Imagine someone well-versed in management skills like motivation, planning, and conflict resolution. Someone who writes reports of efficiency and quarterly reviews, is bilingual if not multilingual and central to an organization’s success.

What image comes to mind? A slick, well-groomed MBA holder, working for a corporate firm and cherry-picked to ensure that only the best move forward?

What if we said we are talking about Laxmi, a supervisor at a garment factory? She matches all the attributes in the first paragraph but none of the perceptions in the second?

This general understanding of who makes for a good manager, and the common misunderstanding that these skills hold value only for certain “white collar” professions, ends up creating an unfair environment for some.

Garment factory floors typically have production lines of 25-40 people each. Each line has a manager whose job is to ensure workers are highly productive and not facing any issues at work. In such organized factory floors in the garment industry, two things stand out – the production lines mostly consist of women while their managers are mostly men, and there is considerable diversity among workers in terms of language preferences and working styles. Managing such a diverse workforce in an environment driven by strict production targets does not come easy.

Our research has found that a significant part of the holistic skill set that makes a manager “good” is often not tested during hiring decisions or neglected while imparting managerial training, thus affecting worker productivity.

Our research has also shown that both of these tasks can be accomplished, rather well, by taking a step beyond research and meaningfully leveraging technology.

Pivoting from the status quo

In our partner’s factories, representative of a large share of garment factories across the world, promoting workers to managers entails a factory head recommending a set of ‘good’ workers based on their subjective assessment of performance, leadership ability, and initiative. These workers then go through a technical test followed by a final short interview.

While women form 92% of the frontline workforce, they occupy only 34% of the managerial positions. In terms of pure numbers, such a fall in the representation of women from worker to manager hints at an inconsistency in the process of being promoted.

Macchiavello et al. 2020 highlight such statistical discrimination in garment factories in Bangladesh. They show fewer women get promoted to supervisory positions, despite minimal skill differences between comparable female and male supervisor candidates.

After talking to workers and factory staff at our partner firm, we built on the idea that this bias could happen due to a lack of clarity among factory heads as to what constitutes a “good” manager.

Our suspicion was that the unsystematic and subjective interpretation of managerial abilities negatively affected women. Either that or women were inherently bad managers.

In 2014, we conducted research to find the blueprint of a productive supervisor. We found attributes that strongly predict productivity in managers. Unsurprisingly, gender wasn’t one. Instead, better short-term memory, autonomy, and attentiveness – an array of soft skills played a significant role.

Since the hiring process at our partner firm didn’t test for this skill set in a systematic manner, we designed a framework substituting the existing screening paradigm with a more formal one to test for soft skills that our research showed predicted managerial performance.

A potential game-changer

We did this by developing an algorithmic mobile and web-based application, SSUP.

SSUP tests for attributes such as internal locus of control, cognitive skills, and autonomous decision-making, then ranks candidates on these soft managerial skills, which then become the criteria to identify a “good” supervisor.

It struck us, however, that such a screening protocol would be inherently exclusionary. We needed a complementary training component to address the soft skill gap and develop a better cohort. After all, our central focus is on worker wellbeing, of which development and training form an essential part.

Moreover, such a training curriculum existed! It had been developed by Options & Solutions, a business advisory, in consultation with our partner firm, and contained modules that encouraged managers to reflect on their roles as a person, a supervisor, a team member, and a leader. We had evaluated the positive impact of this program and knew that managers who received this training drove their lines to be five to seven percent more productive, with effects that persisted up to six months after the training. It also reduced managerial attrition and distress, and increased job satisfaction.

Bringing this curriculum under the SSUP banner required innovation on four fronts: flexibility, scalability, customizability, and inclusivity, which were not simultaneously achievable in a classroom setting.

Flexibility meant the training had to be self-paced; that is, a candidate may complete it in as much time as they wish and repeat it as many times as they want, wherever they want.

Scalability meant the model had to be able to cater to a growing audience. We were looking to train over 3000 supervisory candidates in our partner’s factories alone. Thus, it had to be self-administrable.

Customizability meant that each person would be learning something specifically designed for them so as to retain an interest in the curriculum.

And finally, a nudge for inclusivity meant both men and women were equally represented in examples of leadership or in dealing with management issues, which formed a critical part of the training curriculum.

We thus created STITCH (Supervisors’ Transformation Into Change Holders)– a digital version of the training that complemented its screening counterpart.

A step away from finding out

We hope the next time you think of good and impactful managers, you think about the ones who are often underrepresented in management school classrooms, but who arguably go through a similar selection process with much higher competition and are required to display a congruent set of skills – the best-kept secret of the production factory universe.

Have any questions or thoughts on the article? Write to us at info@goodbusinesslab.org.