About Francis Madison
Why I do this
I grew up outside Sparta and I have worked in Monroe County most of my life. Eleven years in production at a food processing plant, the last six of them as a shift supervisor with about thirty people reporting to me.
The promotion came on a Thursday. My plant manager told me on the floor, shook my hand, and that was the whole training program. I suspect that sounds familiar to a lot of people reading this.
My first year was rough. I kept running the line myself because that was the part I was good at, and my crew mostly sorted things out without me. I put off the hard conversations until they turned into resignations. Two people left who did not need to leave, and I knew both of them well enough to know why.
What turned it around was a manager at a co-op down the road who let me buy him coffee every other week and talk through whatever I was stuck on. He never told me what to do. He asked questions until I could hear my own answer. Four years of that and I was a decent supervisor.
I started coaching part time in 2019 and went full time in 2022. Every client I have is within about two hours of Sparta, and most of them run somewhere between fifteen and two hundred people. Manufacturing, co-ops, clinics, a couple of construction outfits.
What I can help with
None of this is theory. It is all stuff I got wrong first.
Performance, attendance, attitude, the person who was your friend last year and reports to you now. We plan the actual words, and sometimes we say them out loud in the room, which feels silly and works.
Delegation, priorities, and the guilt that comes with not doing the work yourself. Plenty of first-time supervisors are putting in sixty hours because of a habit rather than a workload.
Shift meetings, feedback, and the gap between a team that flags problems early and one that hides them until Friday afternoon. This part takes the longest and pays the most.
Need a hand?
The first session is free and it does not turn into a pitch. Tell me what is going on with your crew and I will give you an honest answer about whether coaching is the right thing for it.