There's a fundamental shift that occurs the moment a front-facing employee becomes their crew's supervisor—and the quicker the new manager understands that shift, the quicker they will get the buy-in of their team. Odds are good that new supervisor was previously the rock star employee of the team. Likely they were a top performer with some pretty decent experience and even better results. Their employer saw this talent and, wanting other employees to be more like the rock star, promoted that individual to supervisor so they could help the others. 

But that promotion changed everything. The moment that employee became a supervisor is the moment they stopped being the star player and became the coach of their team. 

The team doesn’t care how good their supervisor used to be at their former job. What’s most important to those team members is how good they are going to be with their new supervisor as their coach. They want to know how their supervisor is going to help them to be better, more trusted, more respected, and more prepared for promotion down the road. 

As a coach, the supervisor must understand that the team is looking for someone with a very specific set of skills to help them. Like any good coach, the supervisor’s job is to improve the individual performance of each team member by helping them develop better skill sets, by caring about their contributions, and by recognizing their great results. 

And as a coach, the supervisor needs to make the team’s safety their top concern. When team members are safe, they work better. When team members feel safe, valued, and cared about, they give better effort. The supervisor’s role is to help employees get what they want from the job so they can turn around and deliver what the company needs. 

But as the coach, the supervisor must go first. More rules and reminders won’t create safety in the workplace. That arises only from employee buy-in, which comes around when coaches support their teams and lead by example.