The Return Of The Mentor

Strategies For Workplace Learning

Brian J. Caldwell, Earl M.A. Carter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781135721503
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This is a book on the good practice of mentoring written by scholars and practitioners in education, health and industry. It considers the roles of the mentor-mentee in changing workplaces affected by external forces including technology, the economy and the dismantling of middle- management structures, and offers guidelines for those who seek good practice, and the nurturing of the individual in a caring and collaborative culture.; A brief history of mentoring and its subsequent usage is presented, with special attention paid to the gender issues. New concepts such as "shadowing" and "reflective interviewing" are introduced and explained, and strategies are presented in such a way that they can be applied and adapted in any setting. The whole process, therefore, aims to empower the professional in a school, university or industrial level, and with others, towards a more effective and perceptive practice.; All those involved in education and training of individuals at a school, college or industrial level training will find this useful.

The Industry Culture

8
From Cop to Coach: The Shop Floor Supervisor of the 1990s

Frank McMahon

Introduction

A dictionary tells us that a supervisor is one who looks after and directs work or workers.¹ The supervisor ‘oversees’ or ‘superintends’. The supervisor in Australia is typically the first line ‘staff position, i.e. usually a non-award employee who is in charge of a group of workers. Supervisors in the private sector usually do not belong to a union, but those in the public sector are often members of the relevant union.

In workplace reform projects undertaken by the writer over the past five years the issue of the future role of the first line supervisor has been a predominant one.² Some firms have responded to this debate about the future role of the supervisor by eliminating this level of management altogether, and handing the work planning and control functions back to the work team. In those instances where the work team has had the skills, knowledge and motivation to take on this new role, it has worked well. On other occasions, however, the work group has not had the skills to carry out the additional work required and do their own jobs as well, and the experiment has failed. What is agreed by most observers is that if the supervisor position is to be retained, there should be fewer of them, and there needs to be some fundamental changes in their role.

There are many reasons for this desire to change their role. The identification of total quality management as a prerequisite for survival in the 1980s has probably prompted the realisation that you cannot inspect quality into a product or service; it has to be built in by the operator. In many work-places additional indirect staff were appointed as quality controllers, and supervisors were also expected to monitor quality. Clearly you cannot have a supervisor for each operator and operate efficiently. There is a need, therefore, to develop a different relationship in the workplace. Slowly but surely the realisation that this philosophy also applied to cost efficiency, environmental performance, throughput, timely delivery to customers, etc. led to a dramatic change of attitude: you have to skill your people to do their job and then trust them to do it. Help them do their job better; do not control them to the extent that they will do nothing unless they are told to do so or without reference to a higher authority.

If workers saw supervisors as industrial ‘cops’ interested only in control and speaking with them only when they got something wrong, the culture would never be a productive one. Supervisors/work team leaders had to send out different messages. We do not need industrial cops but rather coaches who will communicate and consult with their work team. In discussing the role of supervisors it needs to be said that many are already excellent coaches, facilitators and mentors, but have become so as part of their personal development rather than as part of a management strategy. It should also be said that little blame can be placed at the feet of the other traditional style supervisors. They have for the most part been carrying out the role expected of them.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the importance of mentoring as a component of the new supervisory role. The first line of supervisor or team leadership is, in the experience of the writer, the most crucial link in the chain of command. This person is the human face of the enterprise, presenting a direct link with the people who actually do the work. At the end of the day those organisations which can nurture top quality work team leaders will be those which will be able to deal with constant change and manage continual improvement. In the 1990s these work team leaders need to understand the mentoring function and be able to act effectively in this role. (The writer uses the terms ‘mentoring’ and ‘coaching’ inter-changeably throughout the chapter.)

The structure of the chapter is first to propose a changed role for the first line supervisor, moving from a controller to a facilitator. The concept of supervision as a broader process of team leadership, rather than a narrow role of simply ‘watching over’ people, is then discussed. A traditional hierarchical model of supervision is compared with a new model of workplace relationship. The coaching/mentoring functions are discussed within this new relationship with reference to the new skills associated with a more consultative approach to first line team management and some examples of the success and failures observed in the workplace. The underlying theme is the role required of work team leaders if the organisation is to have a learning culture—the foundation stone of workplace learning.

A Process, Not a Position

This discussion is really not about one particular level in the organisation; it is about the functions which need to be carried out in the organisation. It is about shifting the emphasis from supervision as a control mechanism (watching over people) to greater involvement and ownership by the work team itself. It is about the way work groups relate to each other—how we do things. It is these factors which over time create a different workplace culture—a productive culture based on cooperation and commitment rather than compliance and control.

In Australia and, of course, many other countries, the supervisor is the person in the middle. Often they were selected on the basis of technical skills rather than interpersonal skills and generally moved into the position without any training for their new role. The ‘die’ therefore was cast: the newly appointed supervisor would simply supervise in the same way they themselves had been supervised. This partly explains why the role has changed so little over fifty years or more. Former supervisors chose future supervisors in their own image and often on the basis of their perceived ability to control people. If they had high technical skills, it was felt that they would be respected by the work group. For forepersons who were still ‘hands on the tools’, this system worked quite well. As unions began to impose demarcations on supervisors who were now ‘staff (i.e. no longer a union member) the situation changed dramatically. They no longer could use their technical skills. They ran the work group by ‘telling’ them what to do. As they lost their technical skills over time, they became vulnerable, and conflict began to occur. Another reason why the supervisor to this day is still seen as the ‘enemy’ in many Australian workplaces is the role they have played as strike breakers in many industries. As they were the only representatives of management who could operate the equipment in a strike, they were seen as traitors to their class. They were the very antithesis of the coach or mentor. The beginnings of workplace reform in Australia in 1987 saw a strengthening of the move to change the role of the supervisor and a recognition of their potential role as workplace trainers.

The idea that the role of the supervisor needed to change is not new. Dubin in the 1950s, Whyte in the 1960s, Yuill in the 1970s and a host of writers in the 1980s have talked about the supervisory/middle management role as the most critical factor in the motivation of work teams, on the one hand, and the reduction of dysfunctional conflict in the organisation on the other.³ Yuill described the supervisor in these terms:

The effectiveness of the supervisor in carrying out his role is closely related to the power, authority and status relations which link the supervisor with his subordinates, superiors and peers. Frequently, the organisational design is such that the dysfunctional consequences lead to an inherent conflict in the supervisory role which prevents it being exercised effectively.⁴

This set the scene for workers to be told what to do and to react only to instructions provided from above. This was the beginning of the alienation, an alienation, which in Australia at least, has led to supervisors in ‘bad’ cultures becoming industrial policemen—cops: people who rely on position authority to tell people what to do, how to do it and when to do it, people who have achieved this by the threat of punishment (often covert: no overtime; assigned dirty, boring jobs, etc.), and acting as the ‘blockers’ to any flow of information in the organisation between senior management and the shop-floor. As Hersey and Blanchard have pointed out, there is a time to ‘tell’ people what to do.⁵ If people do not know what to do in ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• The Framework
• The Education Culture
• The Health Culture
• The Industry Culture
• Notes and References
• Notes on Contributors
• Index