No matter what your professional path, you can’t accomplish all of the work you have to do entirely by yourself. You will need help-from colleagues, from higher-ups, and from underlings. You might need outside assistance from contractors or even competitors. The folks you’ll have to depend on are human, in all their creative, innovative, and flawed glory. While you may know your industry from the ground up, you cannot know everything, or every type of person you will encounter in your climb to success. The only absolute in that part of your role is: working with people is messy! It is also supremely rewarding.Now, here’s something they don’t tell you when you’re making career decisions: you’re going to need skills beyond the strengths that propelled you toward management in the first place. You can be a genius in your field, with all sorts of novel ideas that got you promoted. But you now must draw those novel ideas from others while encouraging their best performance. Maybe you’ve already gotten your feet wet by managing projects. If you want to stick around and move up the ladder, you’ll need to learn how to be a better manager of people. A better leader.Effective supervision shows leadership. Whether your job title is supervisor,
manager, or some trendier term, you’re a person who leads or wants to lead a team or group. If you’ve been doing this for a while and consider yourself just part of the team, consider how you got where you are: someone saw something in you. Maybe it was evidence of calmness under pressure, or a flash of solid brilliance in handling a conflict. Whatever it was, they saw you as a leader and moved you up the totem pole. Now you’re a supervisor. So, start acting super.If you are just starting with a professional management degree, keep in mind that your university coursework probably did not teach you much about becoming an effective leader. You’ll be expected to pick up leadership attributes by watching others and borrowing what seems to work for them. Make this your mission. You can’t stop learning now! The degree you have tacked on your wall does not compel people to follow you. The social and psychological skills you need may be completely foreign to you.Perhaps you did not attend a university and didn’t earn a degree. Take heart. Many skilled managers do not have a degree-and are terrific leaders. This is because they educated themselves, one way or another, on how to supervise work performance, manage group dynamics, and lead their teams. Don’t believe this can be done without college and earn you more money? I will show you how.
