Good management is vital to any business, and supervision skills are critical across all industries, from horticulture to construction. Ideal for supervisors, managers, leading hands, business owners and employees, this supervisory training course will teach you how to confidently direct, supervise and manage individuals or teams, regardless of where you work!

Our Supervisor Training Program will give you insights into structure and charts, organisational hierarchy, the types of unions, government versus private personnel departments, liability, discrimination and the law. You will also discover how to communicate with influence, write professional business documents, motivate employees, organise staff and handle discipline issues, problem-solve, and manage training, recruitment, complaints and workplace health and safety.

Learning Outcomes

Outcomes achieved by undertaking a supervisory training course include:

• Learning about organisational structures, the chain of command and supervisors’ responsibilities
• Exploring staff and line positions, the hierarchical structure and non-hierarchical processes within a hierarchy
• Gaining an understanding of organisational charts, how to use them and where to use them
• Studying the workplace in terms of law and employees
• Examining basic contract law and contracted actions within a workplace
• Understanding discrimination, employment law, unions, workplace elements and liability for staff actions
• Attaining knowledge of communications and human relations, formal authority and influence in the workplace
• Gaining insights into knowledge, leadership and power, managing attitude and personal relationships between supervisors and subordinates
• Learning about good business writing and effective business communication
• Exploring memos and letter formats and structures
• Gaining an understanding of motivating employees and workplace and personal incentives
• Studying primary and secondary drives, environmental incentives and practical ways to motivate staff
• Examining example supervision questions, imposter experience and how to support a person with imposter experience
• Understanding how to organise the workplace, work scheduling and strategies for organising work place tasks
• Attaining knowledge of establishing priorities and project planning and management tools
• Gaining insights into worksheets, project estimates and office landscaping
• Learning about standard planning charts including Gantt and PERT charts
• Exploring problem solving techniques, problems solving styles and guidelines for making decisions
• Gaining an understanding of conditional, noncommittal, systematic, by-the-book, slow, democratic and pragmatic problem solvers
• Studying problem solving approaches, formal problem solving techniques and how to involve others in decision making
• Examining how to define the objective, evaluate factual information, develop solutions and evaluate the results
• Understanding discipline, complaints and grievances
• Attaining knowledge of reprimanding, fixing blame, formal warnings and legal action
• Gaining insights into introducing changes, increasing self-discipline and orders and instructions
• Learning about procedures for giving detailed orders and dealing with orders that are carried out incorrectly
• Exploring interviewing, recruiting and training
• Gaining an understanding of resumes, emphasising qualities that are relevant to the job, making decisions for the situation at hand and employee contracts

And more!

Problem-solving Strategies

Problem-solving strategies are an important component of a supervisor’s role as well as in supervisory training. As part of an individual’s goals, they are often referred to as the “problem-solving cycle”.

In this cycle, supervisors acknowledge, recognise and define the problem, develop a strategy to fix it, organise the “knowledge” of the problem cycle, determine the resources needed, monitor their progress, and evaluate their solution for accuracy. The reason it is called a cycle is that once a supervisor has dealt with one problem, another will usually surface!

The following techniques are often referred to as problem-solving strategies:

• Abstraction — solving the problem in a model of the system before applying it to the real system.
• Analogy — using a solution that solves an analogous problem.
• Brainstorming — involves a large number of ideas or solutions (typically discussed among groups of people) that are analysed until an optimum solution is found.
• Critical thinking — the analysis of facts to form a judgement. Definitions include the skeptical, rational, unbiased analysis or evaluation of factual evidence.
• Divide and conquer — breaking down a large, complex problem into smaller and solvable problems.
• Hypothesis testing — assuming a possible explanation to the problem and trying to prove (or, in some contexts, disprove) the assumption.
• Lateral thinking — approaching solutions indirectly and creatively.
• Means-ends analysis — choosing an action at each step to move closer to the goal.
• Method of focal objects — synthesising seemingly non-matching characteristics of different objects into something new.
• Morphological analysis —assessing the output and interactions of an entire system.
• Proof — trying to prove that the problem cannot be solved and the point where the proof fails will be the starting point for solving it.
• Reduction — transforming the problem into another problem for which solutions exist.
• Research — employing existing ideas or adapting existing solutions to similar problems.
• Root cause analysis — identifying the cause of a problem.
• Trial-and-error — testing possible solutions until the right one is found.

Source: 2021, Problem Solving, Wikipedia

What is a Gantt Chart?

Commonly used in project management (and something you will learn about in our supervisory training course), a Gantt chart is one of the most useful and popular ways of showing activities — tasks or events — displayed against time. Essentially, it shows the user was has to be done (the activities) and when (the schedule).

The first Gantt chart was devised in the mid-1890s by Karol Adamiecki, a Polish engineer who ran a steelworks in southern Poland and became interested in management techniques and ideas.

Fifteen years later, Henry Gantt, an American engineer and project management consultant, devised his own version of the chart which became widely known in Western countries. Consequently, it was Henry Gantt whose name was to become associated with charts of this type.

Originally, Gantt charts were prepared laboriously by hand. Each time a project changed it was necessary to  amend or redraw the chart and this limited their usefulness. Why? Because continual change is a feature of most projects!

However, these days, with the advent of project management software, Gantt charts can be created, updated and printed easily. They are most commonly used for tracking project schedules, and can show additional information about the various phases or tasks of the project. For example, how far each task has progressed, how the tasks relate to each other, and what resources are being used for each task.

Typically, on the left of the chart is a list of the activities and along the top is a relevant time scale. Each activity is represented by a bar, and the length and position of the bar reflects the start date, duration and end date of the activity. Visually, this allows the user to see at a glance:

• what the various activities are
• when each activity begins and ends
• how long each activity is scheduled to last
• where activities overlap with other activities, and by how much
• the start and end date of the whole project

What is a PERT chart?

Another chart used by project managers or those who have done supervisory training is a PERT chart. PERT standards for Project (or Program) Evaluation and Review Technique. It is a statistical tool which was designed to analyse and represent the tasks involved in completing a project.

It was first developed by the United States Navy in 1958, and is commonly used in conjunction with the critical path method (CPM) that was introduced in 1957.

PERT is a method of analysing the tasks involved in completing a given project, especially the time needed to complete each task, and to identify the minimum time needed to complete the total project. This method incorporates uncertainty by making it possible to schedule a project while not knowing precisely the duration and details of all the activities.

It is more of an event-oriented technique rather than start- and completion-oriented, and is used more in projects where time is the major factor rather than cost. It is typically applied on complex, one-time, very large-scale, non-routine infrastructure and research and development projects.

PERT charts offer a management tool which relies on on arrow and node diagrams of events and activities. Arrows represent the activities or work necessary to reach the nodes or events that indicate each completed phase of the total project.

PERT and CPM are complementary tools, because CPM employs one time estimation and one cost estimation for each activity, whereas PERT may utilise three time estimates (optimistic, expected and pessimistic) and no costs for each activity. Although these are distinct differences, the term PERT is applied increasingly to all critical path scheduling.

Gain the confidence to take on a supervisory role and implement plans, policies and procedures to maximise workplace productivity with a supervisory training course such as our Supervisor Training Program.