Supervisor Reflection

In a prior position as a supervisor for an insurance tracking company I made a number of decisions individually and in a group. As for individual decisions:

• Whom to put in what queue to maximize efficiency?

• Whom to spend more time coaching to increase their production or quality?

• How to improve team morale with fun activities or recognition?

• When to escalate issues to HR or my supervisor?

These were usually reached intuitively. My upper management team was in Arizona while my team and I were in Pennsylvania. This separation allowed me to run my team day to day with little guidance. I was close to the process and could best gauge what employees would be better suited for what activities.

For group decisions which contained other supervisors and managers (usually on a long conference call):

• What new queues or activities to implement or abandon?

• What new training or recursive training was needed to improve overall quality?

• Production and Quality standard adjustments?

• What work to offshoring?

As Harrison (1999) stated about groups having: “A tendency to

The above mentioned individual decisions as well as the normal decisions faced daily, how to discipline, attendance issues, best practices and motivation, all which had some previously defined rules around them. At the core it was basically right or wrong, so intuitively the correct way to handle something could be grasped. Category II types; unique or judgmental, were made a few levels above me. Structure changes, staffing, policy and procedural changes which relied on data and statistics to help rationally decide the best course of actions for the organization. Over all I was satisfied with the process and who was making what decisions. There was little transparency with the larger Category II decisions, usually they were just announced with little