This month the initial results of an online poll of some 2000 Australian employees of their thoughts on leadership revealed that they didn’t think much of their Australian bosses.

I asked a senior healthcare executive for her thoughts on the most pressing development  needs of supervisors. She reflected on her experience.

“I would also suggest that many supervisors  “fear” providing any negative feedback, some have had training or attended courses but lack the support, mentorship, confidence and or courage to address the issues.  There is an inaccurate sense that it is best to ignore the behaviour hoping it will stop but as we all know the behaviour will generally escalate.  

So the question I ask then is how best to skill up the supervisor OR better yet how was the recruitment of the supervisor performed – there is a lot to be said about recruiting well in the beginning. 

 Planning and preparing to provide feedback is vital and often underperformed or just plan not done – I learnt by my errors and found that when I took the time to structure and plan what I needed to address with the staff member it was a lot easier plus focused on the identified issues.  Didn’t always go to plan but again was prepared to learn from those situations. 

 Supervisors also need to own their position responsibilities and learn to self-reflect in order to address their learning needs not always wait to be told.  My colleagues and I have often had the discussion!  If people (supervisors) are not held to account for either behaviour or performance targets etc then the majority do not self-manage – self managing I believe is also vital to performance. 

 It is like a cascading/ripple effect – then this all leads to the culture of the organisation. Performance of teams/units etc are most definitely a shared responsibility of the supervisor and the team members and I suspect that there are not many organisations that provide the clarity required and the expectations from the beginning ( I could be wrong though).”

What change could you make to developing your supervisors so they are better equipped to achieve results through others?