seminars to your staff we help ease the negative effect of change on both managerial and supervisory personnel. The change in job responsibilities, the change in personnel, job duties, and the rising challenge of developing subordinates are specific goals of our learning systems seminars. We are highly successful at helping Managers and Supervisors learn and adapt to the necessary skills and proper behaviors to be successful at work as well as in their personal lives.

For more information on our management training seminars please contact us.

Management Training:
Management Seminar - Job Descriptions and Why They Fail

Job descriptions can be a burden on both management and employees. If they are too heavily detailed, it leaves little room for growth or learning new skills. They can be frighteningly specific, detail piled upon detail. A job applicant may be turned off or turned away purely by the weight of the job description.

I once was handed a job description to give to HR for an open position. The itemized list of requirements were so daunting, I was taken aback. It would be like finding a needle in a haystack to find an applicant with the skill set so exactly outlined in that classified ad. Sure enough, we received NO inquiries and no resumes in the two weeks it was posted in the various papers (this was before internet job posting became the standard).

I asked if I could rework the ad, separating skills and experience that were absolutely required from those that would be a plus, but could be acquired easily enough on the job. The new ad was placed and we immediately began being contacted by applicants, one of whom was a quite good fit and was hired.

Recently, I was doing a lot of reading about leadership and management excellence and I came across a sentence that has stuck in my mind – “You don’t hire the best talent – you grow it.” The book was First, Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman, and it agreed with how I feel about job descriptions. It is just as important for management to find someone with drive, creativity, the ability to work as a team member, and the desire to grow. Someone with this profile will easily acquire many skills along the way, and will be appreciative of the opportunity to do so. And they’ll want to share their acquired skills with others, so now you’ve widened the group of people who work for you into a team that shares information for the good of the company. You haven’t just hired an applicant, you’ve built a foundation for excellence and the creation of a good team.

Do the members of your existing team know what’s expected of them?

Try this exercise: Ask each employee to write their own job description, based upon what they believe they should be achieving, and go a step further and ask them to write what they believe is the percentage of time they need to spend on each activity and its degree of importance to the job. You may be surprised to see that their assessment of their activities do not agree with those of higher management or with your own. They may perceive different priorities. This means that in a given day, there may be time spent on comparatively non-consequential activities which prevent them from doing the work you rate high in importance.

Don’t get mad at them! This is a unique opportunity to really communicate with them. Let them know which actions they are performing that are really important to you. Good management always comes back to communication.

Barbara Brenner: link

Subject: Management Seminar