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Supervisor Training: How to Develop a Supervisor Training Program - HRDQ
January 13, 2021 Bradford R. Glaser

Supervisor Training: How to Develop a Supervisor Training Program

Great teams begin with great supervisors. In order for your business to thrive, your leaders need to have the skills to flawlessly face common workplace challenges and adapt to change. When you learn how to develop a supervisor training program, you can feel confident that you’re providing those in leadership roles the tools to perform to the greatest of their abilities

HRDQ offers a fully customizable virtual training library, so you can provide specialized training content to your supervisors no matter where they are. Explore the Reproducible Training Library.

Assess Supervisor Skills

Whether you’re hiring new supervisors or training your current management, the first step in developing a supervisor training program is obtaining a baseline of the skills you’re trying to improve. This will allow you to better track your employees’ progress and ensure you create a successful program. As a starting point, some key soft skills that all supervisors should be proficient in include:

After you’ve assessed the strengths and weaknesses of each employee in the areas you’d like to work on, you can then begin honing in on the specifics of your training program.

Explore the HRDQ Online Assessment Center

Outline the Specific Goals of the Program

With a baseline obtained, you need to create goals for the program. By establishing these goals from the beginning and creating your program around them, you can more easily assess if they’ve been met. It’s best to focus on two to four goals within a single training program. An example of goals you may want your participants to achieve include:

  • Improve a performance issue
  • Learn a new skill to qualify for a position
  • Form better relationships with their team
  • Become aware of their management style

Create Modules & Define Objectives

Once you’ve identified your specific goals for your participants, you can then turn those goals into separate modules within your training program. Breaking the modules down even further, there should be various objectives that need to be met in order to complete the module.

For example, if the module is based on the goal of learning a new skill, the first objective could be to understand the definition of the skill. The next objective might be to learn why the skill is important, followed by discovering ways to implement the skill. All of these objectives help the participant work towards the goal of learning the new skill.

Develop Your Materials

Thoughtfully developing your materials plays an important part in ensuring your supervisors engage with and retain the information. As we mentioned, each module should be based on a specific goal and broken down into separate objectives. This is where you can get creative. The method by which the participants reach the objective is entirely up to you.

Whether you want to teach participants using a learning game, real-world simulation, fun activity, or something else is entirely up to you. The key to engaging your participants and improving the effectiveness of your training program is to present them with high-value materials in a variety of ways.

HRDQ’s Reproducible Training Library makes it easy to create personalized training program materials using tools such as a customizable PowerPoint presentation, participant workbooks, and more!

Reassess Your Training

Once you’ve prepared and delivered your supervisor training program, you need to reassess two items:

  • Whether your participants met their goals
  • Whether your training program was successful

To gauge these results, ask your team to complete the assessments you delivered at the beginning of the training once more. Take note of whether or not their scores improved. If so, it’s a sign that you’ve created a successful program and that your supervisors gained value from it.

Another way you can gauge the results of the training program is to refer back specifically to the goals you created. Throughout the next month after the training, track to see if your supervisors are implementing what they’ve learned.

For instance, if the goal was for supervisors to improve relationships with their team members, have they begun scheduling more team and one-on-one meetings? Have they created team-building sessions? Are they applying the tools given to them in the training program in real life? If so, this indicates success. If not, follow-up training may be necessary.

Start Training with HRDQ

We hope you have a solid understanding of how to develop a supervisor training program! At HRDQ, we have all of the resources you need to create an outstanding program that prepares your employees for whatever comes their way.

If you’re ready to begin, here’s how to create your training program with HRDQ:

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Tags: HRDQ Consulting, HRDQ Online Assessment Center, Reproducible Training Library, Supervisory Skills
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About our author

Bradford R. Glaser

Brad is President and CEO of HRDQ, a publisher of soft-skills learning solutions, and HRDQ-U, an online community for learning professionals hosting webinars, workshops, and podcasts. His 35+ years of experience in adult learning and development have fostered his passion for improving the performance of organizations, teams, and individuals.