I'm in the very early stages of creating a First Line/Junior Management Development programme for my organisation. I would like to hear from other trainers & developers who have created similar programmes themselves, how you went about it & how it was structured. I have started to put together a proposal document outlining the key objective/purpose for the programme. Also looking at Job profiles & competencies (expectations at that level) of our Junior management population. I would like any advise on how to get maximum ROI & minimum drop out. Kind Regards Steph
5 Responses
Reinventing the wheel
There’s lots of materials out there that you can use as templates, there’s things like the ‘content guidelines’ for programmes from the CMI and ILM, and – of course – there are downloadable training materials from providers like my company.
And there’s lots of free info on sites like businessballs.com too.
I guess the first bit of trainer advice would be to do a needs analysis and build your course around that.
Good luck,
Carolyn
Course Contents for First Line Managers
Hi Steph
I have designed a couple of these for both my previous and current employer. It is important to understand your audiences training needs to ensure that they will benefit from the programme. For example, the first one I did was for team leaders and included Employment Law and Recruitment and Selection but although they enjoyed these modules they didn’t get involved with this in their day to day jobs and felt frustrated that they couldn’t apply their learning. I do find though that things like time management and delegation, situational leadership, change management, problem solving and decision making are all good places to start. I found inspiration from the one minute manager books and they are still all talking about monkey management! The key thing is to make sure that they apply their learning back to their role and give them “homework” to help them do this.
Good Luck
Liz Fletcher
Support Centre Trainer
using accreditation
I’ve used two approaches, the first of which is quite complex but does create a programme that is truly relevant to the group. Prior to running the programme, I make sure I have a library of number of short ‘modules’ on a wide range of supervision and management topics. The first session of the programme is to run activities on the nature of management, and I include in this a self analysis of personal managerial skills, and a discussion on the key priorities for the organisation. I then run a group activity to negotiate and agree the priorities for the group. Future sessions are then delivered around the groups’ own identified issues. This only works, though, if you can spread out the group sessions (e.g to weekly) to give you time to adapt your modules to the group’s needs.
I have also found ILM (Institute of Leadership and Management) to be really helpful and the structure of the qualifications give a good starting point for design of programmes. For some people, the achievement of a qualification is a great motivator to see it through to the end. For a short programme, the ILM award is great, and can then be built on to give higher levels of qualification. They are available for different levels of management, and there is now a great deal of flexibility to the content of the programmes which allow you to design it to meet the needs of your participants and organisation as well as the awarding body requirements. It’s a good idea to contact your regional ILM manager about the acccredited route, and I’m more than happy to chat through how these approaches have worked for me as well.
Hope this helps,
Lesley-Anne
http://www.developmentworkshrd.co.uk
First Line Managers
Hi Steph
I too have worked on creating programmes for my previous and current company. We have recently adapted our programme slightly to align to the ILM, whom I have found to be extremely helpful, useful and quite proactive in providing assistance.
Last year our programme was designed around what the business required our First Line Managers to deliver and was set up in modular format over 6 months approximately. The modules themselves were Planning & Delegating, Motivating & Developing, Team Building and Problem Solving & Creative Thinknig. The first 3 we relate to Adair’s Leadership Model as well….thinking about Tasks, Individuals and then Team. Seems to work really well and provides a reference point for each of the modules.
More than happy to share any more info – best of luck!
Regards
Alan
your replies……
Thank you to all of you who have answered.
You have all given me some food for thought.
Thanks
again