The Two Decisions That Are Burning Out Your Supervisors

By Accident, Not by Design | Caroline Burgreen, President & CEO

Alan and I got married in Vegas.

The original plan was a 300 person wedding back home. Honestly, neither of us actually wanted that. But it had become the plan, and we figured my parents would be disappointed if we scaled it back. So we kept going. And it was not just the guest list. It was the wedding party. The food. Whether the reception should be inside or outside. The flowers. Every choice was attached to another choice. It had become a second job on top of my actual job, and I was not enjoying any of it.

We were on vacation in Vegas with my parents when my dad floated the idea, almost in passing, of just getting married there in lieu of the big wedding. Alan and I had been fantasizing about eloping for weeks. We had not said anything because we did not want to disappoint my parents. Turns out they had been waiting on us for the same reason. Nobody at the table actually wanted the wedding we were planning. We just all assumed somebody else did.

We were just in Vegas again for a long weekend, and every time we visit, I naturally think about the night we made that decision and our wedding the next day. But this time, I saw a similarity in something I see and hear all the time in my work life.

There is a structural issue hiding in plain sight inside most manufacturing operations, and it rarely gets named until something breaks. A facility is running lean. Headcount has been trimmed, production demands have increased, and somewhere along the way a supervisor ends up responsible for 18, 22, sometimes 25 people. Nobody made a deliberate decision that this was the right number. It just accumulated. One open position here, a restructure there, a hiring freeze that lasted longer than anyone expected. And suddenly one person is carrying a team that no single person can realistically lead well.

I was on a plant tour earlier this year where this was happening in real time. The operations leader walking me through was sharp and present, knew the floor cold. But I watched his supervisor get pulled in four directions in about fifteen minutes. A safety question. A quality issue. Someone needing approval on overtime. A quick conversation about an absence that should have been a real conversation but did not have time to be. The supervisor was good. The problem was not him. The problem was that no version of him could do that job well for 22 people.

The math on this matters. Research consistently shows that effective frontline supervision in manufacturing environments tops out somewhere between 8 and 12 direct reports depending on the complexity of the work. Beyond that threshold, something has to give. Coaching disappears because there is no time for it. Safety conversations get shorter. Performance issues go unaddressed longer than they should because the supervisor is putting out fires before they can get ahead of anything. The team feels it even when nobody says it out loud.

What I find when I talk to operations leaders is that they often know this is happening. They can see the strain. What they struggle with is what to do about it, because the answer almost always requires either adding headcount or restructuring how the work is organized, and both of those conversations have costs attached to them that are visible on a budget. What does not show up on the budget is what the current situation is actually costing. The slower response times, the retention losses, the safety near misses that did not become incidents but easily could have, the institutional knowledge walking out the door with every supervisor who burns out and decides it is not worth it anymore.

Span of control is not just an HR concept. It is an operational design decision, and when it goes unexamined for long enough, it becomes one of the most expensive problems a facility is quietly carrying.



The wedding we ended up with was the one we actually wanted. What still strikes me is how close we came to a day neither of us had really chosen. That is the part worth paying attention to, in facilities too. The decisions nobody made are usually the ones doing the most damage.

The Promotion that Backfired

Most plant managers have lived this one at least once. Someone on the floor is exceptional. They know the equipment, they know the process, they troubleshoot faster than anyone else, and the team respects them for it. When a supervisor opening comes up, it feels obvious to promote from within, reward the performance, and keep the knowledge close.

And then something goes sideways. Not always dramatically, and not always right away. Sometimes it is subtle at first, in the way the new supervisor is uncomfortable giving direction to people they were peers with last month, or in the way they avoid the hard conversations because they still have to work alongside these people every day. They default to doing the technical work themselves because that is where they feel competent, rather than developing the people around them to do it. The team that once ran smoothly starts to drift, the supervisor is frustrated, leadership is confused, and eventually everyone is wondering what happened to someone who seemed like such an obvious choice.

What happened is that two completely different jobs got treated as if they were the same job with a title change. Being exceptional at the work and being capable of leading people who do the work are genuinely separate skill sets. One is technical, the other is relational and communicative, and often counterintuitive for someone whose entire professional identity has been built around personal performance. The best welder on the floor is not automatically equipped to coach the second best welder on how to get better, because that requires a different set of instincts entirely.

This is not an argument against promoting from within. Done well, it is one of the most effective ways to build a leadership pipeline that actually understands the operation. But done without intention, without honest evaluation of whether the person has or can develop the skills the role requires, and without real support in the transition, it sets people up to fail in a very public way. The cost is paid twice, once when the promotion does not work out, and again when that person's trust in the organization, which was earned over years, starts to erode.



The question worth asking before the promotion conversation happens is not whether this person deserves it. It is whether this role is actually the right next step for them, and whether your organization is ready to invest in what that transition genuinely requires.

Where I See this Outside of Work | Kelly Gerritse, Chief Operating Officer

The same month I took my first Director role, I had a newborn at home and we were in the middle of moving across the country. I do not say that for sympathy. I say it because those two things were happening at exactly the same time, and what I learned from one of them completely changed how I approached the other.

I did not walk into motherhood thinking it would be easy, but I also did not walk in thinking I would be starting from scratch. My mom came from a family of eight. My dad came from a family of twelve. I have one older sibling and two younger ones, and between both sides of my family I grew up with 62 first cousins spanning every age you can imagine. Babies, toddlers, teenagers, all of it, all the time. I had been around children my entire life. I had changed diapers, held newborns, babysat more times than I could count. I genuinely thought I understood what I was stepping into.

And then my son arrived and I found myself at two in the morning googling how to burp a newborn.

Not because I had never seen it done. Because when it was actually my responsibility, in my arms, not working, I realized that watching something your whole life and actually knowing how to do it are two entirely different things. All of that familiarity had given me confidence I had not fully earned yet.

Switching between those two versions of myself in that season was its own kind of exhaustion. I would close my laptop after a full day of trying to lead a team and walk straight into a night of feeding schedules and figuring out why he would not sleep. There was no transition. No moment where I got to feel competent in one thing before the other one needed me. I was a beginner in both rooms at the same time.

And somewhere in the middle of that, something clicked about the team I was supposed to be leading.

I had spent years building real instincts for recruiting. I knew how to read a candidate, how to work a search, how to tell the difference between an industrial technician and a residential or commercial technician in a way that felt completely obvious to me. So obvious that I had stopped thinking about why I knew it or how I had learned it. It just lived in me. And then I sat across from someone brand new to the industry and had no idea how to explain what I knew, because I had never had to break it down before.

The parallel was impossible to ignore. I had been around recruiting the way I had been around kids. Enough exposure to feel deeply familiar. But familiarity is not the same as being able to teach something from the ground up to someone who has never done it and does not know what they do not know yet.

What I had to do for my team was the same thing I had to do at two in the morning with a baby that would not burp. Stop assuming I understood what they were experiencing. Start from the beginning. Break down every step as if they had never seen it before, not because they were not capable, but because they genuinely needed the foundation before any of my instincts would make sense to them.



The transition from doing to leading does not happen automatically, and it is more disorienting than it looks from the outside. But I think the people who come out the other side of it well are the ones willing to sit in the uncomfortable space of being a beginner again, in whatever form that takes. For me it happened to be both at once. And as hard as that season was, I am not sure I would have learned either one as well if they had not arrived together.