101 Ways To Supervise Like A Human Being
by
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73. Moving up to a new job is like breaking up: It’s hard to do.
We often get promoted because we are doing the job so well, maybe even better than anyone else can do it. We know the job, the ins and outs, and all the intricacies of it, and we get a lot of satisfaction out of doing it. When we went home at night, we felt good about the job we had done and were proud of it. We got praise and recognition for it, even from higher management. The best thing of all was that out of it we got a promotion to supervision! But now, where has all the fun gone? It''s even worse if we are now supervising the people we were working with, and in the group with the same production goals and procedures. Not the least of our problems is the fact that we no longter have us to depend on. We have lost the best worker, maybe replaced with a new or untrained person. To make it worse, we''re new to our job, too! But the organization still has the same expectations of our group!
90. Do the top priorities first, or prove they weren’t high priorities.
We have a tendency to dread, even avoid high, tough priority items. We dread that unpleasant upcoming interview; we hate to make that call to the unhappy client; we would like to avoid telling the boss we blew it. So, what we do is work on a lower priority item that’s easy, painless and maybe even fun. When we are finished, we have that feeling of accomplishment we like so well. The problem is that the high priority item didn’t go away and may have gotten harder to handle because of our procrastination. We need some serious soul searching to decide if we still want it to be a high item. Maybe we can let it go and it’ll disappear. That rarely happens, but it should be considered. Maybe we can break it into smaller, less painful bites. We could do part of the interview by telephone to get some advanced information; we could find something to offer the client temporarily; perhaps we could take the boss a solution at the same time we inform him or her that we messed up.
96. Be busy doing what needs to be done.
It’s not enough just to be busy; we need to be busy doing the things that need to be done right now. “I can’t get anything done because of all the interruptions,” is an admission that we’re busy doing someone else’s job. “Busy” is a nebulous word. We can be busy doing unimportant things, or we can be busy doing things that just absolutely have to be done. From the outsider’s point of view, we look just as busy either way. Only we can determine if our business is productive or wasted “busyness.” Some of us are easily distracted by minute details. We hit a snag, get tired of the grind, find something that’s interesting or needs to be done someday, or work on something that we’re just curious about. Without realizing how fast time is going by, we get more interested in this side issue; and before we know it, a major part of our available time has slipped away. We were “busy” all that time. We may even been unaware that we’d eased into doing something that wasn’t as important as the things we started out doing. Nevertheless, we’ve lost valuable time and have little to show for it. So we ask ourselves, “Am I doing the most important thing I should be doing right now?”
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About the Book
At last a book that has answers to the supervisor''s questions, and the supervisor gets to ask the questions! Martin M. Broadwell and Carol B. Dietrich, with a combined list of over a dozen books for supervisors and managers, have worked both together and separately for many years. They have conducted supervisory and leadership training all over the world. In "How to Supervise Like a Human Being" they used their combined experience as supervisors for nearly forty years and as trainers of supervisors and managers for over thirty years, and came up with the problems supervisors most often incur. Then they offered the answers to these problems in short, concise, easy to do understand explanations. Look for your dilemma in the Table of Contents and go to the solution page. You can read the entire book—but you don''t need to—to get your answers!
About the Author
Martin Broadwell began his twenty-year supervising career in the Bell System, leaving there as Director of Technical Training to devote full time to training supervisors and writing. Recognized by TRAINING Magazine as the "best supervisory trainer in the world" as they inducted him into the HRD Hall Of Fame in 1990, Martin was named the "Father of Training" by the University of Michigan''s Executive Management Institute, after twenty-seven consecutive years of conducting seminars there." Martin has written fourteen books on leadership, supervision and training, including Moving Up To Supervision, The New Supervisor, Making Experience Pay, Supervising Today, and Supervising Technical and Professional People. This new book ,101 Ways to Supervisor Like a Human Being, co-written with his daughter and training companion for over twenty years, Carol Broadwell Dietrich, is a unique handbook and condensation of several of their books.
Carol Broadwell Dietrich has been a supervisor with two airlines and served with Delta Airlines as an instructor/advisor when they integrated Pan American Airlines into their organization. She is president of Training Systems International, Inc., a firm that provides leadership development assistance for numerous company and governmental entities, including such varied organizations as Frito Lay, Winn-Dixie Foods, Mead Paper Company, Colonial Pipeline, Continental Airlines, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U. S. Army Corps of Engineers (Germany and the U. S.), and several computer service companies. She has spent over twenty years in consulting in the areas of needs analysis, program development, implementation and evaluation, primarily in leadership development. Carol is the coauthor of "The New Supervisor, How to Thrive in the First Year of Management." She also has written several articles for national magazines, and appeared on her own call-in talk show as a workplace consultant.