Self Help

In response to the question: “How do you create a supervisor?” a key executive in a high-tech organization once replied, “It’s easy, you just change the color of his or her badge.” He was being facetious, of course, because becoming a supervisor is not so easy. The job of a supervisor is one that should be trained with not only the duties of management, but handling the work results (or the lack thereof) of the employees whom they are in charge of. However, supervisors are often blamed but are seldom (or inadequately) trained.

In most organizations, first-level supervisors tend to be promoted with little or no leadership training. If you survey their subordinates, the response is usually that whatever leadership training there was, it wasn’t enough!

Take the job of “functional specialists” for example. These specialists include such job titles like engineers, accountants, or sales people and they may spend years learning their field of expertise. Yet when they get their first supervisory promotions, they often are plunged into the complex world of supervisor-subordinate relations and interdepartmental cooperation without the necessary preparation. Many soon get an abrupt orientation to the old adage: “Management would be easy if it weren’t for people!”

Whereas mathematical formulas and the laws of physical and chemical science provide the basis for predicting the behavior of things, people are infinitely variable and thus less predictable. A leader’s mission is to understand individual differences and to be able to marshal people’s collective resources for effective performance. And that’s not an easy task. It requires specialized skills beyond those learned by functional experts.

Recall, or imagine, what it was like to select someone for promotion into the ranks of supervision. Whom did you pick? What were the characteristics of the leading candidates for consideration? Were most of them high producers in their own specialties - for instance, the leading salespeople? Did you consider promoting anyone who produced less but who may have had other attributes, such as listening skills and a strong orientation to teamwork? Or did you feel that the promotion should be a reward given to the highest producer?

Your answers to these questions may reveal that your decision to promote a certain candidate over another is based on incomplete - if not inappropriate - criteria. The highest producer doesn’t necessarily embody the strongest supervisory skills - at least not without the proper training.