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How to use the Three “P’s” of Effective Management
Leadership in the business world is tantamount to success or failure. Without proper leadership, profits can fall, day-to-day operations can flounder, team members can struggle, and organizations may fail to find a single, united vision.
That’s a worst-case scenario, but it’s something that’s realistic in many startups and even established businesses. Interestingly, this pitfall may not be the product of apathy, but rather, the aftermath of seemingly harmless semantics: supervisor vs manager vs leader.
The words are often juxtaposed and used in a synonymous fashion. But without truly understanding the key differences between these job titles, you’re setting yourself up for negative ambiguity — and possibly failure.
Learn the distinctive qualities of each position, what their job duties entail, and how comprehending the differentiation can play a vital role within your business.
Supervisor vs Manager vs Leader: The Basics
Before diving deep into the differences between these roles, let’s first take a look at the big picture. While some companies tend to use the terms interchangeably, a closer look reveals more about the important differences between the three.
Supervisor vs Manager
Supervisors and managers are distinctly different, despite their use in normal conversation. Below, we'll describe the main differences, but here's something that should help you immediately discern the differences:
The Quick Answer: A supervisor focuses on the “how”; a manager centers on the “what.”
Supervisor Overview
Although a supervisor and manager are closely related and even use the same verbiage in some companies, they’re not exactly identical. A supervisor is someone who overlooks a team, employee performance, or a particular project. Above all, they overlook day-to-day tasks and operations.
In some organizational structures, a supervisor position may not be a leadership position, but instead, a high-level non-management position. In others, it’s an entry-level management position that works the same hours and schedules as their subordinates, as well as completing the same tasks on occasion.
Due to the concept of working the same hours and performing some of the same tasks, a supervisor is often referred to as a team leader — one that’s constantly on the frontlines with subordinates.
Manager Overview
A manager is more focused on what gets done in most instances. They may perform the supervisory tasks, but take the idea one step further by managing other aspects of the business beyond staff or human capital. Simply put, they’re more than just overseers of the work of others.
They’re the big-picture people that meet or exceed organizational goals and tasks. A manager decides on prioritization of the task at hand and creates goals and practices to achieve them — including creating the responsibilities of a supervisor. They also rarely interact with subordinates on a regular basis, instead working with a management team and relying on supervisors to ensure the completion of a project.
Note that managers won’t always have the same tasks and roles as supervisors, but they also might, depending on the specific scenario. It’s just another part of the confusion between the two terms.
Manager vs Supervisor: A Real-Life Example
For extra clarity, the City of San Francisco has developed the following job descriptions that define and separate supervisor from manager:
- Manager: An individual in a high-level administrative and policy-influencing position who plans, organizes, staffs, leads, and controls a major function or effort for the purpose of accomplishing organizational goals.
- Supervisor: An individual having authority and exercising independent judgment to effectively recommend to hire/promote, discipline, assign, reward, or adjust the grievances of other employees. Please note, pursuant to Civil Service Rules, supervisors do not directly hire or discipline employees; rather, they recommend a course of action to a higher authority.
This may not hold true in all scenarios and companies, but it can easily help you define the first half of supervisor vs manager vs leader.
Manager vs Leader
Just as a manager takes their duties one step further than a supervisor, a leader does the same with regard to the manager. While they may assume the same management roles as a manager themselves, an effective leader has leadership skills and leadership qualities, and may have more job tasks than managers or supervisors.
Some companies may define leaders as upper-level management. For example, a CEO, vice president, or chairman could be considered a leader. They create a vision and implement policies and practices that ensure that these visions are met through
- Adhering to the mission statement
- Streamlining operations
- Maintaining a competitive advantage
- Answering to key stakeholders
In other organizations, a leader might be more loosely defined. Instead of a leader having a certain job role or senior management job title, it’s more loosely defined. Nevertheless, these leaders are in charge of:
- Maintaining a positive work environment
- Inspiring and encouraging teamwork and individual achievement
- Having the ability to influence others
- Setting goals
- Having a vested role in the decision-making process
Although every manager may have different tasks based on their industry or company, a leader’s duties are normally the same across the board, albeit based on the expectations of execs within the company.
Perhaps most importantly, being a manager doesn’t necessarily mean that a person is a leader. Without the right leadership coaching, skills, and mentoring, a manager may never reach a leadership role. And that’s just one part of why you need to understand the importance of the supervisor vs manager vs leader discussion.
Curious on some tips for transforming your managers into leaders?
Access our BEST, free training video that HR leaders are using to inspire real conversations with their managers.
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Supervisor vs Manager vs Leader: Job Roles
One helpful way to further understand the difference between supervisor vs manager vs leader is to look at a description that outlines their respective duties. By discovering the roles of each in a hiring scenario, the differences become more apparent.
Supervisor Job Roles
The roles of a supervisor might include:
- Training new employees
- Enforcing company policies and rules
- Creating schedules
- Leading training programs
- Quality assurance
- Supporting staff by supplying the right materials and equipment
- Turning to management when necessary
Manager Job Roles
Managers have a more robust role within an organization. Again, they may do the same roles as a supervisor from time to time, but it is by no means their main job. A manager is tasked with:
- Monitoring the performance of supervisors and other subordinates
- Applying problem-solving and critical-thinking skills
- Planning a budget
- Implementing company initiatives
- Conducting performance reviews
- Hiring, promoting, and staffing
- Answering and reporting to the next highest level of authority
- Managing conflict
If a manager can successfully complete these tasks regularly, they may have the necessary skills to eventually become leaders — or at the least — become an irreplaceable part of the company.
Leader Job Roles
Intriguingly, a leader doesn’t have a particular job role — at least not in the sense of something defined by a job posting. It’s a mix of the tangible and intangible; a mishmash of soft skills and hard skills. Some of these are inborn in the individual; others must be learned.
Because a manager isn’t necessarily a leader, the organization should have a crucial role in the development of leaders. But before you implement such a practice, you should know what you wish to achieve.
Thankfully, leaders tend to convey the same types of qualities, including:
- Creating an open environment that empowers employees to take calculated risks and remain autonomous in most aspects
- Inspiring an organization to share the same values and goals of the organization
- Identifying potential in markets and individuals
- Discovering new ways to maintain a competitive advantage
- Leading by example
- Making the tough decisions and sticking by them
- Developing emotional intelligence
- Having integrity, humility, honesty, and empathy
- Creating, eliminating, or altering job roles, titles, and departments as necessary for the betterment of the company
Boiling It Down
The ambiguity between supervisor vs leader vs manager in media and content on the web makes the differences almost indiscernible, but it’s seldom malicious.
The most important factor to take out of the relative vagueness is to understand each title and how it applies to your company. Making a vested effort to define each role is an arduous task, but one that’s met with satisfactory results in terms of productivity, transparency, and even hiring the right person for the job.
How To Enable Employees To Transcend From Supervisor to Manager to Leader
Almost every individual has the potential to reach a leadership role if they have the ambition, tools, and support to do so. Implementing mentorships and training programs, maintaining competitive pay, and giving purpose to the job can all lead the transition from supervisor to manager to leader.
However, any extra edge or push you provide melts the line between supervisor vs manager vs leader. In a perfect world, all supervisors and managers are leaders in their own right. You only need to unlock the potential.
That’s what makes an objective, outward approach to leadership and leadership style such an appealing factor. Perhaps your company doesn’t have the resources to create leaders; maybe you just don’t know where to start.
And that’s why a leadership training program is a solution to your problems. With a holistic approach to leadership principles and real-world application, a leadership training program or leadership retreat with Unicorn Labs can turn managers and supervisors into tomorrow’s business leaders. As a leader, it’s one of the best things you can do to help your team realize its full potential.
Table of Contents:
What are the 3Ps and Why are they Important?
Marcus Lemonis is a Lebanese-born American businessman, television personality and philanthropist.
As a multi-billion dollar business owner, Lemonis says a successful business is made up of three things: People, Process, and Product.
The three Ps, as they’re often called, act as a cornerstone for everything inside a business.
As a manager and head of a team, it is critical to understand how to manage people, the process and the product of a company to grow and succeed.
Why are the 3Ps of business so important?
Well, without good people in the right roles, your growing business will struggle to serve customers and clients, thus affecting your potential revenue.
As well, if you don’t have an effective process in place whether that’s for sales, production, billing, accounting, and customer relationship management, then your overhead cost will increase, reducing profitability.
Finally, if you don’t have a product or service that meets the needs of your market or ideal client, then it won’t be long before your company fails and it’s forced to shut its doors.
And we don’t want that, of course! That’s why we are going to break down the 3Ps and how to use them to be an effective manager.
The People
Even if you’re going into a business as a solopreneur or a digital nomad, people are an integral part of any business.
When we talk about “people,” it has to be put in the context of your workforce. For example, if you have on-site employees or remote freelancers.
👉 Here are some People Management Tips for First-Time Managers.
People also include the other relationships needed to keep your business afloat; such as customers, vendors, suppliers, advisers, partners, investors, etc.
As we’ve mentioned in previous blogs, people are at the core of ay businesses, they should be a priority; which is why they are the first component of the people, process, and product trilogy.
“Without people, your business would flounder.”
Investing time, effort and money into cultivating these relationships will be beneficial to your business.
Tips on People
“Businesses are based on relationships and relationships are based on people,” said Lemonis.
People’s issues can come to the surface at any point and level of the organization.
As Lemonis said, “if you have trust with somebody, it can survive any downturn, any mistake, any problem. And if you don’t have trust, it won’t matter how good the business is; it will fall apart eventually.”
That’s why the first level of high-performing teams is psychological safety, a stage where there is trust and vulnerability between people. Trust and confidence are so well established that regardless of conflicts, the business and team can continue to function.
Here are six tips for leading and managing people:
1. Recruit, hire and retain good people from diverse backgrounds.
To do this effectively, analyze your hiring process.
👉 Reinventing Your Hiring: How a Solid Recruitment Process Increases your Impact.
2. Put people in the right roles.
Understanding their strengths and where they fit best will be key for their success and of the team’s.
Don’t put someone in a managerial position if they don’t enjoy managing people and they would rather continue in a client-facing role.
If your company doesn’t have a dual path career development process yet, here is a quick graphic that can help you.
3. Offer your people opportunities to learn new skills and advance their careers.
👉 Develop Leaders: Three Effortless Steps for Transforming Employees into Leaders
4. Create a positive work environment that encourages people to do their best.
5. Insist on accountability and monitor individual and team performance.
👉 A Manager’s Guide to Cultivate Accountability and Effective Feedback at any Startup.
6. Provide clear feedback and don’t play the blame game.
👉 How to Create a Feedback Culture in Your Startup.
7. Understand people’s personality styles and strengths.
👉 4 Employee Personality Types: Understanding and Managing Different Personalities in the Workplace.
The blog above breaks down the four personality types and how to manage each.
To better understand each person's personality style, have your team members complete this test.
Then read the blog and implement the tips to be a more effective manager.
Focus on Quality And Diversity
Managing the first “P” in the people, process, product chain begins with assembling the best team. For most businesses, that involves two critical factors:
Quality over quantity & Diversity over homogeneity.
No amount of unskilled team members can accomplish the same work as one quality employee.
Focus on hiring the right people with the right skills.
Don’t settle for less in the hopes that hiring more team members will make up for it in the end.
That’s a recipe for disaster.
Similarly, a diverse workforce is always more productive than a homogenous one. Diversity provides a whole host of benefits,
These benefits are extremely important for your business because they keep you competitive in an increasingly global — and diverse — world.
The Process
Process, as a large-scale concept, is the actions your business takes to perform a specific function.
Businesses of any size have myriad processes, including delivering a service, creating a product, making sales presentations, responding to emergencies and customer inquiries, keeping track of supplies, etc.
A process is the action plan if you will.
Having a process in place is essential to answer the questions, “how do we do X, when do we do Y, why do we do Z?”
A good layout process will ensure your business and team can run effectively without your overseeing every small detail.
Even brainstorming and problem-solving benefit when you take the time to create a process that everyone can follow.
Tips on Process
Why is the process the second of the 3 Ps of business? It’s because your people need to work in the most efficient and productive manner.
An effective action plan includes looking at your operational processes carefully to understand every step of the chain, from receiving orders to the finished product/service.
“Control your cash, stick to your core business, and know your numbers,” Lemonis.
Here are five tips for improving your processes:
- Know your costs for labour and materials.
- Track product waste and employee downtime to identify bottlenecks.
- Talk with your sales team about improving the customer relationship management (CRM) process.
- Pay attention to your daily cash flow, and don’t let any dollars disappear.
- Encourage your front-line employees to offer suggestions for improving your processes, as they may spot inefficiencies you may be missing.
Plan For Change
All businesses start small. But, with the right management, growth happens quickly.
Growth also brings an array of new issues that your business might not be prepared to handle.
Also, keep in mind there are plenty of outside factors that might present challenges like lets say… a global pandemic.
You can prevent stagnation or crumble by giving your business the highest chance for success just by planning for change while your business is small.
Small processes are much more amenable to change.
That’s not to say you should restrict growth. Growth is a positive thing.
So, perfect your processes early on and build in strategies for growth before that time comes.
When you’re able to scale your processes up or down at a moment’s notice, you give your business more of a chance to respond to changes in the market and more of a chance to stay profitable longer.
👉 Read this blog to learn how Leadership Programs Helps Startups Meet New Challenges.
The Product
With your people and processes in place, now it’s time to take a close look at your products.
Your product is what your business has to offer.
The product could be a tangible “thing” that you can hold in your hand. Or it could be a service that is only visible by its results — software, tech advice, leadership coaching, etc.
Your product — including your brand and your image — is the most visible part of your business and, as such, deserves the lion’s share of your focus.
But not to the liability of people and process.
In fact, it’s crucial to view people, process, and product as a system in which each separate part depends on the part before it.
It’s a connected cycle.
People reinforce the process -> Process reinforces the product -> Product reinforces the people. On and on this goes in a spiral.
If managed correctly, it moves in an upward direction and leads to sales and success.
Tips on Product
Whether you serve consumers (B2C) or businesses (B2B), your small business needs to offer the right products for your customers.
As Lemonis said, your product line should be “practical, purposeful and profitable.”
Some businesses develop their products without listening to customer feedback.
Product-related problems stem from an unrealistic approach to the market.
That’s why so many startups fail within the first year.
Having a strong product line opens the door to new business opportunities as well.
Here are six tips for capitalizing on your products:
- Sell to new markets, perhaps through sales representatives or an online store.
- Consider licensing opportunities that could generate income from fees.
- Conduct surveys and hold focus groups to identify customer trends.
- Monitor customer rating and review sites to see how your products are received.
- Look for ways to offer “new and improved” products to your current customers.
- Create cross-selling and up-selling opportunities by expanding your product line.
Identify The Proper Market
At the early stages of your business, it’s vital to identify the proper market for your product or service.
As your business continues to grow in size and scope, it’s equally vital to constantly reexamine your market to ensure that your people and processes are focused on the right goals.
👉 In this blog, we cover How to Create a Shared Company Vision that Will Energize Your Entire Team.
As you do establish a shared company vision, don’t forget to evaluate the limitations of both your product and the market. As well as ways to care for your existing customer base while expanding into new areas.
The Product
With your people and processes in place, now it’s time to take a close look at your products.
Your product is what your business has to offer.
The product could be a tangible “thing” that you can hold in your hand. Or it could be a service that is only visible by its results — software, tech advice, leadership coaching, etc.
Your product — including your brand and your image — is the most visible part of your business and, as such, deserves the lion’s share of your focus.
But not to the liability of people and process.
In fact, it’s crucial to view people, process, and product as a system in which each separate part depends on the part before it.
It’s a connected cycle.
People reinforce the process -> Process reinforces the product -> Product reinforces the people. On and on this goes in a spiral.
If managed correctly, it moves in an upward direction and leads to sales and success.
Tips on Product
Whether you serve consumers (B2C) or businesses (B2B), your small business needs to offer the right products for your customers.
As Lemonis said, your product line should be “practical, purposeful and profitable.”
Some businesses develop their products without listening to customer feedback.
Product-related problems stem from an unrealistic approach to the market.
That’s why so many startups fail within the first year.
Having a strong product line opens the door to new business opportunities as well.
Here are six tips for capitalizing on your products:
- Sell to new markets, perhaps through sales representatives or an online store.
- Consider licensing opportunities that could generate income from fees.
- Conduct surveys and hold focus groups to identify customer trends.
- Monitor customer rating and review sites to see how your products are received.
- Look for ways to offer “new and improved” products to your current customers.
- Create cross-selling and up-selling opportunities by expanding your product line.
Identify The Proper Market
At the early stages of your business, it’s vital to identify the proper market for your product or service.
As your business continues to grow in size and scope, it’s equally vital to constantly reexamine your market to ensure that your people and processes are focused on the right goals.
👉 In this blog, we cover How to Create a Shared Company Vision that Will Energize Your Entire Team.
As you do establish a shared company vision, don’t forget to evaluate the limitations of both your product and the market. As well as ways to care for your existing customer base while expanding into new areas.
Now that you have mastered how to manage conflict - what is your plan of action for making an impact with your team?
Now that you have mastered how to create an environment of empowerment via the 3-P's - what is your plan of action for making an impact with your team?
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Now that you have mastered the art of decision making - what is your plan of action for making an impact with your team?
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A DISC Behavior Assessment is the best way to understand your team's personalities.
Each DISC Assessment includes a Self Assessment and DISC Style evaluation worksheet
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