Need a Keynote Speech?

GCI Leadership Blog

It’s Time to Talk about Your Supervisors…
(04/25/2013)
The deep end of the pool is where most aspiring supervisors are thrown. Allowed to sink or swim with only survival and past experience as a preserver of life in the new role. It is tragic yet repeated over and over in organization after organization. The epidemic of bad supervision in the workplace is now being magnified by a young generation of nomadic workers that simply migrate from one job opportunity to the next without regard for the tired, old stigma of job hopping. In fact, these new workers typically place the most recent work experience on an application because a complete job history at twenty five years old would just take too much time, paper, and effort. Potential employers are only privy to snapshot of work experience these applicants choose to provide.
Share

Buy Surviving The
Talent Exodus
[Click Here]

Buy Leadership Among
Idiots 
[Click Here]

The Learning Spotlight

The Origin of Bad Supervisors

By John Grubbs

The most common reason people quit a job is a bad relationship with a direct supervisor.  Hollywood’s movie satire “Horrible Bosses” contains enough reality to be relatable to most people at some point in our lives.  How did bad supervisors become so common in the work place?  Why is it easier to remember the horrible bosses?

Bad bosses are not merely like people; some good and some bad.  Bad supervision is a learned behavior. It is the manifestation of generations that were never taught exactly how to lead or supervise others.  The disproportionate amount of bad supervisors that yell and scream at employees is not representative of humans in general.  When surveyed most people know how a good boss should behave yet so many bad supervisors are indelibly etched into our memories.

The beginning of bad bosses can be traced all the way back to industrialization and the migration of hard working farmers to the growing cities.  These tough and work-hardened individuals gave up everything to start a new life in the emerging factories of the early 1900s.  Workers and supervisors were expected to continue the same long hours as they had experienced on the farms that gave most Americans the sustenance needed to survive.  Good supervisors were not necessary in a factory that had an unlimited supply of workers who could make more money in the city than was possible as a farmhand or sharecropper.  The many poor were eager to find something other than a dirt farm and willingly traded one meager existence for another in the company of many others attempting to better the lives of their families.

The Great Depression contributed significantly to the common method of supervision.  The attitude toward the worker changes when you have far more workers than you do positions to fill.  At twenty-five percent unemployment, it becomes easy to take people for granted and not develop the necessary relationships that promote a healthy work environment.  In this environment, people become interchangeable pawns that can be easily replaced.  Workers become conditioned slowlyovertime to have low expectations from others in the chain of command.  As time passes the bond between the worker and supervisor becomes very weak....

Read Complete Article...

My Time To Lead Series