First Line Manager Profile

The following profile is provided to assist you in deciding which programme is most appropriate for you.

As a First Line Manager you may still engage in some of the tasks performed by your fellow team members, but this does not constitute your primary function. You are a manager who also practices. This means that you will engage much more extensively in managerial tasks which other team member will not engage in.

This may also (though not always) mean that First Line Managers have a wider span of control than team leaders, much more likely to be in double figures and possibly extending to 20 or 30 people. It will also mean having more extensive control, responsibility, authority or power, and a greater degree of autonomy than is the case with team leaders. This will be reflected in the ability of Managers to make decisions which have some resource implications, initiate actions in relation to the employment of others (e.g. be involved in, but not decide about, recruitment decisions or disciplinary matters), and operate with less supervision or control by others. Furthermore, you will tend to work with longer time horizons than team leaders when planning work, looking several weeks or months ahead, whereas team leaders’ time horizons tend to be days or a few weeks at most.

First Line Managers can be expected to have a greater knowledge than team leaders of customers or suppliers and their specific requirements, including internal customers or suppliers. Conversely, you are not likely to be able to make decisions to vary the terms under which customers or suppliers trade with the employing organisation. You may well be expected to deal with similar problems to those presented by team leaders, requiring some superior technical ability, as well as having sometimes to make more subjective judgements that demand understanding of relationships between people working together. This is likely to extend to the relationship between the customer or supplier and the employing organisation or other market related criteria – i.e. decisions that demand some insight into the way the organisation relates to external individuals or organisations.

What distinguishes a First Line Manager from a Middle Manager is that you have very limited budgetary responsibility. You make decisions about resource utilisation but the budgetary accountability for these resources exists at a higher level. You are also limited in the range of decisions you can make compared to a Middle Manager, with all delegated decision making heavily circumscribed by rules and procedures.