Five needs of a supervisor

(bright music) - Hi and welcome back. In this module, you'll learn about the supervisor's five needs. Now the TWI definition of a supervisor is any person who directs the work of others. If you're taking this course to become a JI instructor and you don't have the title of supervisor or manager, you'll still be directing the work of others. As a JI instructor, this means J I instructors fit the TWI definition of a supervisor, and in order to be highly effective, supervisors must meet five needs. These needs are knowledge of the work, knowledge of responsibilities, skill and instructing, skill and improving methods, and skill and leading. Now, you may have noticed that two of these needs are knowledge-based and the remaining three are skill based. Knowledge can be gained by reading books, attending seminars, or watching videos. Skill, on the other hand must be learned through practice and repetition. The first need, knowledge of the work refers to the kind of information that makes your business different from all other businesses. Things that might make your business different could be materials, tools, operations, equipment, software, technology, processes, and technical skill. Some people have spent their career learning their skills and they continue to gain knowledge of their work. If they move to another industry, another organization, or even a different department within the same organization, new knowledge of work must be learned. Now knowledge of work can only be gained through actual on the job experience, which is why we don't address this topic during this course. The supervisor's second need is knowledge of responsibilities, which refers to the particular policies, safety, regulatory requirements, agreements, rules, schedules, and interdepartmental relationships, which are different in every organization. Supervisors must have a clear understanding of their responsibilities as a part of management in order to be effective. These responsibilities are the ground rule supervisors need to follow in order to be successful. Knowledge of responsibilities must be supplied locally. In other words, this is something you'll need to learn by working in your organization. Skill and instructing is a supervisor's third need and is concerned with helping supervisors develop a well trained workforce. The purpose for developing this skill is to have fewer accidents and less waste, specifically less scrap, less rework, fewer defects and less waiting. Mastery of a job alone isn't enough to transfer knowledge from the supervisor to the learner. In fact, just because someone is a master of a particular skill or job doesn't mean they're able to effectively teach others, which is why mastering the skill of instructing is crucial in order for a supervisor to be effective. This skill of instructing is what the JI course is all about. The fourth need skill and improving methods deals with utilizing materials, machines, and manpower more effectively by studying the operation in order to combine, rearrange and simplified details with the job. This skill allows supervisors to make better use of available resources to improve quality and productivity. The skill of improving methods is practiced in the job methods course. The supervisor's fifth need is skill and leading. Skill and leading helps leaders improve their ability to work with people. After all, a supervisor is challenged with getting things done through the work of other people. There are basic principles that when applied day in and day out will tend to keep relations smooth and prevent problems from ever arising. Now, it's important to note that supervisors are not born with these skills. Leadership skill is something that must be acquired over time with proper training and experience. Skill and leading will be the topic of the job relations course. We also addressed this topic in a number of other Gemba Academy courses, including the culture of Kaizen and Kaizen leadership. Now, this course isn't intended to tell you how to do your job. After all we at Gemba Academy, don't even know what your job is. This course is intended to cover one very specific topic, which is transferring knowledge from one person to another using the job instruction method. I've been fortunate enough to see for myself in a previous role just how effective JI is. This method helps to drastically reduce training time, while improving the quality of the work being done and increasing throughput for newly trained associates. Furthermore, when properly applied, JI instills confidence in both the trainer and the learner, which leads to higher job satisfaction. There are essentially two groups of associates that should be trained using the JI method. The first is employees who are currently doing a job and the second is associates new to a particular job. The first group experienced employees must continually learn new skills because of engineering changes, new equipment, new types of jobs, new and higher inspection standards, promotions, transfers, and all kinds of new production requirements. Now, the second group could be associates new to the organization or people who have been in the organization for awhile, but are new to the job being done. People in this category just might be learning an entirely new kind of work. It's important that everyone doing a particular job is trained the same way. This means that if the job instruction method is new to your organization or to the job being done, all of the experienced associates are to be retrained despite the fact they might already be experts on the job. This will create a single best way of doing the job. Okay, before we end this module, let's quickly review the supervisor's five needs. These needs are: knowledge of the work, knowledge of responsibilities, skill and instructing, skill and improving methods, and skill and leading. The JI course will address only the third need, namely skill and instructing. All right, that does it for this module. Thanks for watching.