Chapter 21. Common Mistakes You Don't Want to Make

After you have finished reading this chapter, you should be able to improve your upward mobility through the elimination of some common mistakes.

“I've been in upper management for twelve years and, in my opinion, the greatest mistake most supervisors make is to back away from and be too soft with the employees in their departments. Sometimes you'd think the supervisor is working for the employee and not the other way around.”

“I can't help but think that for many supervisors their biggest mistake is old-fashioned stubbornness. They appear to listen to their employees and superiors, but they go right ahead and do it their own way. They lock themselves in with their closed minds.”

“I've been supervising supervisors for more than twenty years with the same company and, in my opinion, their biggest mistake is underestimating the true potential of the people they supervise. They write off people before giving them a chance. This one failure has cost my company millions.”

“Most managers multiply their problems because they think they communicate with their people when, in fact, they do not. It's their biggest mistake.”

If you were to do a survey asking fifty different management people to name the biggest mistake made by first-line supervisors, you could easily receive twenty or so different answers. But if you examined the essentials of all those responses, they would probably all fit into one of the following categories.