Supervisor is the title of a management job position that involves authority over fellow workers or the workplace. A good supervisor works with his employees to delegate roles and responsibilities and establishes suitable goals and action plans. He mentors and guides his employees towards development and represents their requests to the management. He advocates not only for the employees but also for the organization as a whole, thereby making a priceless addition to the organization.
The supervisor’s responsibilities include ensuring that the employees follow the company’s rules and policies; training and orienting new employees to the organization and its facilities; providing accurate job descriptions for every job role under their supervision and helping the management with the staffing process, ensuring that the most appropriate candidates get selected.
In order to carry out these roles and responsibilities efficiently, supervisors require a set of competencies, as laid out by most organizations in the form of a supervisor competency model. Such a model includes:
These supervisor competency models might vary with regard to a particular organization and its requirements. However, the above mentioned competencies are general in nature and applicable to any supervisory position.
An efficient supervisor must therefore act decisively, demonstrate flexibility, foster continuous improvement and innovation, encourage diversity, think systematically and inspire change, manage performance, manage conflicts and issues, communicate effectively and provide excellent customer service.
A well planned and carefully designed competency model can help achieve such high performance by identifying the performance criteria, providing clear objective performance standards and clarifying excellence standards to meet the performance criteria.