Do you sabotage success?

Do we cripple our supervisors by imagining their role to be leaders and managers? Could it be there are expectations placed on supervisors to fill the “leader” role in the absence of leadership and management from the company hierarchy? Let’s examine the role and responsibilities for successful supervision, and if our companies sabotage success.

To have successful maintenance, you must have a realistic view of supervision. To have successful maintenance, you must give the supervisor the tools, authority, and support they need. To have successful maintenance, you must have respect for what the supervisor contributes.

In the maintenance field, the supervisor is the critical player running the team. At a basic level, the supervisor is accountable for the quality, safety, security, and productivity of the maintenance effort. If you read articles about modern supervision, you will see quite a bit of discussion on the supervisor as a leader and the supervisor as a manager. If you read between the lines, you understand that supervisors should be great leaders, efficient managers, and focused on getting the work done.

This expectation is nothing new. The supervisor will play multiple roles for the good of the company and of their group.

Defining the roles

So are supervisors leaders, managers, or just supervisors? What exactly do we hire supervisors to do? I think there is some confusion about what we want from supervisors; perhaps we are seeking a miracle worker or magician to make up for the lack of our company’s leadership and management. Before we can discuss this, let’s define these terms.

Leader: A leader is a person who leads or commands a group, organization, or country. A leader will provide a roadmap and set goals for the team to achieve, as well as monitor progress to ensure those goals are met. According to online career development platform Mindtools.com, “Leadership is about mapping out where you need to go to ‘win’ as a team or an organization, and it is dynamic, exciting, and inspiring.”

Manager: A manager is responsible for controlling or administering all or part of a company or similar organization. A manager organizes and facilitates business activities in order to achieve defined objectives.

Roles in the maintenance world

Much of our impression of leadership is from war movies and TV shows. We ask for leadership to take the next mountain, the next bridge. In that kind of leadership, is it okay to sacrifice the leader and their “troops” to take that hill or bridge? That is an idealized version of leadership.

In maintenance, the “supervisor leader” calls forth the best work from their team members. The leader looks out for their people, tries to protect them from bad decisions of upper management, gets them training, provides recognition, and takes the heat when there are mistakes. Leaders also protect the employees from their tendencies to take shortcuts, be unsafe, or compromise when it comes to environmental or health issues.

The company can either support or undermine the supervisor’s leadership through the allocating of funds for training, tools, and support systems, as well as purchasing the right equipment.

In the same way, the idea of management comes from images of a relentless cost-cutter, efficiency expert, or strictly a “numbers” person. The idealized manager has no time for soft skills, soft people, or for anything that doesn’t directly impact the value stream.

Good supervisor managers start early to ensure, as far as possible, technicians have everything they need to do their jobs. The maintenance manager makes sure the other groups are ready so that the task can proceed smoothly. They chase after their team members to ensure all work has work orders and technicians record all hours, all parts, and all other elements of the job.

The company will support or undermine the supervisor’s management by allocating adequate funds for maintenance management software, proper planning, and scheduling (including the issuance of permits and cleaning of equipment before the work is to start). The company supports their management by insisting that everyone adhere to the schedule. The company agrees to the importance of the predictive maintenance (PM) efforts and the adherence to the PM schedule. The company also provides adequate support in the form of parts, staffed warehousing, reliability, and maintenance engineering.

I visit organizations all the time that stand behind their supervisors as managers and promote supervisors’ leadership.

Unfortunately, I also visit organizations that give lip service to leadership and proper management. I think that attitude costs them real money by increasing turnover, increasing mistakes, lowering morale, and having leaders who do not lead, managers who do not manage, and supervisors who don’t supervise.