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Why Supervisors Suffer

Guest post by: Robert Whipple

Article Overview: I always considered the job of the Shift Supervisor to be the most challenging position in my organization. This article describes why being a supervisor is no picnic and gives some advice on how upper management can lighten the load.

Why Supervisors Suffer

The position of first line supervisor is probably the most difficult position in any company. There are several reasons for this as follows:

1. Front Lines - The first line supervisor represents the company to all the individuals reporting to him or her. The interpretation of corporate policies and applying them to daily activity is the supervisor's responsibility. This is an incredible load in itself, because the number of weird situations and combinations of individual personalities makes it impossible to predict what issues must be dealt with on a daily basis.

2. Management Rep - The supervisor is a representative of the management point of view, but often this person has recently graduated from the hourly ranks. This means there is a conversion going on that needs to be assimilated. Often there is not enough training and reinforcement to support new supervisors, so they "sink or swim" on their own.

3. Way overworked - As globalization has pushed organizations to cut back on staff, the number of employees per supervisor has grown steadily. It used to be a rule of thumb that a good load for any supervisor was 8-15 people. Now it is common to see supervisors trying to handle 50-60 individuals. That becomes a problem just to be able to interface with all employees daily.

4. Dead end - The supervisor position in many companies is the final step that someone without a 4 year degree can attain. There may be a rare exception, but the general rule is that the higher level jobs and higher paying positions go to the more educated individuals. For a young supervisor, this means a long time sitting in the same position.

5. Shift responsibility - Often supervisors are heading up shifts of work that are on duty at all hours of the day and night. When things go wrong in the middle of the night, all the pressure to make correct decisions in an emergency fall on the shoulders of the supervisor.

6. Focus problems - Supervisors must be totally up to speed on the workings at higher levels in order to interpret policies correctly. This means that supervisors not only have to keep things running smoothly on the shop floor, they must also participate in numerous higher level briefings and meetings that might be considered distractions from the immediate tasks in order to guide the future correctly.

With all these, and many more pressures on supervisors, you can see it is a very difficult job. The antidote is that upper management should focus energy and praise on these people. They should make sure there is a great development program for supervisors and a good mentoring program to allow them to grow in skill. Also, upper management should consider these people for the higher positions based on their demonstrated skills and tolerance for an incredible workload.

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Article Tags: Group leader, leadership, manager, shift work, Supervisor, trust



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