New Supervisors Understanding Conflict from a Team Perspective

To be a successful, new supervisors and managers must understand and deal effectively with conflict - because conflict is inevitable. By providing new supervisor training, your managers can learn to:

• Look at conflict with a new attitude
• Shift the effect on the team that you are managing from corrosive to energizing

New supervisors can learn to "revision" conflict and to convert it from an impediment to an opportunity. New managers can see it not as bad but as inevitable. Well positioned new manager training should teach supervisors the skills to anticipate conflict and treat it as momentary while understanding how to resolve rather than avoid or deny it.


If you sense conflict, model this approach. Call the team together and ask if they, too, are feeling discomfort. Talk about what to look for. Plan to touch base again to share the data gathered.


Your team will feel more connected and more focused on learning together how to identify conflict and harvest the underlying opportunities.

Conflict from Corporate Culture Clashes

Mergers, acquisitions and new partnerships are ripe ground for conflict. You need to plan carefully for change and provide new supervisor training to prepare your managers for the bumpy road ahead.

When an established larger company, for example, merges with a younger, more aggressive company, the two cultures inevitably clash. Appropriate intervention is needed to integrate the more staid group with the younger company’s more innovative business style.

There is also the problem created when people brought into an overall organization are treated like second-class citizens by existing employees. The new arrivals feel this arrogance and are likely to leave the company and take with them the expertise that prompted the acquisition initially.

However, in an Engaged Organization, where commitment is valued over compliance, this does not happen. Managers within the parent company who have been exposed to new supervisor training are effective at communicating the rationale for acquisitions and gaining authentic buy-in from all his team members.

The Influence of Authority on Conflict

“Top-down” companies and fast growing startups are often prone to problems with authority when new employees are reluctant or unwilling to contribute their ideas because they feel locked out of existing groups. Direct and honest communication suffers, opportunities can be lost and nagging conflicts grow.

Authority issues also are factors in conflicts between the “Home Office” and the “Field.” If these two entities cannot communicate openly, real issues are left to fester rather than being addressed directly and early enough to avoid conflict.

It’s critical to avoid the “us” and “them” syndrome. With new and supervisor training, your managers can learn how to keep the communication lines open. The worst situation is when the Field sees Corporate as unresponsive and uncaring, while Corporate gets frustrated with complaints from those in the Field.

Avoiding Errors in Decision-Making

A sound decision making process is often critical to success. Yet there are recurrent errors in thinking that can sabotage new supervisors and managers. As a business leader you need to make time for a thoughtful analysis of these errors as well as to provide new supervisor training that alerts your managers to these pitfalls.

Avoid costly mistakes to your business by watching out for the following errors in thinking for new managers and supervisors:

• Too strong a focus on short-term business results without considering long-term consequences
• Undervaluing the benefit of “generalist” leaders who welcome a breadth of ideas, perspectives and goals as opposed to “specialist” leaders with a narrow focus
• Leaning too far toward alignment and teamwork if it discourages a healthy mix of ideas and principles

See that your meetings and decision-making processes invite questions on assumptions, a variety of opinions, and substantiation of proposals with data and logic.

New Manager Best Practices that Drive Sales Growth

In a recent new supervisor and new manager quarterly poll, a large % of new leaders stated that "ensuring the best customer care possible" was keeping them up at night.

A small % increase in customer service performance can boost profits by as much as upwards of 50%. Research has shown that high levels of customer care lead to greater business sales growth.

Read more about some of the best new leader and new manager training programs, hiring practices and make the link between industry leading business sales revenue growth and service...

Your organization's new managers?

All organizations, big and small, suffer from bad new managers. Stopping to think about your organization, do you know:

• The impact of a bad new managers on employee performance?
• How and when to rollout effective new supervisor training programs to tackle the issue head-on?

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