Tips for New Supervisor: Build Credibility with Your Employees

As a new supervisor your future employees will determine your success as a supervisor or team leader. The day you become a supervisor, or even before, your employees will assess for themselves how credible you are. What does credibility mean? It is simply the trust and acceptance your employees place in you. With credibility, they will be willing to follow your lead. They will listen to you, honor your call to carry out assignments, accept your feedback.

As a new supervisor your future employees will determine your success as a supervisor or team leader. You must realize that your employees will carry out the work assigned to your unit. If they carry the work out in an efficient, productive, and quality manner, you will look good. If they carry out the work in an inefficient, unproductive, and shoddy manner, you will look bad. It’s as simple as that.

The day you become a supervisor, or even before, your employees will assess for themselves how credible you are. And your credibility will increase or decrease depending on the experiences they have with you as their supervisor. In fact, if you have been around the organization for a while, you will already have established a certain level of credibility with these employees.

Understanding Credibility

What does credibility mean? It is simply the trust and acceptance your employees place in you. With credibility, they will be willing to follow your lead. They will listen to you, honor your call to carry out assignments, accept your feedback. Conversely, if you lack credibility in their eyes, they may be unwilling to follow your lead, perhaps even hold you in disdain. At best they will adhere to your commands only reluctantly.

Unfortunately, there is no magic formula for establishing credibility with your employees. Credibility is actually a composite of many different traits, behaviors, knowledge and skills. Each employee weighs what is important in his or her mind and gives you a certain level of credibility. Because of that, you may have high credibility with one employee and low credibility with another. It all depends on their personal experiences with you.

Credibility Factors

What are the credibility factors which lead to your being an effective supervisor? In reality there are so many factors that they couldn’t possibly all be named here.. But here are some of the more important factors:

• Extensive knowledge of the products, services, processes of the work unit
• Effectively convey the decisions of upper management
• Ability to solve problems
• Ability to listen to employees and address employee issues
• Ability to handle multiple demands
• Willing to be held accountable for results and decisions
• Maintains an even disposition
• Sense of humor
• Ability to communicate decisions and positions taken
• Assertive, but not aggressive
• Ability to guide employees in improving performance

You can probably name several more.

New supervisors come to their jobs with a previously established set of attitudes and personal behavior. Some of these may not be conducive to being an effective supervisor. Therefore, it would be in your interest to honestly evaluate how you might perform on each of the above factors. It doesn’t do any good to gloss over any of these issues.

If you haven’t had an opportunity to receive formal training, find out from your human resources department what courses are available to you in your quest to be an effective supervisor.

Good luck in your desire to be all the supervisor you can be.

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