Attributes For Success in Field Managers

By Greg Nathan posted July 1, 2010

Last year our team of psychologists did a study on 159 Australian Field Managers from 49 brands.

Field managers have one of the most important but toughest roles - simultaneously driving franchisee performance and alignment to the brand. How well they do their job affects everyone because it impacts significantly on franchisee success and satisfaction.

Our study asked 124 detailed questions covering their relationship with their manager, their competence in specific areas, what helps them achieve success and the impact of their job on various aspects of their life.

What's most important for satisfaction

We found the three most important aspects of their job, in order were, having the opportunity to develop new knowledge and skills, doing interesting work, and being able to help others.

When we looked at the extent to which they experience these things, the most important job attribute - developing new knowledge and skills - was rated the lowest, at 63% satisfaction.

We also asked what aspect of their job bothers them most; if you think it's working with difficult franchisees you'd be wrong. The top two issues were inefficient systems and organisational politics. Dealing with difficult franchisees came in third.

To summarise, for field managers to achieve greater satisfaction (an important contributor to productivity) it appears they need more professional development, more efficient systems and better internal communication.

What's most important for success

A final question in the survey asked, "When considering your performance in your field support role, what three attributes do you believe are most important to your success?"

Because this is one of my professional interests, I looked in detail at the 477 responses, searching for themes. Six attributes consistently emerged as being critical for success. There were no surprises here as these are regularly raised as being important to franchisees, in our franchisee satisfaction surveys.

Until next time,

Greg Nathan

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