Depending on your sales volume and how many locations you have are indicators to know if you personally are still doing a lot of internal training or if you’ve promoted or hired someone to do it. Either way, you or someone is training people in your operation nearly every day.
I promised that I would start to share actual training experiences that we used to train thousands of people. Well, maybe you weren’t a customer back in the day, but you can still use what I am sharing.
Management Style Quiz (Click Here to Download)
This Quiz is a tool to use to improve the communications and the output performance of a management team. It can be used in many different ways compared to what I am outlining.
Time– 90 minutes
Purpose– Use in a group setting with management level people who have direct reports. This exercise flushes out where attitudes or indifference occurs when leading people and which style of influence is best to use in a given situation. This exercise opens the discussions around day to day scenarios where management must influence the business outcomes through their direct reports. The discussions allow for cross-collaboration and sharing of worst to best practices.
Exercise Strategy– Hand out the Quiz and have each person fill it in in less than 5 minutes. Then talk about each question facilitating the group to make sure everyone participates. Through the discussions, everyone will hear where you are all on the same page and where there are differences. Keep the dialog upbeat and focused on the given question vs. getting off track and chasing too many subjects. Have fun with the team, but no brain damaging.
Targeted Solutions– Many times, management-level people have perceptions about their upper management, how competent their direct reports are, their width of authority, and other related issues. A key to unleashing them is to make sure you are all on the same page with a given situation and the expected outcomes. When you are in alignment, this frees the person up to make a decision the next time a similar scenario arises vs. hesitating or doing nothing. It is also likely that through the discussions, you’ll determine that you need new or revised policies or procedures.
The most effective management style is participative. Depending on the “readiness” level of an individual or team to complete a task, this determines if the leader can delegate more or if they need to be directive. That’s the gist of it.
There are undoubtedly other uses of this Quiz and different ways to interpret what you hear from your people when going through the exercise. As usual, just give me a call, and I’ll be glad to share my experience.
