Find Your Leaders

As a dairy manager, you understand that people are key to your dairy’s success, even with today’s rise in use of automated technologies. As a manager, it’s your job to identify leaders among your team and place them in a work environment that meets your needs and their needs.

Remember, leaders are not just executives. Leaders exist at all levels of your dairy. Leaders are those individuals who have the ability to influence, motivate and enable others to contribute to the dairy’s success – be it as part of the milking team, repro team, feed team or any other team. So, how do you identify the leaders on your team?

Look for individuals who possess the seven competencies of successful leaders: emotional intelligence, integrity, drive, leadership motivation, self-confidence, intelligence and knowledge of the business.

1. Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand and regulate emotion in oneself and others. In other words, you need to determine if the employee has the ability to control himself or herself under pressure. If the person gets angry quickly and takes it out on other staff or cows, this person is not ideal for leading others.

2. Integrity is the ability to not only be truthful and honest, but to put these words into action. An employee who takes the responsibility to let you know he couldn’t find all the cows on the synch list possesses integrity.

3. Drive is an internal motivation to do well or succeed. To find those with drive, you look for employees who take pride in their work and try to do their best even without being pushed. People with drive want to learn. As a manager, you need to supply these individuals with training and tools to meet their internal forces.

People are the biggest asset to any organization, and identifying good leaders among your employees is important.

4. Leadership motivation is a need for socialized power. These people want to lead others as a team to meet objectives. They feel a need to encourage others to work towards the same goal. To simplify this, you are searching for the person that tries to motivate his or her co-workers to do well.

5. Self-confidence, as a leadership competency, is the belief you have the skills and ability to lead others to achieve goals.

6. Intelligence is the above-average cognitive ability to process large amounts of information. This doesn’t mean leaders are geniuses; it simply means they are able to identify several solutions or areas of opportunity. For example, headlock time is an important measurement for dairies striving to improve cow efficiency and comfort. Leaders are those who find different ways to minimize the time in headlocks during heavy breeding days, whether it be breeding at an earlier time or using chalk marks on cows to locate synched animals.

7. Knowledge of the business is the leader’s understanding of the dairy’s environment to make more intuitive decisions. Employees who understand the parlor flow system, the synch schedules, the transition program and cow movement on the dairy are better able to make smart decisions that improve effectiveness in obtaining goals.

There’s no doubt people are the biggest asset to any organization. Robert Waterman, co-author of “In Search of Excellence,” argues that the best-performing companies provide their employees with the following:

❯ Something to believe in

❯ A feeling of control

❯ Job challenge

❯ The opportunity to engage in lifelong learning

❯ Recognition for achievements

He continues, “…[the best firms] are better organized to meet the needs of their people, so that they attract better people than their competitors do and their people are more greatly motivated to do a superior job, whatever it is they do.”

People are the largest contributors to your dairy’s success. Attracting, hiring and sustaining the leaders that possess the seven competencies will help set your farm up for success long into the future.