Leadership Skills for Maintenance Supervisors and Managers

Joel D. Levitt

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367481759
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000327526
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Supervision is a leveraged activity. When we develop the supervisor's skills, we enhance the productivity of the whole workgroup.

This book provides valuable skill training for supervisors, team leaders, and managers. It offers techniques to improve reliability that can be accomplished at the supervisor level. It teaches both the science and the art of the supervision of maintenance workers, discusses managing meetings and time, the elements of technical issues, and presents management and people skills, offering maximum productivity and high-quality provision of services and at the same time, improving morale throughout the workforce.

This book is suitable for all types of maintenance for organizations with supervisors and managers from plant operations, storeroom, construction, and related areas including industrial organizations, construction companies, mines, fleets, building maintenance, janitorial maintenance contractors, and vocational tech schools teaching maintenance short courses.

Section III

Supervisors’ Toolbox

20Transition from Worker to Supervisor

New supervisors often have trouble recognizing that the skills that got them promoted to supervisors are not the same skills that make a great supervisor. The greatest electrician in the world (the kind of person who can tell a wire gauge from across the room and know its insulation and ampacity rating) might fall on their face as a supervisor until they face the facts:

1. Skills need to change from technical to people/management skills.
2. The speed that you can do the job is unimportant. Your task now is to get others to do the job in a reasonable time. Berating people because they can’t work as fast as you could is not useful.
3. The satisfaction and pride you used to get from doing a job right are gone. Your satisfaction will have to come from more abstract things like developing your people.
4. As people advance in the organization, they are expected to adopt a more long-term view of their job. You must shift from being repair-oriented to operation-oriented (looking at the whole operation for the longer term).
5. Your essential resources shift from the capabilities of your own hands and back (put into gear by your brain) to the skills of your subordinates (also put into gear by your and their minds). You will be measured by what you can control, not by what you can do.

The supervisor sandwich:

Figure 20.1Supervisor sandwich.

Supervising Friends

Congratulations, you have been promoted to a supervisor! Oh dear, you now must supervise your old friends. This promotion may be an uncomfortable situation. There might be some left-over feelings about you being picked instead of them. You might even feel guilty.

The first rule is that, if the situation makes you uncomfortable, tell people the truth. Be honest if you feel uncertainty about the form of future relationships. Dr. Lee Minor says, repeatedly, when training supervisors, “If you can talk about an issue, you have the strength to deal with it.” It is okay, even encouraged, to discuss your discomfort, guilt, or other feelings with your friends.

Beware:

• No matter what your relationship is on the outside, you have the right to be the boss on the job.
• Don’t make your friend’s into “boss’s pets.”
• Don’t go overboard the other way either by dumping on your friends whenever anything goes wrong.

The trick is to be even-tempered and treat everyone fairly.

Expect yourself to have feelings about issues that concern your friends. It is normal to have these feelings. You still must act consistently with the best interests of your organization. If you cannot do this, you should transfer them someplace where they will be treated equally with everyone else (or ask for a transfer for yourself). If you do not do this, you are merely putting off trouble.

The same thing goes with supervising enemies: treat them the same as everyone else

Supervising Young Workers

One of the barriers to success with young workers is called transference. Transference is a psychological concept developed by Freud in the early twentieth century. It is a powerfully, simple concept. They will react to you, the supervisor, as if you were their parents, transferring all their emotions about their parents, onto you, without even realizing it.

There is a reverse condition called countertransference. Supervisors can suffer from this is especially true for parents. Countertransference means that you treat the young worker as if they were your children (so you assume they are a certain way). You may respond to them as if they had the same needs, habits, patterns as your children did. If you have no children, you may react to them as if they were your own younger siblings.

Because of transference and countertransference, the young worker and the supervisor are often not responding to the person who is standing in front of them. They react to their internal projections of each other, instead, in stereotypical (nonauthentic) ways.

Example: Tom, the new supervisor, is struggling to come up with next month’s workforce assignment. Andy, the fresh-faced kid who has just been there six months, comes in to report on a suspicious bearing noise.

Tom, whose own younger brother always seemed to be whining about something, responds irritably, “Do you always have to come complaining to me? Can’t you try to figure it out yourself?”

Andy, who was merely reporting a potential problem as he was instructed initially, but whose own father often burst into drunken rages, cowered his way out of sight.

Ideas:

• Exercise restraint with their y...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Author
• Introduction
• Section I: Psychology of Supervision and of Subordinates
• Section II: Maintenance Management for Supervisors
• Section III: Supervisors’ Toolbox
• Section IV: The Future of Managing Maintenance
• Appendix
• Index