Don’t Trust Your Security Supervisors If You Want To Fail

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.

Security Supervisors Need A Foundation

There were two major decisions that we made that determined how successful our supervisors were going to be. The first decision was investing heavily in formal training. 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:

• Communication Essentials for Managers
• Decision Making
• Problem Solving
• Preventing Harassment In the Workplace
• Customer Service
• Etc.

After many 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 was going to be pivotal.

Security Supervisors Need Experience

In addition to discovering their 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.

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.