Management and Supervisory Skills
Maintaining an effective and efficient work
center or division requires five management and
supervisory skills. Those skills are a concern for
standards, a concern for efficiency, planning and
organizing, supervising for effective performance,
and monitoring. Develop these skills in super-
vising your people.
CONCERN FOR STANDARDS. —Emphasize
the importance of doing a job right and enforce
high standards by doing the following:
• Ensuring tasks are done safely and
according to regulations
• Seeing that required documentation is
updated
• Being intolerant of poor performance
CONCERN FOR EFFICIENCY. —Define
and organize each task to best use your work
center’s or division’s time and resources as
follows:
• Identify inefficiencies.
• Improve the efficiency of existing systems.
• Delegate tasks to improve efficiency.
• Encourage superiors to use efficient ways
to accomplish tasks.
• Build preparations for inspections into the
day-to-day routine of the work center or
division.
PLANNING AND ORGANIZING. —Take
the following steps to carefully and systematically
develop thorough and specific plans and
schedules:
• Set priorities, goals, and deadlines.
• Develop detailed, step-by-step plans.
• Develop schedules that optimize the
allocated manpower.
• Coordinate schedules with others.
• Anticipate obstacles and plan accordingly.
Use the skills of planning and organizing to
determine the status and impact of your division
work on the work of other divisions. Become
proficient in your planning of divisional work by
applying the strategic, standing, and single-use
plans discussed earlier in this chapter. Become
efficient at setting goals, and then analyze your
plans to reach those goals by using the SWOT
analysis.
SUPERVISING FOR EFFECTIVE PER-
FORMANCE. —Get the best results from your
subordinates by coordinating their actions. Set
challenging standards and demand high levels of
performance; then supervise your subordinates’
performance as follows:
• Set and clearly communicate your expec-
tations for the level of performance in your
work center or division.
• State up front the consequences for
violations of conduct or nonperformance.
• Hold subordinates accountable for poor
performance.
• Match people and jobs to get the best
performance.
• Promote cooperation and teamwork for
effective performance.
MONITORING. —Develop the habit of
routinely gathering information and keeping track
of ongoing work to monitor work center progress
by doing the following:
• Observe procedures and processes.
• Monitor records, equipment, and
resources.
• Ask questions to assess the readiness of
your subordinates.
Monitoring is a control function of manage-
ment, as previously discussed in this chapter. You
can use inventory control, one of the six types of
quality control, or a control method such as the
POA&M, the Gantt chart, CPM, or PERT to help
you in monitoring.
Effective Leadership
To be an effective leader requires certain skills.
The Navy has identified six skills effective leaders
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