Introduction
In a fast-changing business environment, it has always been expected that every new supervisor is capable in:
- Understanding the management skills needed to succeed in a rapidly changing environment
- Planning, organizing, communicating and monitoring
- Applying the most appropriate supervisory style to each individual and situation
- Understanding legal responsibilities
- Learning management skills to help you give constructive criticism
- Maximizing productivity by leveraging diversity and individual differences
- Learning techniques to help you cope with difficult employees
- Using delegation for effective employee development, time management and motivation
- Increasing job satisfaction and work output through coaching.
- The following will discuss best practices for new supervisors with the indicated supervisory responsibilities.
Demonstrating Communication Skills
New supervisors are tasked with both management and employee expectations so that a clear balance is needed in order to maintain objectives on delivery of expectations. In demonstrating communication skills, a new supervisor delineates various company goals that is not limited to customer-satisfaction, quality products or services, but also building a positive environment among workers or employees.
Goal-oriented focus on the communication process is necessary to achieve this. create an effective message and how to better understand the messages being sent to you. The new supervisor must learn how to share feelings and ideas through his messages and how to use feedback. Likewise, he learns how to recognize disruptive factors and how perceptions filter understanding. The new supervisor will learn to identify the impact of beliefs and how a situation may distort messages while being aware of language and nonverbal skills (ISI, 2007).
In communicating to both superiors and subordinates, the new supervisor send clear and consistent messages that use words that are familiar to the receiver, words that are specific and concrete, and to avoid jargon as well as use supportive nonverbal cues to support message. He will also take diversity into consideration, recognizing cultural factors and gender differences. In addition, he will actively seek to understand how to recognize perceptual influences, develop effective listening skills and prevent misunderstandings through clarifying questions and use of the feedback loop (ISI, 2007).
Boosting employee morale has been cited by Bryars (2004) as an effective communication strategy that indicates employees want to be recognized and feel as though they are a part of something bigger. Likewise, take employee impulse by knowing where morale stands. A multifaceted approach as suggested below may be used for taking an accurate pulse of employees:
- “First, do a cross-sectional survey of all employees.
- Get that data into the hands of managers.
- Give managers the responsibility to feed it back to their employees and create an effective action plan.
- Then, measure behavior: Track the kinds of actions people are taking, the schedule for meeting their goals and the percentage of managers who are accomplishing their action items. These are statistics that you can report to your executives, and that your executives can exert some control over-because they can control leaders, but not attitudes.
- Help managers understand how career and lifestyle events impact employees. Oftentimes, legal folks are guiding HR, saying managers shouldn’t get too close to their employees because of a liability associated with that. But in fact, there’s a liability in not getting close with your employees,” (Woodward, 2007, 82).
Likewise, the following may also be employed for communications to and from the ew supervisor:
- Be able to demonstrate paraphrasing to check for content understanding
- Must experience the impact of nonverbal communication
- Must send harmonious messages
- Know how to ask questions that get the answers that is really needed.
Determining Effective Orientation and Training Methods
In determining effective orientation and training methods, the new supervisor is expected to give and receive criticism constructively, minimize defensiveness in him and others, and demonstrate a coaching discussion model. It was suggested that training programs should align with organizational values, goals, and objectives in order to be successful. The new supervisor must have gained insight and overview as well as develop an effective training program by assessing training needs and designing training programs to meet those needs. In case a gap or gaps are found in what is needed and what employees can do, the training must be designed to fill in the gap (Allen, 1998).
To determine training needs, the new supervisor need to identify what the employee is expected to do using job analysis. It will be decided who needs training by asking the employees themselves and by identifying what the employee already knows. Likewise, a needs assessment helps to determine training content and objectives. In identifying objectives, supervisors prepare objectives for the training after assessing employee needs. The supervisor, through planning, determines an acceptable level of overall performance and specifies objectives while making employees understand what is necessary in order to satisfy the company’s expectations, that is, objectives and expectations should be formulated collaboratively (Allen, 1998).
Instructional objectives, must inform employees what they should know, do, do differently or better, or stop doing. Clear, defined objectives enable the new supervisor to evaluate whether they have been reached. An effective objective thought out before the training begins is clear and measurable, identify as precisely as possible what the employees will do to demonstrate that they have learned it, or that the objective has been reached. It describes the important conditions under which the individual will demonstrate competence and define what constitutes acceptable performance. The training objectives should describe the desired knowledge, practice, or skill and its observable behavior using specific, action-oriented language (Allen, 1998).
Improving Productivity for Teams
The new supervisor is expected to coach subordinates for high quality performance by
- Giving and receiving criticism constructively
- Minimizing defensiveness in self and others
- Demonstrating coaching discussion model.
Likewise, in creating a motivating environment, the new supervisor must
- Able to establish the essentials of a motivating environment
- Able to demonstrate rules for reinforcing productive behavior
- Must be able to take delegation, performance and team development to the expected goal or level of excellence
- Can use delegation as a motivational tool
- Develop strategies for solving a current employee motivational problem (Byars, 2004).
Conducting Performance Appraisals
Pratt (2007) presented a performance appraisal model as set by IT managers at the University of Miami which sets expectations looked forward to with changes that include by putting focus on what the supervisors really want to accomplish as a department that make the people commit. There is a common goal to contribute to which is considered as important. A strategy pointed out is to compare employee qualifications against key skills needed in the company enabling supervisors and managers to focus training, set development goals and reward employees whoa acquire hot skills.
Right timing has also been cited where coincidence with key decisions such as setting pay increases could add a good reason for the appraisal. End of a calendar year was used by Aetna Information Services delivery operations with expectations that cascade down into team and individual balanced scorecards base done on specific schedule (Pratt, 2007). It has been added that this process must be considered as an on-going career management with scheduled regular follow-up meetings at set intervals to ensure workers are on track and hit targets.
Sources for input of performance appraisal are valuable in their own right including favoured self-evaluation, 360-degree and peer evaluations done anonymously where strengths and areas of improvement are pointed out. Nevertheless, this could be manipulated to become a forum for criticism which could be destructive and demotivating (Pratts, 2007).
It is also advisable that in managing performance appraisals, the new supervisor must
- Understand your company’s appraisal system
- Record-keeping and compliance issues
- Write a performance appraisal document
- Conduct an effective performance appraisal meeting
Resolving Conflict
Conflict is a part of doing business, a normal and natural part of any workplace. There is a tendency to lower morale when conflict occurs, while it may also cause an increase in absenteeism and decreased productivity. Office managers and supervisors, according to studies, spend at least 25 percent of their time resolving workplace conflicts directly causing lowered office performance (UC, 2007).
Handling and resolving conflicts in the workplace may be dealt with two responses: run away or avoidance, or battle it out or confrontation. Both could be uncomfortable or dissatisfying as results may not yield resolution. Constructive conflict resolution can turn a potentially destructive situation into an opportunity for creativity and enhanced performance.
Following are sources of conflict:
- Poor Communication caused by different communication styles leading to misunderstandings between employees or between employee and superiors. In addition, lack of communication drives conflict further.
- Differing Values where individuals see the world differently. Lack of acceptance and understanding of these differences may lead to conflict.
- Differing Interests where individual workers ‘fight’ or compete for personal goals, ignoring organizational goals and organizational well-being.
- Scarce Resources where employees have to compete for available resources in order to accomplish their tasks. Awareness of how scarce resources may be could minimize but not eradicate conflict arising from this.
- Personality Clashes of which work environments are made up of differing personalities where colleagues may not understand and accept each other’s approach to work and problem-solving.
- Poor Performance where individuals within a work unit may be pointed out to performing below expectation, conflict becomes inevitable.
In addressing conflicts, the following ways can be utilized:
- Avoidance with the hope that the conflict will go away.
- Collaboration by working together to find a mutually beneficial solution.
- Compromise by finding the middle ground whereby every party of the conflict gets a substantial portion.
- Competition by having the fittest get what he or she deserves.
- Accommodation by surrendering own needs and wishes to please the other person (UC, 2007).
Generally, collaboration or compromise are considered the most productive forms of addressing conflict as there is not a winner or loser but rather a working together for the best possible solution.
In conflict resolution, arriving at a positive resolution is always the ultimate goal, and may be achieved by:
- Articulate clearly the causes of the conflict by acknowledging there will be differing perceptions of the problem(s).
- Make a clear statement of why the conflict needs to be resolved and reasons to work on conflict.
- Communicate how one wants the conflict resolved.
- Address the issues face-to-face
- Stick to the issues and address specific behaviors and situations if change is to take place.
- Take time out if necessary to avoid emotions interfering with arriving at a productive resolution (UC, 2007).
Improving Employee Relations
In improving employee relations, it is necessary for the new supervisor to embrace the new role and expectations:
- What your boss, employees, peers and senior management expect from you in your supervisory role
- Four basic management functions: planning, organizing, communicating, monitoring
It is the task of the new supervisor to be able to relate with the manager’s tasks. In managing a diverse workforce, it is expected that:
- Diversity issues and how they affect the supervisor, his work unit and his company must be handled properly
- He must understand the American with Disabilities Act (ADA), workplace discrimination, hostile environment and other key laws and legal terms relevant to the supervisory position (UC, 2007).
The new supervisor is also best advised to fill his communication skills toolbox advantages and disadvantages of one-way and two-way communication and when to use each, and capitalize on the benefits of e-mail and other gadget and technology that ease work communication.
Effective time management gives advantage for a new supervisor in a workplace. This will not only serve as an example to subordinates but also systematize effective work scheduling so that it is expected from the supervisor to have
- Key principles of effective time management
- Share time management best practices
The new supervisor must plan for continuing growth through selecting and prioritizing his own next steps and developing an action plan for continuing professional development (Woodward, 2007).
References
- Allen, Gemmy (1998). “Supervision.”
- ISI e-Learning Solutions (2007). “Basics of Effective Communications” Web.
- Pratt, Mary (2007). “No More Job Reviews.” Strategies & Tactics. Computerworld.
- University of Colorado at Boulder (2007). “Resolving Workplace Conflict.”
- Woodward, Nancy Hatch. “Uplifting Employees.” HRMagazine 52 (8), 81-85.