Moving from Supervisor to Manager

Welcome to this week’s House of Leadership Newsletter! A weekly newsletter where I provide honest high-quality and actionable leadership tips from my daily experience as a leader directly to your inbox.

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Today at a Glance:

• Supervisors vs Managers

• How do I get from Supervisor to Manager

• What things do Managers do

• Using Intrinsic motivation to open new doors

• 4 Mindset Shifts that will boost your confidence

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A lot of us will start our journey as an individual contributor working on our craft and developing our skills.

The next step up is overseeing a team of individual contributors in a supervisor or manager capacity.

Photo by Jake Hills on Unsplash

It might be clear to some people but I wanted to highlight it here.

What made you successful in your role as an individual contributor will not make you a successful leader.

It’s a completely different skill and mindset.

I wanted to talk through this today as a lot of people are curious about the difference and not overly clear about what they should focus on to help them get to the next level.

Supervisor vs Manager, what’s the difference?

This is from my own experience from working for 3 different tech firms.

I am sure there are a ton of variations based on the industry and size of the organisation.

Supervisor

• First people manager role managing a team of individual contributors.

• Usually stretched and prepared in a team lead role so this becomes a small step rather than a big leap.

• Total team size wouldn’t be more than 12.

• Generally, the team will consist of employees with the same job roles and very minimal complexity.

• Supervisor will be responsible for the team completing their roles successfully.

• After a year or so they maybe stretched with additional projects and tasks outside their usual scope.

Manager

• Usually 2-3 years of experience managing people.

• They will usually oversee a larger team of 12-40 people.

• May have a strategic focus or look after a specific business unit