Vegetable farming is a multifaceted occupation with unexpected events often taking you away from your duties. This can mean a temporary management vacuum on the farm. One therefore has to train senior staff to think and react the way you would in those circumstances. When I finished my education, took a temporary job working for the government doing accounts before my military training. was given work to do, but couldn’t make decisions without consulting my superior.
When went farming, my boss would give me a job to do and expect me to make the relevant decisions. was a shock and initially battled to cope. Having been used to going to my superior for everything, thinking for myself was now foreign to me. We often expect our supervisors to just obey instructions without reasoning for themselves, as we feel we are the ones with the know-how. This is all very well if we’re always there, but that’s often not the case. We have to train our supervisors to think for themselves.
The best way to achieve this is to ask them how they think we should tackle a certain problem. When they make a wrong choice, tell them why it won’t work and keep pressing them until they come up with a solution. Tell them it’s a good idea and get it implemented. Their “strike” rate will improve until they are as good as you are. This may take a year or so, but once your supervisors are trained to make decisions you’ll be released to tackle other problems.
Plus you’ll elevate their self-esteem, which is more important than money to them and very important to you. worked for a big agricultural estate and had trained two supervisors on their respective vegetable sections to the point where could absolutely rely on them in my absence. When left, told my replacement he could lean very heavily on them. A few months later, bumped into one of the supervisors and asked him how it was going. He replied, “Terrible!”
He said when he tried to help the new manager he was told that there was only one boss in that section. The supervisor then just did as he was told and watched the vegetable section crumble. year later, the company abandoned vegetable production.– Bill Kerr ((016) 366 0616 or e-mail [email protected]). |fw
