Leadership Progression

How do you make the shift from being a buddy to being a supervisor?

Today, I am going to talk about a follow-up to a previous Leader Feeder called A Supervisor’s Growth Journey, that explored the leadership progression model. I got a lot of feedback from viewers saying that, in their opinion, their frontline leaders are considered “buddies” right now and they want to know what steps they can take to move up.

If you recall, I talked about how at the buddy level, the person often has not embraced their leadership role, and therefore they have not decided that they like being a supervisor.

Here are three strategies for leaders to move up in the leadership progression model:

Tip #1: Embrace your leadership role.  

Many times, when people get promoted, they play it relatively safe and are not sure whether they really want to be a leader. The first step here is for a frontline leader to say, “You know what, I have accepted this leadership role. I have to embrace it. And my team needs me to be their leader, not to simply be their coworker and their buddy.”

Tip #2: Challenge your team and yourself to see if you can help the team improve its performance.

Teams want to win and your job is to help them start to see what it takes to win the day and win longer term.

When the team feels good about its accomplishments, you can feel pride as a supervisor for leading them in that direction.

Tip #3: Like being a leader.

I want you to start to get a kick out of getting results through other people. Before you became a leader, it was all about the work you did and what you accomplished. Now, you get to feel pride about the work other people are accomplishing.

If you feel positively when other people succeed, you are well on your journey to getting a lot of goodwill out of your leadership relationship with your team.

Enjoy seeing people grow and develop. Take it as a sense of pride when you see people step up their performance.

Once you have figured out how to cross that threshold from the bottom of the pyramid upwards, you are going to want to work on some of your other leadership capabilities, and of course that is where we come in.

We want to be your partners in leadership excellence so that you can have an organization that retains talent and maximizes performance.