Anton Guinea
Entrepreneur, Speaker, bestselling author, and founder of The Guinea Group of Companies. For over 15 years, Anton has helped leaders move their teams to become psychologically safe, physically safe and overall better versions of themselves.
What happens when you give someone responsibility for a team but never really teach them how to lead it?
I see this happen regularly.
Someone is excellent at their job. They know the systems, the work and the people. So they get promoted to supervisor.
Then everything changes.
They are suddenly responsible for performance, behaviour, safety, communication and the development of other people. Yet they are often given little more than a new title, a list of expectations and a few procedures.
Then we wonder why they struggle.
Being good at the job does not make you good at leading people
One of the biggest mistakes organisations make is assuming that technical competence automatically translates into leadership capability.
It doesn’t.
A great operator does not automatically know how to have a difficult conversation. A highly experienced worker does not automatically know how to coach someone who is underperforming.
Technical skills and leadership skills are different.
Frontline leaders need to set expectations, give feedback, manage conflict, delegate, make decisions under pressure and create an environment where people feel safe enough to speak up.
That is a very different job from doing the work yourself.
Research from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development also highlights the importance of developing people-management capability rather than assuming people will become effective managers simply because they have been promoted.
If this sounds familiar, I have also written about what happens when supervisors aren’t really leading and their managers end up carrying the load.
Why supervisors struggle to lead
When I look at why supervisors struggle to lead, I don’t immediately ask what’s wrong with the supervisor.
I ask what support they were given.
Were they taught how to lead difficult conversations? Were they coached through real problems? Did anyone help them understand their own leadership behaviour?
Too often, the answer is no.
That can create what I call the instruction trap.
A problem occurs. The supervisor tells someone what to do. The problem happens again. They repeat the instruction. Eventually, they become frustrated because people still aren’t doing what they were told.
The issue may not be effort.
The issue may be that the supervisor has never learned how to develop people’s thinking.
Frontline leadership requires more than procedures
Instructions matter. People need clear expectations and boundaries.
But leadership starts where the instructions end.
What happens when two employees are constantly in conflict?
What happens when someone is technically brilliant but damaging the team?
What happens when a team member stops speaking up?
What happens when your people are under pressure and you are under even more pressure?
These are real frontline leadership challenges. A procedure cannot solve all of them.
Safe Work Australia recognises the need for supervisors to have appropriate skills, experience and training to support workers and manage workplace risks. You can explore the guidance around supervisor capability and workplace controls for more detail.
Leadership development has to prepare people for real situations, not just teach them policies.
The common supervisor leadership mistakes
Most supervisors aren’t trying to be poor leaders. They are usually using the tools they have.
Some of the common supervisor leadership mistakes I see include:
- They tell instead of ask. They solve every problem instead of helping their people think.
- They avoid difficult conversations. Small issues become bigger because nobody addresses them early.
- They confuse being liked with being respected. Good leadership requires fairness, consistency and clear expectations.
- They take problems back from their team. The supervisor becomes the person everyone relies on to fix everything.
That last one is particularly damaging.
If your supervisor solves every problem, their team doesn’t become more capable. The supervisor simply becomes more overloaded.
That’s why I believe asking better questions instead of always giving answers is such an important leadership skill.
Why supervisors need coaching
Coaching gives supervisors another way to lead.
Instead of immediately saying, “Here’s what you need to do,” they can ask:
- “What do you think is causing this?”
- “What have you already tried?”
- “What do you think needs to happen next?”
- “What would you do if I wasn’t standing here?”
These questions make people think.
And when people think through problems themselves, they build capability.
Research into managerial coaching has found positive links between coaching skills, employee performance and organisational commitment. The research on managerial coaching and employee performance provides useful evidence for this.
Coaching doesn’t mean lowering standards.
A supervisor can care about people and still hold them accountable. They can listen and still make difficult decisions.
In fact, I think the best frontline leaders do both.
What managers of supervisors should do differently
If you manage supervisors, start asking better questions of them too.
- “What conversations are you avoiding?”
- “Where are you still doing work your team should be doing?”
- “What feedback have you received?”
- “What are you learning about yourself as a leader?”
Then give them space to answer.
Don’t immediately solve the problem for them. Otherwise, you may create the same dependency you are asking them to remove from their own teams.
Frontline leaders are where strategy meets reality. They are often the first people to see changes in behaviour, morale, performance and safety.
That makes their development too important to leave to chance.
Give your frontline leaders someone to think with
After more than two decades working with leaders, one lesson keeps coming back to me.
People don’t always need more information. They often need better conversations about what they are doing with the information they already have.
That’s where coaching earns its place.
A good coach can challenge a supervisor without taking responsibility away from them. They can expose blind spots, ask the difficult question and help the leader work out what to do differently next time.
Leadership is learned through practice, reflection, feedback and repetition.
It isn’t enough to give someone instructions and hope they figure it out.
Your supervisors are worth developing
If your frontline leaders are struggling, don’t automatically assume you have the wrong people.
First ask whether you’ve given them the right development.
Have you coached them through difficult situations? Have you given them useful feedback? Have you helped them develop their judgement?
If the answer is no, the solution may not be another instruction sheet.
It may be coaching.
Your frontline leaders need to know what to do, but they also need to know how to think when the situation changes.
If you’d like to discuss the leadership challenges you’re seeing in your organisation, you can contact me about your leadership challenge or book a conversation with me about your leaders and teams.
Sometimes the best place to start isn’t with another instruction.
It’s with a better question.
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