You May Be Boss Biggest Challenge - Book Report/Review Example

You May Be Boss Biggest Challenge Summary Madden Kaitlin in her article “You May Be Boss’ Biggest Challenge” addresses the issue that first time supervisors face and how they can overcome those. Everybody wants to be the boss. Being the boss has various advantages and benefits such as greater pay, more power, freedom and prestige. But it’s not just this. Along with all these being the boss also means greater responsibility and greater pressure. Kaitlin says that no matter how enthusiastic one might be to take up a supervisory/leadership role, not everyone is ready for this. Kaitlin in her article highlights the result from a survey conducted by Career Builder. According to the survey, one out of every four managers was not ready to take up a supervisory role when they got the opportunity. A simple reason for this is that a non-supervisory role and a supervisory role are very different from each other. In a non-supervisory role, that of an engineer or an accountant, employees are taught and trained on the skills needed to carry out the job during at the college level. How good they are in their jobs depends on their personal competencies and hard work. On the other hand, in a supervisory role the skills needed to succeed are a lot different and they are not taught either in college or in on-the-job training. Main skills that are needed by a supervisor are people oriented such as developing subordinates, scheduling and distributing work, conflict management, motivating, etc. As these skills nowhere taught before, a new supervisor is lost in his management role. The survey reported that the various aspects of a supervisor’s role that is most challenging and the ones supervisors struggle the most are all people-centric. Following are the results from the survey: Dealing with issues between co-workers on my team, creating career paths for my team, finding the resources needed to support the team, performance reviews and motivating team members. In spite of not being trained and not having any leadership/supervisory experience, a successful transition can be made from a non-supervisory role to a supervisory role. Kaitlin in her article puts forward the following suggestions made by Kravetz to achieve this transition: Take classes specifically designed for supervisors, identify effective supervisors and model you over them, gain experience by seeking supervisory roles even when not officially assigned, communicate with your current supervisor and ask him/her to assess your supervisory skills and read books/literature on being an effective supervisor. The journey does not end here. In order to be an effective supervisor, one must model their behaviour. A supervisor must stay away from playing favourites, only providing negative feedback, failing to provide feedback, failing to motivate employees and failing to listen to concerns. Reaction I agree with the overall idea behind Kaitlin Madden’s article “You may be boss' biggest challenge”. It’s very much true that most managers are not ready for the supervisory role when they take up the job. Our education system and corporate training are primarily focused on one asset of the skills that is required by the job: the one that generates the revenues and whose impact can be directly measured. But there is whole another aspect which in most cases is completely and sometimes partially ignored. The reason for this is that its impact cannot be directly measured. But these are very important and one among this is training of supervisory/leadership skills. Irrespective of the technical quality and expertise of the human resource of a company, it needs supervisors and leaders to manage the human resources. But very less effort is being put into developing these skills and abilities. Human resources are the most valuable asset of an organization and it needs to be effectively managed. Every company accepts this nut very less is being done on developing skills and abilities that are needed to manage the human resources. Kaitlin Madden rightly falls back on the results of the survey by Career Builder to show that not all managers are ready to take up a supervisory role. Hence, this means they are left to learn on their own by committing mistakes and investing on personal training. There is nothing wrong with learning from mistakes and trying to develop your personal skills on your own. But this would prove very costly for the company. Instead of waiting for people to commit mistakes and learn on their own, companies must take the initiative in developing the leadership and supervisory skills of their employees. Development of personal skills of the employees must not just be the responsibility of the employees but also of the employers. The survey by Career Builder has identified that the managers have the most trouble with issues that are related to people such as motivating them, developing others, mentoring, work allocation, conflict management, etc. I completely agree with this because these are very difficult as it involves dealing with others. It is always easy to manage oneself that manage others. Failure of the managers to effectively do their job not only affects them but also the ones they interact with (their subordinates). Therefore, this is a very sensitive aspect of supervisor’s job. There are various suggestions made in the article to supervisors on how they can improve their skills and then once they are there what not to do. These are valid recommendations and will be very effective. But what needs to be done here is not to wait for the employees to take the initiative to develop their leadership and supervisory skills but it must be made part of the job requirement to develop these skills. Employers must take the initiative and try to build a team of leaders and supervisors. Works Cited Madden, Kaitlin. “You May Be Boss' Biggest Challenge.” CNN, CareerBuilder.com. 18 Apr. 2011. Web. 1 Feb. 2012. . Read More