Customer Reviews

The 21st Century Supervisor, Facilitator's Guide: Nine Essential Skills for Frontline Leaders

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The 21st Century Supervisor: Nine Essential Skills For Frontline Leaders is designed to show anyone charged with a managerial or supervisor responsibility how best to carry out their obligations regardless of the size or nature of their company, corporation, agency, or organization. The 21st Century Supervisor shows how to improve skills of communication, coaching, business analysis, computers, project management, and resource management to meet goals, deal with senior leaders, subordinates, and even customers. The 21st Century Supervisor comprises the equivalent of a complete self-study training program in management for the new millennium.

The book is not very stimulating to read, and you will find yourself putting it down because of lack of interest. The author hits on many key points throughout the book, but rarely excites or intrigues the reader with the subject matter of supervision. Many bullets, charts and information; but not very engaging!

Definitely designed more like a textbook than a manifesto, this volume bills itself as the only supervisory training book you'll ever need to deal with today's issues and skills. Consultants Brad Humphrey and Jeff Stokes' punctuate their book with illustrative graphs, chapter wrap-up questions and lots of notes in highlighted bold type. Their tone of voice would fit well into many classrooms as well as corporate offices. This wide-ranging book covers the basics and offers very complicated productivity analysis, worker evaluation protocols and even an initial primer on how computer applications can help your productivity. For the manager or supervisor who's just testing the deep waters of management theory, we... recommend this fairly easy first step into the deep end. The authors suggest that an organization's supervisors should all read a chapter and then deal with the questions and exercises in a discussion group. That's the supervisory skill equivalent of "Okay, everybody in the pool!"

The things that I found to be the most helpful in this package was the fact that it was very thorough and there were multiple examples for each section along with a wide range of topics dealing with everyday situations in the business world. This package helped me in understanding some of the key aspects in training and development such as self-assessments and proper ways to construct agendas. It also outlined a development plan for improving supervisory ability. The thing that I appreciated was that it is possible to use this program with managers, supervisors, or can be done with employees and supervisors. This book is very complete and could be very beneficial to any supervisor, manager, consultant, or employee if the program is used properly and taken seriously.

The 21st Century Supervisor was inspirational. I know that sounds a bit over-the-top but I really liked what it had to say. It was more about developing supervisory skills which will help establish a synergistic work environment. It described the art and science of supervision as a worthwhile end in itself rather than a step up the corporate ladder.