Every security business owner will eventually have to confront their fear of delegating to supervisors in order to continue growing their business. If your security business’s supervisory development program includes at least the eight points above, you will have significantly more successes than failures.
That being said, it is imperative that you trust your supervisors. Not trusting the people you have trained and delegated responsibility to can really hurt your business and keep you from growing.
I’ve worked across several industries for companies of all sizes. Of all the lessons that I have learned throughout my career, the most impactful have been about managing people. One of the most important lessons that I learned working in the security guard industry is that it is impossible to be successful without developing great security supervisors.
During my time managing my family’s security guard company, I learned some valuable lessons. At one point in the business, we had decided to start delegating some of the responsibilities that we as owners had been managing. One of our senior officers was promoted to sergeant. Let’s call her “Sarge.” After her promotion, Sarge was responsible for managing a team of about five security officers.
Trusting officers such as Sarge to make decisions without us was a very tough thing to do, and for good reason. It was my assumption, or maybe I was just hoping, that officers like Sarge who had been in the industry for a while understood what was needed to make a security team successful. Sadly, I couldn’t have been more incorrect. In the first few months after Sarge’s promotion, she made some very questionable decisions that left me thinking, “I can’t trust her judgment.” There were even more times when I got off the phone with her thinking to myself, “This is never going to work!”
“When there is no way out, find a deeper way in!”
– THE INTERNATIONAL
At some point during those first few months, despite all of our doubts, we decided that there was no going back. So instead of reversing course, we doubled down. We made two major decisions that would determine how successful our supervisors were going to be. The first decision was investing heavily in formal training.
We had determined that most officers had not been given a foundation on which they could begin building their supervisory skills. As it turned out, many of the things that I thought were common knowledge weren’t so common. So in order to get Sarge and our other supervisors the foundational knowledge that they needed, we began using Trainingdepartment.com as one of our training tools. With Trainingdepartment.com the supervisors were able to take self-paced classes that included:
After of our security supervisors finished the curriculum that we had outlined, we got the same response from many of them: “Wow, I didn’t know a lot of that.” Although the information that they received from the online training and classroom sessions was valuable, getting them real world experience would be pivotal.
Not only did our security officers lack of foundational knowledge, I also discovered that very few of our officers had ever had the responsibility of making a “real decision” on the job. It’s generally accepted that without having the opportunity to make decisions and mistakes, no one can be a good supervisor, manager, or leader. So our second decision was committing to letting our security supervisors make real world decisions and learn from any mistakes that they made.
Let’s look at an example:
Sarge was eager to have a member of her team terminated. Prior to our commitment to giving supervisors experience, our policy was that a member from the ownership team would handle all terminations. But based on this new commitment, supervisors were now going to have to participate in all terminations as well as some other internal processes.
So Sarge was going to “co-manage” the process of terminating the officer as well as that of hiring a new officer. Prior to this, as far as our officers were concerned, when an officer was terminated a new officer magically appeared to take that officer’s place. But unbeknownst to the officers, there was a lot that went into recruiting and hiring a new officer. It was going to be essential for our security supervisors to understand that process if they were going to understand the mechanics of how the company operated.
Although Sarge was a little cavalier about the meeting to terminate the officer, I could see that as the meeting progressed she began to understand the seriousness of what was happening. This was someone’s job that was being discussed, someone’s way of feeding their family, and there were going to be real consequences for that person as a result of this meeting.
After the meeting, we had her focus on covering her open post. We’d helped her out by getting it covered for the next few days, but after that it was up to her to keep it staffed—while keeping overtime to a minimum.
During that following two or three weeks, she had to work the phones to find floaters, cover midnight shifts, and participate in interviews of candidates. I remember trying not to laugh from the exasperation in her voice when she asked, “Have we found anyone to replace the officer?” and “Where are you keeping all the good applications?” Before then, she hadn’t considered the consequences of terminating an employee, but now she was getting it.
After that experience, she substantially changed the way she led her team and approached her position. She had finally begun to understand what it meant to be a supervisor and trusted leader. Happily I can report that after she was given the opportunity to make a few more mistakes, she grew into the type of security supervisor that I am proud to have called a team member.
On my last day in the security guard business, I had conversations with a dozen or more officers who stopped by to say good-bye. But it was the conversation with Sarge that has always stuck out in my mind. She told me that no one had ever given her the level of trust and responsibility that we’d given her and that she would always be thankful for that.
Although it can be easy to be cynical about the quality of your officers, don’t focus on the bad seeds. I truly believe that most security officers and security supervisors want to be great employees—you just have to show them how to get there. So if you want to be the best company that you can be, commit to giving your security supervisors the knowledge and experience that they need to be successful.
In our next chapter, we’ll talk more about the business side of running your company and what you need to do and understand to make sure your business thrives.
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