How do you leverage your supervisory skills to influence and inspire others and build trust and credibility?

In my experience I have noted emotional awareness is key as a supervisor. You must be a person that listens more than you speak in order to hear the views and needs of the team that you lead. An emotionally aware leader is rarely provoked and is able to remain cool, calm and sensible regardless of the situation. They care about other people and will show empathy allowing the team to enjoy work and want to come to work as they feel valued and supported. No wonder there is a common saying "People leave managers not companies".

One thing I have found is communicating with supervisors, peers, and subordinates to find out where I can improve/excel at. Each category sees something different. Then I do a self assessment based on the information they provided. Then I make a plan to work on whatever it is. For example when people felt that my short and to the point writing was not very good for their evaluation I sent it to others to ask for guidance. I communicate a lot, borderline excessively, through out the rating period and I acknowledge their hard work often and or address ways to improve or things that are not ok. But then i don’t write all of it on an evaluation. So I took some classes on writing and how to write better evaluation comments.

Another way to create alignment is to try to understand each one's psychology as to why ppl do what they do. This is done by taking off our leader hats and putting on our everyday joe hats to have meaningful conversations that allow us to connect with those reporting to us on a human level vs on a data level. This shows them that yes we have these data points that we need to hit but we are also understanding that life happens and that someone giving their all may look different day to day. I only ask people to give their all and if their all is 50% one day then give me that 50% and if the next day is 100% give me 100%. We must never lose the human aspect as we continue to push for max productivity.

Something that I've leveraged throughout my career is to let everyone know what matrices are being tracked as well as how each individual plays a role in those matrices. Once that is understood we set a standard to hold to and communicate out daily and weekly performance to standard and not goal because standard should be higher than the goal.

This is the most important factor to me. I love giving my team the opportunity to grow. By providing further education through programs like Coursera and edX, teams can dig into interests they didn’t know they had. Within those interests come competencies that expand and help improve your overall performance. Creating a web of skills in a team helps open collaborative learning and development opportunities.

One thing that I have found to be helpful in building trust and confidence of my subordinates is to not micromanage them. They are given tasks to complete on their own and I step back to see how effectively they can complete said tasks. Granted, they aren't just thrown to the wolves. Theses are apprentices that have been trained. But even after initial training, that first assigned task can be overwhelming as it is, especially if you are the semi-new employee. So instead of critiquing their every move and step. I allow them the room to apply what has been taught and see how this particular individual interprets what has been taught to accomplish the job. The fastest way to lose good people is to be to overbearing.