The key to a good business is good employees. The key to good employees? A great supervisor. The Essential Supervisor's Handbook provides a guide for both new and experienced supervisors featuring expert explanations, advice, and motivation. It is a quick reference guide that covers a wide range of topics, from employee relations, team leadership, and motivation to the legal aspects of hiring, firing, and disciplining employees.The Essential Supervisor's Handbook also takes on difficult issues from upgrading to downsizing, and everything in between, such as: multicultural teams, working with unions, finding communication methods that work for you and your team. As well as how to stay positive, move your team (and yourself) forward, and create a productive work atmosphere. Concise and written in an easy-to-understand style, The Essential Supervisor's Handbook is the one tool that no manager can afford to be without.
Frequently asked questions
Yes, you can cancel anytime from the Subscription tab in your account settings on the Perlego website. Your subscription will stay active until the end of your current billing period. Learn how to cancel your subscription.
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
Perlego offers two plans: Essential and Complete
Essential is ideal for learners and professionals who enjoy exploring a wide range of subjects. Access the Essential Library with 800,000+ trusted titles and best-sellers across business, personal growth, and the humanities. Includes unlimited reading time and Standard Read Aloud voice.
Complete: Perfect for advanced learners and researchers needing full, unrestricted access. Unlock 1.4M+ books across hundreds of subjects, including academic and specialized titles. The Complete Plan also includes advanced features like Premium Read Aloud and Research Assistant.
Both plans are available with monthly, semester, or annual billing cycles.
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Yes! You can use the Perlego app on both iOS or Android devices to read anytime, anywhere — even offline. Perfect for commutes or when you’re on the go. Please note we cannot support devices running on iOS 13 and Android 7 or earlier. Learn more about using the app.
Yes, you can access The Essential Supervisor's Handbook by Brette Mcwhorter Sember,Terrence J. Sember in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Business & Management. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Starting out as a supervisor, you are probably excited, but may feel slightly overwhelmed. Settling into a new job is always difficult, but taking on a job with new management responsibilities is an additional challenge. To learn to be a leader, you need to grasp on some basic management techniques. You don’t have to have an MBA to be able to direct other people and manage their work; management techniques are things that anyone can learn. All you need is a little common sense and some insight into how to make things go smoothly.
Managing Yourself
Evaluate Yourself
It is always important to assess the skills and abilities of those you manage, but the same applies to yourself. To be a successful supervisor, you must first evaluate your own skills and abilities. Create a list of all the duties and responsibilities your position includes. If you haven’t started your new job yet and aren’t sure what these are, you can come back to this section and complete it later. This can include coaching and counseling employees, writing reports, attending conferences, monitoring daily production, or reading and responding to e-mail. Use the chart on page 13 to list your basic responsibilities.
When you have listed all the things you’ll be responsible for in your position, take a moment and rate your ability at each task. Give yourself a rating of “excellent,” “good,” “fair,” “poor,” or “terrible.” For example, if one of your responsibilities is reconciling register drawers with accounting (and you know you are not very good with math), you might rate yourself with “poor.” If you are required to hold meetings and feel you are a good public speaker, but find you have a little bit of trouble keeping meetings on task, you might give yourself a “good” for that type of responsibility.
Once you have rated yourself, go through all the tasks for which you rated yourself fair, poor, or terrible, and write down what possible avenues are available to you for improving your skills in that area. You might take additional training, talk to a mentor, practice skills outside the workplace, or follow other avenues to improve your abilities. Now assess how realistic it is that you will be able to follow through on what would be necessary to improve those skills. Cross out the things that you most likely would never do. If it’s unlikely you’ll ever join Toastmasters to improve your public speaking, then cross out that option.
What you’ll be left with is a very good outline of your management abilities and possibilities. The items you marked good or excellent are your strengths; you should capitalize on your strengths and use them to your advantage. They are probably the things that got you where you are today, and you want to continue to let these skills move you forward.
Skills that you have listed possible improvements for, which you did not cross out, are realistic things you can do to improve your capabilities. These are realistic steps you can take to further yourself as a manager. Make a plan for how you will improve these skills.
The skills you ranked as needing improvement, but felt it was unrealistic that you would take steps toward improving, are your weaknesses. We all have weaknesses—after all, you can’t excel at everything. Part of being successful in business is recognizing your weaknesses and finding ways to overcome them. Overcoming weaknesses does not mean throwing up your hands in the air and saying, “Oh well, I’m terrible at responding to e-mails, so I’m just not going to use e-mail.”
Essential elements for overcoming weaknesses:
Learn skills you are lacking. As addressed previously, you can get help to improve yourself. One common mistake people make is thinking that it will take too much work or time to improve a skill. However, there are small things you can do to make a difference. You may not need to take a semester-long course to improve your computer skills; there might be a weekend course you could take that would teach you enough to offer significant improvement.
Delegate tasks to others who are skilled at them. If there is an important operation of your department or team, but you are not the best person to handle it, delegate it to someone who is. Not only must you be able to recognize your own strengths, but you should be able to spot your employee’s strengths as well, and use them to benefit your team. A highly effective team is one that maximizes the strengths of every team member.
Don’t denigrate yourself. Stop beating yourself up for your weaknesses. You aren’t perfect and you never will be. Think positively and keep reminding yourself of your strengths.
Use strengths to counter weaknesses. Oftentimes there are strengths that can be used to counterbalance or compensate for weaknesses. If you are terrible at writing cohesive memos, you might counterbalance this weakness by holding good meetings. Look for things you are good at that can take the place of things you are not good at. Arrange things so that your job revolves around your strengths whenever possible.
10 Essential Strengths for a Supervisor
✓ Flexibility
✓ Sincerity
✓ Honesty
✓ Empathy
✓ Organization
✓ Willingness to learn
✓ Confidence
✓ Focus
✓ Openness to new ideas
✓ Consistency
Evaluate Your Position
Whether you are entering a new company (or a new position within the same company), one of your first tasks as a supervisor must be to understand your new responsibilities. Here are some essential steps to acclimate yourself to a new job:
Read all employee and manager’s handbooks and policies.
Read your job description and any descriptions of the role or tasks for which your team is responsible.
Read any memos detailing restructuring that led to the creation of your department or job.
Talk to your own supervisor and learn what his or her goals are for your team. Get inside his or her head to find out what exactly the company needs you to do.
Clarify your role within the company hierarchy so that you are clear on what you have control over and to whom you report.
Learn and understand standard operating procedures.
It can also be very helpful to talk to your human resources department to learn procedures for hiring, documenting employee mistakes, firing, and time off. Talking to other managers can offer insight into how things are handled within the company. Remember that it just takes time to learn your way around a new job and a new company. You can’t expect to pick it up overnight; learning the ropes is a gradual process.
Managing Yourself
Get Into Management Mode
Before you can manage or lead anyone else, you must first learn to successfully manage yourself. Now that you are in a supervisor’s position, you have achieved some success. To this point, you’ve managed yourself and your career quite well. But now that you must manage other people as well, it’s time to take a step back and examine how you can manage yourself so that you become a good supervisor.
Essential supervisory steps:
Take control of your emotions. You’re still a person with feelings, but now you must be certain that your anger, frustration, tiredness, and so on do not overly impact those you are managing. When faced with a stressful situation, take a deep breath before speaking or reacting. Thinking before you speak will allow you to sift out inappropriate reactions. Apply this same rule to e-mail communication as well. It’s very easy to shoot out a quick message or reply to something in the heat of the moment, when instead you should have given the problem more thought or censored yourself better. Build in a delay on the delivery time of emails that go into your outbox so that you have time to reconsider things.
Understand your goals. You should have a grasp on what you want to attain at all times. Any time you are about to do something, ask yourself if this action will bring you closer to attaining your goal. This can be particularly helpful when you are deciding whether or not to confront someone. If it does not bring you ...
