Tag Archives: supervision

Great Teams

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Getting the most out of yourself and others.

Perspective is nearly everything when it comes to accelerating your performance, or someone else’s.  Human motivation is more art than science.  No matter what I believe or expect about the natural laws, for example, my opinion has no impact. Gravity does what gravity does, no matter what I think.

Human motivation is different. What you believe about yourself, or others, has an impact on your behavior or someone else’s behavior. The self-fulfilling prophecy does not apply to natural laws, but does apply to us lowly humans.  This is both good and bad.

We are unfinished beings.  We are deflected and controlled, to some degree, by self-talk and the opinion of others.  We evolve, or de-evolve, every day according to circumstances and conditions. This is why negative self-talk and overly critical communication with others is so destructive.

The difference in effect between leadership and supervision is so profound in this dimension. Leadership instills value in others, and their work, thereby increasing their motivation to follow. Great leaders focus this value, not on themselves, but on the individual and the business or project. Leadership starts with a commonly accepted value proposition and “leads” others to fulfillment.

Great teams have three creative qualities:

Creative Abrasion:  Different experiences lead to different points of view.  None may be completely correct, none are completely wrong.  Folks need to listen to others and to have others listen to them, in a safe environment.  In other words, agree to disagree.  Not being able to listen to others leads to the “emperor in his new clothes” syndrome.  Look this up if you don’t know what I am talking about.

Creative Agility:  The ability to test and refine our processes and ideas.  To align our creative effort toward the ultimate objective.  For us, this is fulfilling customer expectations, which leads to customer retention and profit.  It simply is not about us.  We are not at the center of things, the customer is.

Creative Resolution:  Making a decision.  In most cases the best solution winds up being a combination of several solution ideas.  When done right, we hear the word “we” a lot more often than the word “I”.

All of this boils down to a relatively simple concept.  Successful innovation requires a sense of community.  Working together nearly always leads to success.  Working as individuals nearly always leads to failure (or at best, limited success).

What does this mean to you?  See the operation of the business and its functions as a dance that requires partners. Find ways to work together. Focus on how we are doing with satisfying internal and external customers. Quit focusing on other people’s performance and think on how to improve yours.

Great teams are made up of a group of individuals who have a shared vision, an expectation of success, an understanding of their role, and are focused on execution.

Leadership vs Supervision As reprinted from http://MetaOpsMagazine.com

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Leadership vs. Supervision  As reprinted from http://MetaOpsMagazine.com

LIVONIA, Mich., June 13, 2013 — Making leaders, not rulers

Every manager maintains a balance of supervisory and leadership skills. This balance is impacted by the personality of the manager and the situation in which they are operating. These skill sets complement each other in a healthy work environment, but are in conflict in an unhealthy one.

Leadership and supervision are concepts best defined by the source of their authority to act, or their power source. A supervisor gets his or her authority, or power, from the position power provided by the organization. This is a top-down flow of power. Supervisors manage from a command-and-control paradigm that is rooted in the ongoing inspection of performance.

Conversely, leaders get their power from those who are willing to follow. This power can flow from anywhere and anyone. Leaders manage from a facilitator perspective that is rooted in the expectation of performance.

Building on this, there are formal and informal power structures within any organized group of people. Formal power is typically based upon command and control (supervision). Informal power is typically rooted in leadership. These two power structures co-exist within the ebb and flow of people and their perceptions. Sometimes the same person or group of persons wield both types of power at the same time. This typically leads to a workspace with low stress and high productivity. When this is not the case, the formal and informal power “centers of gravity” are found in different persons and tension is created between the two.

In successful military systems, the authority and power structure is very organized and centralized. Conformity is both demanded and enforced, and there is a great need for authority figures to be both a supervisor and a leader. This is why military officer training programs emphasize leadership skills. The tension that results from different formal and informal power centers, within a military group, can be fatal.

On the other hand, look at the typical athletic team. Here, the formal and informal power foci are found in different people. The coach, for example, wields the formal power and a player—functioning as team captain—may wield the informal power. This works because the coach is not out on the field of play as a participant. The team needs a leader “in the game” to carry out the strategy.

Now, how do these power structures apply in the typical workplace? First, the relationship between leadership and supervision is situational and the balance between the two is dynamic. It is usual and normal to find both the formal and informal power being wielded by a single person in one situation and wielded by different persons in the next. In a healthy workplace, there is a high level of trust and cooperation between formal and informal power, which results in a high level of delegated empowerment. In the healthy workplace, productivity is typically high while conflict is minimized.

In an unhealthy workplace, trust is weak or absent. The relationship between the formal and informal power structure is based in conflict. Productivity is typically low and conflict replaces empowerment.

In order to be a truly motivating, inspiring and effective leader, develop and nurture the qualities that are found in good leaders. You must be a good listener who is also capable of motivating his or her team. Knowing your employees’ names is essential for respect given and received. Additionally, credit must be given and received where it is due. Following these guidelines will help you develop into a team leader who is both trusted and deemed trustworthy, and that’s the true mark of leadership.

 

WaltM PhotoWalter McIntyre has spent 30 years in the business world, holding positions from apprentice to Vice President. Throughout that time he has worked in both the manufacturing and transactional sides of business operation. He is currently the Chief Operations Officer and General Manager of Nationwide Parts Distributors in Jacksonville, Florida.

 

Walt earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Greenville College, Greenville, Illinois.  He earned a master’s degree in engineering management from the University of South Florida in Tampa. He is a certified Six Sigma Black Belt, Master Black Belt and Master Trainer.

 

Walt’s motto is, “Have fun learning, have fun doing, have fun sharing.” He can be found on Twitter @waltmcintyre, at his website: leanmeanprocessimprovement.com, or by email at walt.m@att.net.

Walt McIntyre, COO and general manager of Nationwide Parts Distributors in Jacksonville, Florida, presented an analysis of supervision, power and how to turn “rulers” into true leaders in an article published in MetaOps MagEzine, http://metaopsmagazine.com.

 

About Walt McIntyre:

 

McIntyre has spent 30 years in the business world, holding positions from apprentice to Vice President. Throughout that time he has worked in both the manufacturing and transactional sides of business operation. McIntyre earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Greenville College, Greenville, Illinois, and a master’s degree in engineering management from the University of South Florida in Tampa. He is a certified Six Sigma Black Belt, Master Black Belt and Master Trainer.

 

About MetaOps, Inc.:

 

MetaOps, Inc. helps companies increase their market share and profit through a PeopleCentrix™ approach. The company’s team of world-class experts brings an extensive toolkit that helps management see problems and opportunities while teaching staff how to make dramatic improvements and drive sustainable improvement. Learn how to transform your own organization, boosting efficiency and increasing market share, by visiting MetaOps, Inc. on the web.

 

 

The 5 Deadly Sins of Management

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The Know It All

The “Know It All” supervisor routinely challenges and overturns subordinate’s decisions. This approach to management will de-motivate others in the group, making them not want to make decisions or to make them behind the supervisor’s back. Supervisors that work this way will willingly take over decision making and, as a result, sub-optimize the work group.
I have had a supervisor that would always decide opposite my own decisions. It got so ridiculous that I began to present my own opinions opposite of what I really wanted in order to get him to decide the way I wanted him to. This creates a toxic work environment.

The Critic

This supervisor does not know what they want, but are quick criticize other people’s work. The work place culture, in this case, takes on an unsafe feel. Employees are not willing to act on their own initiative, thereby avoiding criticism. In the end the subordinates begin to avoid work that can wind up in the supervisor’s hands or go behind the supervisor’s back. Communication is compromised and the work group is sub-optimized.
A good example is when a supervisor asks a subordinate to write a memo and then precedes to wordsmith it. The memo, which should only take a few minutes to write, winds up taking hours. The memo gets bounced between the supervisor and the subordinate multiple times and becomes something written by committee. I once experienced a situation where, after I incorporated my supervisor’s comments, he began to edit and criticize his own work. When I pointed this out, he denied asking for the edits. After a few of these experiences, I made him give me bullet points or write the first draft himself. This worked pretty well.

Introduction of Politics or Religion

In our current political environment there are many employees voicing their political and religious opinions. As long as this is kept “off line” and separate from the work effort there are few problems. When a supervisor introduces these opinions in an “on line” fashion, the work place is made to feel unsafe or maybe even hostile to persons who disagree. The result is employee withdraw from interaction, resentment or arguments.
Managers cannot allow the mass distribution of political or religious email, signage, or dialog in forced attendance venues. The work place will become politically or religiously charged and use up emotional and intellectual bandwidth that is better used in completing work.
When explaining this to my staff I simply tell them that this type of communication is based upon two or more idiots talking about other idiots they know nothing about. A total waste of time when on the job.

Manipulation

Quid pro quo, lying, withholding information (also lying) are forms of manipulation. Supervisors who manage this way have moved the focus of the work effort away from the customer. The work group begins to work to support these side agreements or misinformation instead of producing a quality product or service.
An example would be using quotas to pay bonuses. I consulted with a steel mill that had a product quality issue. What I found was that the production, inspection, and shipping work groups all had the same quota based bonus system. Everything was tied to volume. In order to get a bonus, the production group would tell the inspection group what product to not inspect. The inspection group complied because their bonus was tied with the same criteria (volume) that rewarded the production group. The shipping group would see bad product and ship it anyway for the same reason. This is a great example of teamwork gone bad.

Serial Entrepreneur

This supervisor has a new idea every five minutes and is trying to implement them just as fast. This creates a reactive work space where the focus is on implementing change without analysis. This usually happens when the line between a business’s owners (or senior management) and its operations management become blurred.
The result is operational processes that are not in control. No one knows what change created what result or what impact. Changes or experiments get piggy backed upon each other creating a confusion.
The fix is to document the ideas and plan experiments to test their usefulness. This way, everyone knows what is going on, and the baseline process flow is predictable and the customer is protected.