Developing a Training Plan

Introduction

There are many different theories and perspectives regarding leadership development that have sparked many opinions and debate in the business world. In this paper I will thoroughly discuss effective leadership development as well as what type of training goes in to become an effective leader. Supervision or effective leadership contrary to the way most view it is a learned skill. As most are aware of not all individuals are suited to become effective leaders. Sometimes it can take a series of years for an individual to become an effective leader and develop the necessary skill set to manage a team or group of employees. Therefore, many companies are very fast to hire employees that have previous military experience or law enforcement experience since they are very familiar with the dynamics required to put individuals on the best path to doing their required jobs to the best of their capabilities. According to an article written by Dr. Michael Crant who is currently the Mary Jo and Richard M. Kovacevich Professor of Excellence in Leadership Instruction at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, it is extremely imperative for new managers or supervisors to understand the key ingredients to become an effective leader (Crant,2017). Dr. Crant is internationally known for his extensive research on proactive behavior in the workplace and field of management and Crant believes that the key to success of a new manager is to thoroughly understand what is expected from employees and senior managers alike since, expectations are different, depending on whether it’s based on the perspectives of those you supervise or the executives you answer to (Crant, 2017). He also states that leaders can become much more adept at their job roles. It is also important to determine the certain measurement that will be used from the start of the implementation of leadership training so that the success of the training program can be evaluated. According to the Harvard Business Article written by Clark titled Measuring the Impact of Leadership Development: Getting Back to Basics it is very important that stakeholders understand the strategy that the solution supports, they’ll understand the type of metrics you choose (Clark,2018). Performance-based leadership development will support performance-based results, and pipeline-based leader development should support talent metrics (Clark,2018).

How Training needs impact Caprateks expansion goals:

Proper training is extremely imperative to not only the future of CapraTek, but also for its goals in expansion. Therefore, all employees must feel a sense of belonging to CapraTek and have high level of respect and support for leadership so that they perform at their maximum potential and are always motivated to complete their daily job responsibilities. This change management program will be successfully implemented by including more advancement opportunities for plant workers and pay raises. Our new leadership development training program will also help to create more stability in the company by bringing management and regular employees together which will in turn establish new processes and methods in which leadership can more effectively supervise their teams. We believe these new processes put into place will effectively aid CapraTek in achieving its goals since employees as well as management will feel a greater a sense of unity and therefore work more cohesively together. This will create more stability among all employees and boost work performance which will contribute to the long-term goals CapraTek has of continuous expansion.

Training Needs Analysis

First let’s identify what a training needs analysis is and why it is so important to a company or organization. A training needs analysis involves collecting certain information in order to determine if a training need exists. If a certain training need certainly does exist, then it is extremely important to determine what type of training is required in order to meet this need. It is important for a training needs analysis to address why a certain need exists and if the issue identified doesn’t have an impact or worker performance then training might not necessarily be the course of action.

The first step for the individual conducting a training needs analysis in any organization is to understand the overall organization and department goals and priorities in order to properly assess the most effective training options and opportunities that will contribute to all departments and the business. This will require CapraTek to utilize a thorough gap analysis in order to fully understand which specific areas it can focus on to better help employees in each of it’s different departments. One method would be to review current and past human resources records in order to get a better idea of some potential problem areas in the plants such as accident and safety reports. Other information that could be examined from these human resources records to increase productivity include performance evaluations, production costs and sales records. Another effective method for properly conducting a gap analysis is to complete a SWOT analysis which is an analysis that covers the strengths, weaknesses opportunities and threats analysis. Questions that could be evaluated in a SWOT for CapraTek include what are the current strengths of each department in the plant as well as what are the biggest weaknesses and threats that are currently present in the plant? By answering these questions this would give management a better action plan to put in to place to effectively capitalize on the current strengths of the plant as well as address and weakness and threats to enhance overall productivity. Other potential gaps that can be encountered when administering a training analysis include employees that have received a lack of training for their job duties in the plant as well as employees that are underperforming for other reasons such as attitude or not having enough motivation.

Evaluation of CapraTek interviews for SMEs selected:

Now let’s focus on how implementing the right type of training to the managers and supervisors at CapraTek would strategically assist the entire organization in effectively increasing sales and overall employee morale for company. Let’s first have a look at the interviews that were conducting on different employees within the organization to see what their viewpoints and opinions were on how training should be conducted in the organization. Developing leadership can be a very challenging task if the right processes are not put into place. I have experienced this firsthand in my experience in both the retail automotive sales industry and the media sales industry which I am currently in. I carefully selected different managers for interviewing since I desired to have a wide array of perspectives regarding how we should implement our new leadership training. In the process of interviewing the department manager Michael Delarosa we found that team building was regarded as one of the most important activities that needed to be implemented into the organizations leadership development process since it allows managers and supervisors to effectively collaborate to solve problems. This manager also gave some valuable insight regarding suggestions for training new supervisors and certain challenges supervisors encounter in the plants. The feedback that we received in regards to suggestions is that the company should make sure that there are opportunities for hands on problem solving and that too much of the current training is theory and that supervisors need to be more focused on the real world issues that arise. He stated that from his viewpoint the main challenges that are currently being faced is the diversity on the lines in the plant and that individuals in the factory aren’t always working well together. He also mentioned that the most important abilities for managers is the ability to find information as well as the ability to develop technical expertise and he stated that training should be made up of both online training and face to face training, but if the company was to only choose one type of training it would be face to face training.

The feedback that we received from our shift supervisors in regards to what areas supervisors should receive training is the ability to see the behind the scenes aspect of operations in the plant and how to effectively apply company policy and how their teams performance affects the company as a whole. Another one of our shift supervisors also recommended that we should shorten our training process and focus on the more important areas like properly understanding the law, company policy or the processes in which tasks should be completed. In terms of challenges currently being faced in the plant some of the feedback that we received from the shift supervisors include that employees are being asked to do more with less and receiving specialized training on performance reviews and paperwork would contribute to higher performance. In terms of how training could be administered several shift supervisors included that a large amount of employee training could be done online, but one of these managers did state that he believed face to face leadership training is still effective since management personnel are able to better get an idea of what the current issues are in the plant as well as get different perspectives on how these issues could be fixed.

I believe that in order to fully implement the most effective leadership training program in place that we should not just focus on one or two perspectives from the management personnel interviewed but take everyone’s perspective into account and evaluate which methods will be best to use in the company. Since leadership is a learned skill, we will take the feedback given that some parts of training certainly need to be face to face and not solely online so that we can promote involvement from all employees in the company in order to successfully develop a new leadership training program for our supervisors and managers.

Conclusion

In conclusion we believe that by following the feedback given from the SME’s interviewed and continuing to listen to our employees on how we can improve different management processes that our company will be on the right track to achieve it’s goals in being highly competitive in the market and continue to expand into new segments of the technology industry.

References