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Thank you for casting light on a very pervasive problem. - Your article was a needed breath of fresh air.

Posted: Sep 17th, 2016 - 3:21 pm In Reply to: Thank you for a BRILLIANT response to my post! - Jay

For those following the discussion, I'd like to expand briefly on team size, which I see as a significant factor in promoting the SLAP-M (or SLAP-EM) phenomenon as a predictable consequence of supervisor frustration.

I mentioned that I supervised upward of 60 people and sometimes more.

Sixty people is not too many to yell at. Group messaging makes that easy. But it is too many people to know well and to understand, much less to lead and develop.

Understanding your team members...so much more than a passing acquaintance.

When the team is too large, early identification of individual problems becomes a matter of mere serendipity, of simply happening to notice them, rather than reliably discovering them by a systematic process of careful observation.

When the team is too large, the amount of time that the supervisor has to devote to any individual team member diminishes proportionately and as the 25-hour day looms inexorably nearer, not merely frustration but even panic sets in, and group-think takes over the supervisor's thinking out of perceived necessity.

When the team is too large, its members can readily sense the loss of relationship with their team leader. This loss is not imaginary; it is real.

How many people in our field work for supervisors from whom they hear anything only when they do something wrong?

"If you haven't heard anything from me, you must be doing okay."

This is not leadership, and it is not a team. A gaggle of geese has more cohesion.

In too many companies, the circumstances into which supervisors are thrust mitigate against their effectiveness. We must come to an appreciation not only of the proper role of supervisors, but of the tremendous potential that great supervisors have to develop their people and the company in turn. Great supervisors cannot succeed if we are forever setting them up to fail.

And for God's sake, pay them well. What is the cost of a lost employee? Far more than you might imagine. And what is the cost of a client lost due to poor performance? Even far greater than that.

Well, it's your supervisors who play the major role in both employee retention and client satisfaction - NOT the people in the C-suite!!

If we have supervisors who are "blowing their stack", projecting individual errors and shortcomings on the whole team, being rude or dismissive, failing to answer emails or to address employee concerns in a timely manner, have unacceptable rates of employee turnover, etc. we need to find out why and do so quickly. We might have a bad supervisor (inappropriate selection). We might have a great supervisor who's simply at the end of her tether. It might be something systemic in our business processes that we hadn't noticed.

Whatever it might be, IMMEDIATE INTERVENTION IS DEMANDED (proper oversight of supervisors) before this supervisor takes the team down with her. To that end, root cause analysis (RCA) is a discipline that I recommend all managers become familiar with and practice when addressing ambiguous problems like these and many others that arise in business processes.

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