Why New Supervisors Fail
We all strive to be challenged and to advance our career goals and often find ourselves stepping up to the role of supervisor without the knowledge and tools to succeed. New supervisors fail because they do not understand the overall supervisory framework. To increase their odds for success of supervising others lies in understanding the five basic management functions of planning, organizing, leading, controlling, and coordinating.
1. PLANNING: When supervising others, think about it as if you were supervising yourself by answering the following questions. Provided are some examples to help guide you:
a) Why are we here? To make a quality product or give a quality service for our customers.
b) How do we think? To Grow our people - knowledge/training - teamwork.
c) What are our aims? To be World class - increase market share, maximize efficiency and productivity.
d) Who are the people? Training, development, delegate, grow - permanent and seasonal staff - head office, internal, suppliers, customers.
e) Planning - short/long-term, requirements?
f) Implementation? Cascading goals - from head office to managers to staff.
g) Evaluation? Focus on growth of the company and prepare for this (increase in market share); focus on world-class (quality); focus on maximizing efficiency and productivity (numbers/statistics).
2. ORGANIZING: With an overall plan for your team, list your main objective which could be to reduce costs by 10% or increase revenue by 5%. Break this down into expectations and "baby step" tasks such as cut back on paper costs by 2% by reducing photocopy usage for miscellaneous items or increase market share by 5% before the end of the quarter. Establish how and when you will monitor and measure your results. Ask who or what else do I need to connect with in order to be successful and how will I translate this to others so that they know what is expected of them and what to do? Be sure to have two-way communication so that you get the information you need to monitor results.
3. LEADING: Use the formula of Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood as your rule of thumb. Stay objective by focusing on statistics as much as possible. Understand each person's job and how you will measure their results. Use these measurements to lead to them to greater results. Your job is to mentor, grow and develop your people so that they no longer need you because they understand where they are going and how to get there on their own. By asking good questions and setting objective, achievable and challenging goals with them, you stand a better chance of being a good supervisor.
4. CONTROLLING: Be attentive to the standards you are setting and stay consistent when communicating these to others. Continuously discuss what is OK what is not OK to accept with your staff. Stay informed and if a standard has to be overlooked, be sure the group understands why and are informed so that the standards are consistently taken seriously. If you don't address the discrepancies as they show up, lower standards will be created by default. Excuses get in the way of efficiency and productivity and standards get lowered which is not the objective for any team and can act as a de-motivating factor for the whole team.
5. COORDINATING: Strive always to mentor, grow and develop people so that they achieve the company's objectives as well as their individual objectives. In doing this, your staff will feel challenged, acknowledged and want to contribute in meaningful ways. Most organizations want to grow and expand its share of the market place. If this is true for your organization, know that your position will grow and expand too. This is why it is essential that you become better at delegating and 'getting out of the way' of your people so that they can step forward and eventually not need you at all. When this happens, you know you have done your job and are a successful supervisor. Strive to get your staff to where they feel powerful enough to initiate activities that get their jobs done and only have to report back to you on their results. This frees you up to develop yourself to move towards higher management roles and functions.
CONCLUSION: The five management functions for supervisors are the cornerstone for increasing your odds to succeed as a supervisor. Often new supervisors fail because they feel awkward with power and either over control or under control but control they must and they can do it in ways that respect, challenge, and grow their staff. The job of a supervisor is to encourage your staff to take risks, to be innovative and to work with you to achieve the company's and the individuals' objectives. You can do this with clear goals and consistent, fair management practices based on objective quantity and quality of productivity.
