Poof! You're a boss.
 Subscribe to the Three Star Leadership Blog |
| The Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. |
| Follow me on Twitter |
| For weekly tips and resources pointers, check Wally's Three Star Leadership Letter |
| Find out more about having Wally speak to your company or convention. |
| Find out more about Wally's coaching services. |
 |
Most people who get promoted to a boss's role today get promoted because they were good individual contributors. Then we give them virtually no training and expect them to be productive in their new role within hours. We offer them only catch-as-catch-can support.
Is it any wonder we have so many bosses who don't like their job and aren't good at it? Bosses are the key to productivity and morale. So let's do it right.
Pick people for the job who've at least shown some evidence of the ability to do it well. Look for men and women who like helping others succeed. Look for men and women who are willing to talk to others about performance or behavior. Look for men and women who are willing to make decisions and be accountable for results.
Give them some basic skills. I'm not talking about how to fill out all those forms or master the policy manual. Give them some basic skills for setting clear and reasonable expectations, then following up to assure performance. Help them understand their new role. Help them learn to direct their own development.
Help them make the transition. It won't happen overnight. Figure a year to eighteen months. There should be ongoing training.
Consider something similar to the police field training model. There, experienced officers, who've learned to be training officers, are assigned to help new officers make the transition from academy to effective work on the street. Why not Transition Training Supervisors with a title and come extra bucks and recognition?
Structure peer support so every boss gets it. There are some things you can only discuss with peers.
Create options for promotion that don't involve being a boss. Make it possible for people who assume supervisory roles to give them up if they find it's simply awful. If you don't, they'll be simply awful bosses.
Boss's Bottom Line
Many of the things above are also above your pay grade. But you can help men and women on your team make a good judgment about whether being a boss is for them. You can help them prepare themselves for the job. And you can be their mentor even when they've moved into their new job.
Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.
Categories: Promotion,Boss,supervision,Management,Leadership
Tags: Promotion Supervision Boss Management Leadership
This is very true. Too often people think if someone is an expert at something then they should be in charge of those who aren't. The best sales rep isn't necessarily going to have any supervisory/management skills, but how often are they given those roles after proving he/she excels in the field? Often you will find this when it comes to education as well. In college, you will have people who are highly-educated or experts in a particular subject matter but they lack skills in educating others and do a poor job in teaching the students. Just because you can DO doesn't mean you can TEACH or MANAGE. Of course some are good at all three and that's when magic happens. I agree with you that there should be transitions or at least evaluations specific to the needed skills before promoting someone to a leadership position. Leaders should earn their positions based on a proven ability to lead others, not as a reward for excellence in a current job.
Reply to this
Thanks for stopping by and commenting, Lynn. It sure would be nice if we looked at a person's career for examples of leadership skills. Instead, it's "You're the best plumber. You be the crew chief."
Reply to this
Hi Wally,
Thanks for your continuing efforts to make the case.
It is both a responsibility and a privelege for a manager to choose the right person for their first gig as "boss", and then to help them succeed by coaching and mentoring them. The work world is too complex for a boss to expect a new manager to learn on the job and "suck it up" on their own.
Its sad that many external coaches are called in a year or two after a person has begun their first assignment as a boss -only to do the work that should have been done within the organization in the first place.
Reply to this
Good point, Mary Jo. One of the nicest things that anyone said to me from my "corporate period" was when he was referring to the people who'd come up under me and got promoted. "You know," he told me, "Your shadow still falls across this organation."
Reply to this
A quote comes to my mind when I read the post (though I dont remember the exact words) "Others may do things right, but leaders do the right things."
people who are promoted in a leadership position often do not know what are the right things. Leadership is a totally different world and those who are new to it should be guided because in most cases, they don't know what they don't know.
Reply to this
What you have written is 100 percent correct. The steps involved in employing and getting the better out of him are arranged in an order. Beginning with finding person with some ability to provide him some basic training to wait until he shows up the transition potential your steps are all inclusive.
It is must read for all those who are beginning a business.
Reply to this
Wally, glad I found your blog - growth leadership is something I have always been fascinated with. So much of the difference between being a great manager who facilitates growth and one who doesn't is dependent exactly on what you have described - the ability not only to do the job well, but also to empower others to do it well.
The best growth leaders and bosses look inside - to the people they already have - and figure out exactly how to maximize their output.
I just read a book, "The Catalyst", which deals with being a growth leader even during hard economic times. The authors had a whole section on the ability of leaders to "reframe" ideas - thinking through the customers mind oftentimes - to make growth happen within organizations. One of my favorite growth books I've read in a while.
Glad I found the blog! I'll keep reading.
Reply to this
Thanks for coming by and for the kind words. I don't know the book you mention, but I'll be sure to find out more.
Reply to this
Great post. In my experience, the hardest transition that I've seen people make is the one that people make into their first leadership position. You hit the nail on the head about promoting great individual performers. However, that's the key...they performed well "as an individual." Now, all of a sudden, they are actually "responsible" for the actions of other people. Alot of people just have a hard time (at first) grasping the concept that if Jimmy does something stupid then they also get in trouble. Why? Because they are responsible for him, and his actions / inactions.
Enjoyed it,
-Kyle
Reply to this
Thanks for coming by and sharing, Kyle. My take is that there are two transitions that are equally hard. The first is from individual contributor to boss and the other is the one to CEO. In both cases the man or woman making the move enters an experience that's very different from before and where the support group also changes.
Reply to this
More excellent advice, Wally. I especially like your first point.
The paradox of your advice is the good managers are already doing what you recommend, and the bad ones probably never will.
Which leads me to a question for you - do you think bad bosses read these blogs and other materials on how to improve, or are we preaching to the choir?
Thanks!
Bret
Reply to this
I would imagine that the number of bosses that recognize themsleves as "bad" would be low.
I suspect that individuals who would fall in the category of a "bad boss" would read a blog post such as this one and say "That's not me!"
They may even tell someone else about it and not even identify it with their own actions.
I'll admit that I have no factual data to support this but it's just a gut feeling I have.
Reply to this
I agree with you on all of that Audley, but, as I said in reply to Bret, I believe in redemption. It's fiendishly hard to have a clear view of who you are and what you do. We human beings tend to judge ourselves by our intent and others by results.
We are awful at self-critique. That's why I put methods for self-critique in the very first trainings I do for new bosses. I want to help them develop the habit of "after-action critique."
But having said all that, I also know that reading a single article or blog post or listening to a single audio program can be the trigger for a person to get started on doing things differently.
Reply to this
Good questions, Bret. I think the good ones are more likely to read and self-critique than the bad ones. But I also believe in redemption. I've witnessed too many coaching clients and heard from too many readers who took something I wrote or said and used it as the pry bar to get inside their own head and imagine things differently. That's who I write for.
Reply to this
Good questions, Bret. I think the good ones are more likely to read and self-critique than the bad ones. But I also believe in redemption. I've witnessed too many coaching clients and heard from too many readers who took something I wrote or said and used it as the pry bar to get inside their own head and imagine things differently. That's who I write for.
Reply to this
Wally, you're also writing for us: students of leadership. I used to have these pre-conceived (read: naive) notions of what it's like to be a "boss". Reading your blog allows me to self-evaluate as it challenges me to learn to see and think things differently.
Reply to this
Thank you for those kind words, Maria. I hope you find this blog helpful and I also hope you'll check many of the other excellent resources on the web and elsewhere.
If you're thinking about a career path that includes being responsible for the performance of a group, I strongly encourage you to try out the role first, perhaps in a volunteer assignment or a task force. That way you'll get an idea of whether it's a good fit.
Reply to this
Thank you for your suggestion Wally. I do find this blog both helpful and insightful.
I've been wondering how much of an effective leadership is "innate", and how much of it is learned. Perhaps the truly effective leaders are both born with the talent to lead that was complemented with the right training. However, could someone who is not necessarily a born leader lead effectively when armed with a determination for excellence? Can it be a "good fit" when one endeavours to make it work? Or, is mediocrity an imminent likelihood of such a "forced" venture?
Reply to this
There are a lot of differing opinions on that one. Here's mine, based on reading a lot and working with a lot of people in "leadership" positions over three decades.
There are "born" leaders in the same sense that there are "born" cooks, cobblers, and cornet players. In other words, some people emerge into adulthood with talents that make it more likely they will do well. It helps if you start out with enough smarts and you've got a high level of emotional intelligence and if you have some talent at communicating.
I look for three things. Can you decide and be held accountable? Will you talk to others about their performance or behavior? Do you like helping others succeed? I don't think we can teach those things, though we can make you better at them. Being a boss is a very hard slog if you can't answer positively to those questions.
We can teach you techniques for pretty much everything else, BUT (it's a big but) you will learn most of what you need to know on the job. That means you have to master the skills of self-critique and getting and using feedback. You'll be more effective more rapidly if you do.
That's also why you should learn about and take to heart the fact that role models and mentors can help you develop faster. And it's why it helps for you to seek out developmental assignments.
Learning about leading/managing/supervising is a lot like learning a complex physical skill, such as dance. There are things you can practice "deliberately," but most of the time learning and performance happen at the same time.
The last thing I'll share is that the exciting thing about the craft of being a boss is that you will never be done learning and developing. There will never be a day when you can say, "OK, now I can quit learning this stuff." Every day, every person, and every assignment will be different enough that you have to keep paying attention and getting better.
Reply to this
Hey Wally,
I think your article is bang on.
The biggest challenge that overnight bosses face is that they aren't always given the necessary tools and resources to do their job effectively but still are expected to produce.
Leaving them to rely on the trial and error method. They can only hope that not too much damage is created in the wake of inevitable mistakes.
Reply to this
Thanks for the kind words, Audley. I think you're right about the basic challenge being that they don't have a good skillset. That's aggravated by perhaps not being suited to being a boss.
We toss them in the water and let them sink or swim. That would be bad enough if it was just the new boss. But many times when they sink, they take the team down with them.
Reply to this
Great post, Wally. I like the trasition training supervisor idea. That would be such a rewarding role by itself - but why not pay them for it as well?
Reply to this
The "field training" concept has worked well for police agencies since Glenn Kaminsky developed it in San Jose in the 70s. I've never seen it done for supervisors, either in police work or private industry, but I think it would work, especially in larger companies.
Reply to this
Your post hit the bulls-eye. Let me suggest another trait to look for when picking a manager: Find someone who manages themselves well.
Charisma isn't enough. Desire isn't enough. Ability isn't enough. Past results aren't enough. A manager who can't plan and manage (control) their own behavior will be terrible at managing how others plan and behave.
Reply to this
Very true, Steve, I couldn't agree more. I am always harping on the executive leaders I coach that if they want to be able to effectively influence others to follow them, they must lead themselves first. Their behaviors must be congruent with what comes out of their mouth. Congruency is a core value of leadership in my book. Anything else creates cynicism and resentment. Great Post, again, Wally, thanks for starting this discusion! Skip
Reply to this
Thanks, Skip. Capt. James Ayers, the best CO I had in the Marines, said that "There is no leadership without leadership by example." He meant that if you're in a leadership role, people will follow your example, good or bad. If you set a good example, good things follow.
Reply to this
Good suggestion. John Maxwell has been saying for years that the natural progression is "lead yourself," "lead others," "leading leaders" and "developing leaders.
Reply to this
I could have used information like this before my last job where I was appointed as a sales manager with 4 staff for the first time. If i had had such help in the past it would have made the transition much easier. thanks for the tips
Reply to this
Great article! Thank you very much!
regards,
Emanuel
Reply to this