Tips for the new Supervisor

Becoming a supervisor for the first time can be an unnerving experience. You may feel as if you have been dumped into a trackless desert where people await your leadership before anyone has handed you a map. Here are some signposts:

Be yourself

Do not try to be your predecessor or to emphasize your difference from your predecessor. You can only be confident that your center will hold in times of pressure if you remain yourself.

Start slowly

Do not be a “new broom” that immediately tries to sweep away all previous procedures. Reassure your staff that it will be “business as usual” at least until you get the lay of the land and have a clearer idea of what is needed.

Gather information

Observe, ask questions, be a good listener, solicit input, let people know you are open to being informed of problems.

Be visible

Move around among your staff. Find ways to get to know them. If necessary, create reasons for contact so that you can establish good two-way communication. Whenever possible, have an open door policy.

Review written materials, policies and procedures 

Do this as early as possible. Identify priorities, put yourself in a position to know what needs to be done without having to depend on others to give you information that is actually already available to you.

Use your boss and seek a seasoned mentor

Do not use these sources to get information that is available in training materials and procedures manuals that you will be expected to have read. Turn to your human resources (note that does not necessarily mean “Human Resources Department,” but resources who are human beings) for information that may not be available writing. Particularly, get clarification on the extent of your authority and your responsibility, where the ball is yours to carry, and where it must be handed off. Also, try to become aware of any ‘political’ problems or inter-departmental concerns without being influenced by or involved in the gossip cesspool.

Emphasize teamwork

You are not a lone ranger, and your staff are not peons. Early in the game they probably know more than you about many aspects of the job. While you will need to establish your authority, you also need to empower your staff as members of the team.

Be evenhanded, fair, and consistent

Discover for yourself the strengths and weaknesses of your staff. Beware the eager beaver staff member who tries to fill you in on everything and everyone on your first few days. The information s/he gives may be filtered and self-serving.

Promise – and provide – good communication in both directions

Let your staff know that you will keep them informed whenever possible, and build trust that you will avoid surprises whenever it is in your power. Encourage them to seek clarification when necessary. Let your staff know that you care about them, and, above all, that when they speak with you they are heard.

Wherever it is within your power, make your own decisions

You are the new kid on the block, and people may expect to be able to influence you. Be clear that when you seek information and advice, you are not handing over the reins. You are simply gathering additional data for use in YOUR decision-making process.Do not give away your power, but do not abuse it either.

And good luck!

Diana Gardner Robinson

What is the most useful thing you have ever learned from a risk-taking experience?

From time to time I get questions addressed to me via Quora. Some are interesting, some are not. I rather liked the thoughts that were prompted by this one. It led me to think about risk-taking and non-risk-taking. Do we learn more from the risks we take? Or from the risks we do not take?

I suspect that it depends on where we start.

Risk-Takers

Some people seem to be natural risk-takers from the day they learn to walk – or before. (These are the ones whose parents’ hair is probably prematurely grey.) Jumping from great heights, leaping into canals with no knowledge of what may be under the water surface, experimenting with the new and the unknown… you know who you are…

Others may be at the other extreme. They fear the unknown, have need to feel certain of the outcome before beginning a project, hesitate to be in the company of people whose looks or lifestyles are very different from their own. They seem to need to feel safe and see uncertainty as unsafe.

I took the rather large risk of leaving behind everything that was familiar, safe, and dear to me when I left England to come to the United States as a legal immigrant. I came with my then husband. Neither of us had jobs. Neither of us knew anyone in our destination city. The only contact we had was an introduction from his pastor to a local pastor. (That was very helpful in the earliest days, but we very soon branched out on our own.)

There have been times, both before and since making that choice, that I chose not to take a risk. As always, there have been pluses and minuses over the years. Overall, I have many more regrets over the risks I did not take (particularly those when I was young) than over those that I did take. That is pretty much par for the course. In my database of over 2,000 quotations, every one that mentions “risk” encourages a willingness to take, rather then recoil from taking them.

(Which, I should add, does not mean that I encourage people to jump into a canal without knowing what is below. Some inquiry, when possible, is always advisable.)

Getting back to the question – what did I learn from taking that risk and the many I have taken since? The main thing that I learned is that I am a competent human being and I need to trust myself and my judgement, even when I am in unknown territory.

And I trust the universe.

Decisions may be difficult for many reasons. There may be too many pros and cons, making a balanced decision difficult. It may be that we simply don’t care. Or that we haven’t thought the whole thing through carefully. Here are ten ways to make a decision, growing in complexity from the totally superficial to the deeply considered:

1. Think about what you want to do. Get the options crystal clear in your mind.

2. Toss a coin.

3. Toss a coin. As you observe how it falls, check your gut feelings. Do you feel pleased, or do you wish you hadn’t made the toss? This will tell you which way you REALLY want to go (and you are absolutely NOT bound by the fall of the coin).

4. Pray, meditate, seek inspiration.

5. Make a list of the pros and cons of BOTH taking the action you are considering and of NOT taking that actions. Include your positive and negative feelings about the decision as pros or cons. Weight the balance.

6. Discuss your options with trusted and objective other people. (These may not necessarily be your closest friends.)

7. If you need more information, do research on the Internet or at a library.

8. If your decision involves choosing between A and B and both are important to you, seek a synthesis of the two. It could be that with such a synthesis you may not have to reject either. (As an example, I remember a woman who was torn between her passion for dancing and her deep interest in religion. She believed that the two were mutually exclusive – until she discovered the power of sacred dance, and found a church that included it in their liturgy. She was happily able to combine the two.)

9. Create a decision tree. This involves asking yes-or-no questions at every point. For example, the first question might be: Do I want to make this change? Then: Am I willing to make the effort to make the change? And so down the tree until a final decision, usually something about timing and resources, is answered.

10. Lastly check back over the decision tree again. At every point of decision, check the relevant decisions and actions and weigh them against your gut feelings, your values, your purpose and your vision. Only if all of these are in agreement with the decision you are inclined to make should you move forward.

One last suggestion… never forget the importance of #5. Always include the pluses and minuses of NOT making a change, as well as of making that change. Sometimes a craving for the new may lead to impulsively giving up more than you have recognized. Or not.

I was walking through my home village, on a route I had followed for years, at least three times a week. Yet I was feeling my way along, with my hands on someone’s fence. I knew where I was only by the texture and form of the fence, and even then I was uncertain…

There’s not much difference between fog and a low-flying cloud. Normally one can see some feet ahead, at least one’s hand in front of one’s face. When it comes to smog, though, everything is different. Smog is fog combined with air pollutants. It can incapacitate those with lung problems, and cause lung problems for those who previously did not.   

It can also get one very, very lost. Although not in London, I was having my first experience of a London pea-souper.

Efforts along “clean air” lines have, in much of the world, ended what in London were called “pea soupers” – smog so thick that you can see through it about as well as you can see through pea soup. However, recent attempts to limit or overturn the clean air laws concern me. Let me explain some of my experience with London pea soupers, which, occasionally, would spread 50 to 60 miles beyond the city.

The first paragraph, above, involved a time when I was trying to get to choir practice one evening. (I was a teenager, and choir practice at least got me out of the house one evening a week.) The walk usually took less than ten minutes, and I knew the road like the back of my hand… or so I thought. Yet that evening the smog was so thick that I became totally disoriented. Yes, I really did have to feel my way along the fences and hedges that fronted each of my neighbors’ homes. Usually, in the dark of night I could just see where my hand was if it was in front of my face. In this case, in the early evening, I could not.

I got to the church – and back – but the experience certainly did not prepare me for what I encountered when I moved to London (one of several cities sometimes referred to as “the big smoke”) a few years later.

It happened that I counted among my London friends a number of people for whom cycling was the normal form of transportation and a way of life. I soon learned that, when needed, some of them also served as  guides when the London smog was so bad that the drivers of the tall, double-decked London buses could not see the curbs, the road surface lines, or the street signs that usually guided them. As thousands of commuters depended on the buses this was serious business.

Enter the cyclists.

Because they were nearer the ground than the bus drivers, and did not have reflections from the bus windows to distract their vision, they could just make out the street signs, the road surface signs, and the curbs in even the worst of smogs.  they would gather at London Bridge, and each would negotiate with a bus driver for a fee to guide him to his destination. Youngsters who had lived all their lives in the city, they knew the twists and turns, and each would ride ahead following the intended route, pausing occasionally to check with the bus driver to be sure that they were the driver thought they should be.  Away from the smogs, cyclists and bus drivers were hardly the best of friends, but in times of need they cooperated so that the buses and their impatient passengers got to their destinations, usually more than a little late, but they got there. Meanwhile the cyclists, most of them chronically short of cash, benefited in that way.

It sounds ridiculous now, but it happened.

Even more surreal was an incident involving the fire engine (as they are known in the U.K.). I was, very  cautiously, walking from the Underground (subway) station to my nearby home after work.  I heard the fire-siren behind me, approaching unusually slowly. A few moments later I saw a glow approaching. It turned out to surround a flaming torch held aloft by a man running along the white line in the middle of the road. Behind it, guided by the glow, was a fire engine on its way to a fire emergency, travelling only as fast as the man could run. As I wondered where the fire was, the vehicle stopped. The runner mounted the steps to a house to peer at the street number on the door. Having discovered how far along the road they were, and so how far they had yet to go, he returned to the white line and continued his journey, cautiously followed by the fire engine. I never did discover whether they got to the fire in time to save the house, or any lives.

Of course that happened many years ago. Today, our GPS systems would let us know how far along our journey we were, how far remained, and where to turn, should smogs occur again.  We would not have to rely on a running man with a flaming torch. What, though, would warn us of that other vehicle approaching from the other direction as each of us tried to rely on the hardly visible street signs, curb sides and surface signs? Let us hope that the “clean air” laws will survive efforts to dilute them, so that we will never again have to put that thought to the test.

(“Adventures with Smog” is part of a new series, “That was Then and This is Now” which will appear intermittently in addition to my regular (or irregular when life intrudes) blog. To sign up for my newsletter “Work in Progress”  see the form ti the right of the pages of this website.)