TEN CHARACTERISTICS NEEDED FOR SUCCESS

Does your beer distributorship have supervisors or team leaders? What is the difference? Does it really matter? Probably not! The main point being supervisors/team leaders and their work groups are responsible for accomplishing a multitude of tasks with limited resources. The position of supervisor/team leader is probably the toughest job in a beer distributorship.

Their duties require them to interact with not only the executive management of your distributorship but also with retailers. Many times these two groups have different and conflicting goals. Executives want the assigned tasks completed as quickly and as cost effective as possible….retailers are demanding more and more services….a demand that is not necessarily cost effective.

As a former supervisor, executive, and now consultant there appears to be several characteristics to the supervisor/team leader position that if known and developed can help satisfy the needs of both the executives and retailers. A supervisor/team leader must simultaneously satisfy these two groups if he/she is to be successful.

1.If a supervisor/team leader is to be effective he/she must maintain self-confidence and self-esteem whenever they are interacting with executives, retailers, and the employees of their work group. Without self-confidence and self-esteem the supervisor/team leader cannot be effective. The best supervisors/team leaders have an air of self-confidence (not arrogance) about them. Supervisors/team leaders are not born with self-confidence. Self-confidence is a learned behavior that comes with experience, task accomplishment, positive feedback, and self-awareness.

2.By the nature of the position the supervisor/team leader must have excellent communication skills. The position is the pivotal point between the distributorship achieving its goals and the retailer promoting your products. The supervisor/team leader that gets directly to the point, focuses upon specifics, shows respect to all, and allows for two-way communications will be an effective communicator. The effective supervisor/team leader must be capable of communicating with executives, retailers, and employees in his/her work group with equal effectiveness.

3.The effective supervisor/team leader must be a teacher. The teaching demands of this position are not limited to the employees within his/her work group. The supervisor/team leader must be able to teach the executives what is happening in the market and with retailers. He/she must also be able to teach retailers product knowledge and the nuances of merchandising and pricing. The most important teaching task the supervisor/team leader has is with the employees of his/her work group. He/she must be able to describe the steps of each task, demonstrate each of these steps, observe the employee performing the task, and provide constructive feedback to each employee.

4.The supervisor/team leader in a beer distributorship must be an excellent salesperson. This obviously applies to the selling of your products to retailers. However, it also applies to his/her ability to sell ideas and concepts to executives, retailers, and the work group. The ability to sell the intangible is an absolute necessity. This ability like many of the characteristics discussed here is a learned skill and comes through practice and experience.

5.The ability to plan and reach goals is also an absolute necessity for supervisors /team leaders. Holding a pivotal position between executive management and retailers is difficult at best; not having a plan that focuses the work group on the goals of the company and the service demands of retailers invites disaster. The supervisor must have a plan to deploy his/her limited resources (the work group) to accomplish the multitude of tasks and demands.

6.The successful supervisor/team leader will demonstrate initiative when working to balance the executive’s demands for goal achievement with the retailer’s demands for more service. Those supervisors/team leaders that succeed in this most difficult of environments will demonstrate a high degree of initiative.

7.A trait present within all successful supervisors/team leaders is a company orientation. They support the "company line" even when they do not agree with a decision. They never put down the decision; not to their work group and certainly not to the retailers. They are however self-confident enough to discuss in private with the executive the decision and the underlying reason.

8.Dependability is without question a supervisor/team leader characteristic that may in many cases be the most important. A little lack of planning or difficulty with communications can be tolerated; lack of dependability will ensure failure every time regardless of how strong the other characteristics.

9.With the many demands placed upon the position of supervisor/team leader he/she must be very flexible and adaptable to a changing environment. The business of beer distribution is far too complex for a supervisor/team leader to try to go down a road that has no twists or turns. It is important to have plans, key account call schedules, and other regimented systems. It is how goals are achieved. However, it is vitally important for the supervisor/team leader to be flexible enough to change directions on a moment’s notice and take advantage of situations as they arise.

10.Finally, supervisors/team leaders must have all the functional skills needed to perform their duties. They must be able to run routes, build displays, fix draft lines, understand pricing, operate hand-helds, and be able to generate the needed reports from the computer system. Without these functional skills they will be a drag on the distributorship’s productivity and profits….something that cannot be tolerated.