Are you a Leader or a Supervisor?
This is well-worn topic but I’ve had some inspiration hit recently for distinguishing between the two: Leaders enable their team to excel at their job, supervisors tell their team to excel at their job. Enabling versus telling requires different skills and will yield very different results. Telling exceptional employees that you support them will always work because they are going to excel regardless. They’ve chosen the job they are in because it fits with their goals, and they’ll leave on good terms if they decide it is not the right path. So instead I want to focus on the great employees (I know talk about settling).
Great employees need leaders, not supervisors. Great employees want to do their jobs well, have a growth mindset with their professional development, expand their skill sets, and develop meaningful relationships with the people they work with. To help great employees be great employees, their environment needs to give them the tools needed to do all these things… their leaders need to enable their path to success. This is crucial to an organization because enabling great employees makes them stay and prevents the organization from having to hire “good enough” employees.
Enabling employees to do their job well
There is always a core skill and responsibility set for an employee. Mastering these core responsibilities are not enough to shine, but it is crucial for employees to be able to execute well on these core competencies. Executing well on core competencies breeds positive health of the organization and the positive performance of the employee. It is a leader’s job to make sure an employee has the tools to excel at the job’s core competency set. This could be in the form of the equipment, software, trainings, processes, and more. If every day is a battle to get the basic job done well, a great employee will struggle to shine.
Enabling growth mindsets and expanded skill sets
The only constant is change – it’s important for each employee to understand this right alongside the organization. The best way to successfully navigate change is through having a growth mindset culture and expectations for expanding skill sets. Growth mindsets are in work cultures can be achieved a variety of ways, below are a few of my favorites.
- Focusing on the root cause of problems rather than symptoms. For example, if an employee is having a performance issue with a specific task, ask them why they are having problems rather than telling them they are underperforming and telling them they need to improve. Chances are they already know they are underperforming and are unable to fix it on their own. It’s also possible that other employees are having the same issue.
- Discuss failures in specific terms rather than vague terms. If an employee royally futzed something up, don’t ambiguously have a talk with the whole group about how things need to change because of this “incident.” Instead have that person own the mistake and discuss what went wrong with the rest of the relevant group. Royal futzings are rarely just the fault of one person, so don’t treat it as such. The individual in question should own their responsibility in what went wrong, but the other parties that contributed to it should also step up to claim their role. This identifies the weaknesses in the team as a whole and facilitates growth.
- Celebrate each other’s strengths, and support each other’s weaknesses. There is a lot packaged into this small request, but the core of doing this effectively is an honest internal an external dialogue. Employees first need to be able to accurately gauge what they are good at and trust their strengths. Then employees need to be able to identify where their weaknesses are and reach out for support. This is so much easier said than done, so the key is an open external dialogue facilitated by leaders. A great tool for facilitating an open dialogue is routine peer review sessions. This helps employees learn to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their peers as well as validate their beliefs about their own strengths and weaknesses.
The complement to maintaining a growth mindset culture is incentivizing skills growth. Employees should be incentivized to expand their skill sets to bolster their strengths and improve their weaknesses. Incentives are soft and hard: for example recognizing an employee that got a new certification or learned a new tool, or having a pay initiative linked to certain skill based accomplishments.
Enable meaningful relationships
By no means do I expect coworkers to be friends (although often they are), but meaningful work relationships can absolutely be the norm. An environment for meaningful work relationships simply means creating a trusting environment. Understanding strengths and weaknesses of peers already sets the stage for a trusting environment since employees learn to trust in each other’s strengths and trust each other to support their weaknesses.
Do you consider yourself a supervisor? Do you also consider yourself a leader? I’d love to hear your thoughts in comments or in person on what the difference is between the two. What are your thoughts on growth mindsets in the workplace? And open communication around strengths and weaknesses? I touched a slew of different topics on this post and would really appreciate feedback around it. I’m always open to discuss in person as well as digitally! Twitter: @crystalvharvey and LinkedIn.
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