Helping Ben's students keep up with Ben since 2005. 

Today we talked about planning, and not just the type of planning that we do in our head while we drive — we talked about the type of planning that requires actual thinking with actual writing-down-of-stuff. To that end, we talked about Gantt charts and PERT diagrams, both tools that help us figure out the planning process. We finished up the class talking about setting goals — something you guys have beaten to death in other classes, so we talked about the problems that we have encountered in setting goals for others and having them set for us.

As an update, the original schedule dictates that today we would cover chapters 3 and 4, but we changed that to only cover chapter 3. As such, I’ll need to alter the schedule and content on the classroom site. Homework #03 has already been altered, but please wait until 6p tonight before doing any other homework — if you do, you’ll get questions from wrong chapters. I’ll delete any attempts I come across this afternoon. I don’t think this affects any of you, but I still want to be sure I put something out here before doing that.

Homework:

• Week 3 homework on http://class.benbedo.com

This week we talked about chapter 2 – dealing with the specific challenges that supervisors in today’s business world face. The first angle of supervisory challenges centered around the increasingly global nature of business and how supervisors must adapt to perform in this environment. For example, global competitiveness has lead many “American” products to no longer be American. One of my favorite examples of this, which we discussed in class, was the question of which automobile is more “American”, the Ford Mustang, or the Toyota Camry? If you completely disassemble the parts and track them all down, the Toyota is technically more American than the Ford Mustang. How do you like that?

Secondly, we talked about technology. Technology can simultaneously solve problems while introducing new ones. For example, technology allows for supervisors and front-line employees to no longer have to work in the same physical location. That is a good thing. Except that it can sometimes create motivation problems for employees who are not extremely internally motivated.

Add to that the differences that we have with diversity. As a world, we are definitely getting smaller as we have a stronger chance of working with someone who was raised in a culture different than our own. It’s important to remember (and Americans have a reputation for being bad at this) that just because someone may do something different than we would, that does not mean that their way is wrong. It’s just different. Supervisors of employees from different cultures must always keep this in mind and make adjustments accordingly.

Homework:

• See week two on http://class.benbedo.com

Today was a get-to-know-you/get-to-know-supervision day. We opened by talking about the mechanisms for completing your work in this class (available on http://class.benbedo.com/) and the expectations that go along with that. We then talked through an introductory overview of what supervision is. Most of you have taken the Principles of Management class and we discussed how Supervision is a subset of management. Supervisors generally deal directly with the front-line employees and thus generally need to know the gist of what their employees do and be able to handle the various personalities that go along with them.

We ended up the class on a seemingly negative note: is supervision something you really want to do? We talked about how companies oftentimes will promote their top front-line performers into a management position as a reward; the downside to this is that supervision requires a very different set of skills than the front-line work, and often the best performers on the front lines are not the best supervisors. However, if management promotes a non-performer ahead of a top-performer, resentment may form and respect may be lost. It really is a fine balance that must be defined at the culture level.

Homework:

• Read Chapter 1 and 2
• Do homework on http://class.benbedo.com