Blog

What Neurosurgeon's Know About Staff Supervision That Most Managers Don't

I'll never forget watching a neurosurgeon explain to a junior doctor why he'd made the wrong incision during my wife's brain surgery consultation three years ago. No shouting. No humiliation. Just precise, immediate feedback delivered with the kind of calm authority that makes people listen without question.

That moment changed how I think about supervision forever.

Most managers I meet think supervision is about checking boxes and having monthly catch-ups. They've got it completely wrong. The best supervisors—whether they're running operating theatres or construction sites—understand something fundamental that the average office manager misses entirely.

It's not about control. It's about creating conditions where people can't help but succeed.

The Precision Problem

Here's where most workplace supervision falls apart: we treat it like a conversation instead of a precision instrument. Watch a surgeon train a resident and you'll see the difference immediately. Every instruction serves a specific purpose. Every correction addresses a particular skill gap. There's no wasted movement, no unnecessary chatter.

Compare that to the typical Australian workplace supervision session. Forty-five minutes of rambling about "performance improvement" and "communication issues" with zero specific outcomes. No wonder 68% of employees report feeling confused about their supervisor's expectations.

I learned this the hard way running teams in Perth's mining sector for eight years. Used to think good supervision meant being available and supportive. Sounds reasonable, right? Wrong. Being available isn't the same as being useful. And supportive without being specific is just another word for ineffective.

The breakthrough came when I started thinking like a surgical trainer instead of a friendly manager.

The Four-Minute Rule

Surgeons have a rule most people don't know about: if you can't explain what someone needs to improve within four minutes, you don't understand the problem well enough yourself. This isn't because they're impatient—it's because precision saves lives.

Your workplace probably won't kill anyone if you mess up supervision, but the principle still applies. If you're spending twenty minutes explaining why someone's work isn't meeting standards, you're doing it wrong.

Take Sarah from my team last year. Brilliant analyst, terrible at prioritising client requests. Most managers would've scheduled a lengthy discussion about "time management skills" and sent her on a course. Instead, I gave her this: "Emergency clients get same-day response. Standard clients get three-day response. Everything else gets weekly response. When in doubt, ask me within one hour."

Problem solved in thirty seconds. She hasn't missed a priority since.

The magic isn't in the complexity—it's in the clarity. Surgeons know that confused people make dangerous mistakes. Your confused employees just make expensive ones.

Why Most Supervision Training Gets It Backwards

Here's what drives me crazy about most supervisory training courses: they focus on relationship building instead of skill building. Don't get me wrong—relationships matter. But they're not the foundation of good supervision.

Skills are.

I see managers spending months trying to "connect" with difficult employees while ignoring obvious competency gaps. It's like trying to perform surgery with a rusty scalpel because you've built a good relationship with it. The relationship doesn't fix the fundamental problem.

Surgeons build relationships through competence, not small talk. When someone trusts your ability to guide them toward better performance, the relationship follows naturally. Try it the other way around and you'll spend years having pleasant conversations with people who still can't do their jobs properly.

This is especially true in Australian workplaces where people value straightforward communication. We're not Americans—we don't need to be friends with our supervisors. We need them to be competent.

The Feedback Surgery

Medical professionals have mastered something most managers never learn: how to give feedback that actually changes behaviour. They call it "just-in-time teaching," and it's devastatingly effective.

The technique is simple. Catch someone making a mistake. Stop them immediately. Show them the correct method. Watch them do it correctly once. Move on.

No lengthy explanations about why the mistake happened. No psychology sessions about underlying causes. Just immediate, specific correction delivered without emotional baggage.

I've used this approach for twelve years now, and it works every single time. Last month, one of my project managers kept sending unclear emails to clients. Instead of booking a meeting to discuss "communication improvement," I forwarded one of his confusing emails back to him with a revised version.

"Use this format instead," I wrote. "Clear subject line, three bullet points maximum, specific next steps."

He's been writing better emails ever since. Total time invested: three minutes.

Compare that to the traditional supervision approach, where you'd schedule a meeting, discuss the importance of clear communication, create an improvement plan, and follow up weekly for six months. By the time you've finished talking about the problem, a surgeon would've trained six people to solve it.

The Competence Cascade

Here's something interesting about surgical training that most managers never consider: the best teachers create teachers, not just competent performers. They're thinking three levels ahead.

When a senior surgeon trains a resident, they're not just improving one person's skills. They're creating someone who will eventually train other residents. The knowledge multiplies exponentially because the teaching method itself becomes part of the learning.

Most workplace supervision stops at the first level. You teach someone to do their job better, and that's the end of the story. But what if you taught them to supervise others while you were at it?

I started doing this accidentally five years ago. Instead of just correcting mistakes, I began explaining my correction process. "I'm stopping you here because..." became my standard opening. Within six months, my team members were catching and correcting each other's mistakes using the same language.

Suddenly I had eight supervisors instead of one. The workload didn't just get easier—it disappeared entirely. Now my main job is supervising the supervisors, and they handle everything else. It's like having a surgical team where everyone knows what the chief surgeon would do in any situation.

The key is making your supervision process transparent instead of mysterious. Most managers treat their feedback methods like trade secrets. Surgeons treat them like teachable techniques.

Where Australian Managers Go Wrong

Working across Brisbane, Melbourne, and Sydney for the past decade, I've noticed something peculiar about Australian supervision culture. We're too polite for our own good.

Surgeons can't afford to be polite when someone's about to make a life-threatening mistake. They interrupt. They correct immediately. They don't worry about hurting feelings because hurt feelings heal faster than surgical complications.

Australian managers, by contrast, will watch someone make the same mistake for months rather than interrupt their process. We'll wait for the "right moment" to provide feedback, usually in some scheduled review session weeks later. By then, the mistake has become a habit, and habits are much harder to fix than single incidents.

I'm not suggesting we become rude or aggressive. I'm suggesting we become precise and immediate, like effective medical supervision. The kindest thing you can do for someone is help them succeed quickly, not slowly.

The Authority Question

Let's address the elephant in the room: surgical supervision works partly because of clear hierarchy. The chief surgeon's word is final, and everyone accepts that reality.

Most Australian workplaces have abandoned hierarchy without replacing it with anything equally effective. We've created this strange middle ground where supervisors have responsibility but not authority, and employees have opinions about everything but accountability for nothing.

You can't supervise effectively from this position. You need clear authority to make decisive corrections, just like surgeons need clear authority to direct operations. This doesn't mean becoming dictatorial—it means accepting that someone has to make final decisions, and that someone needs to be you.

The best supervisors I know—whether they're running medical teams or construction crews—embrace this responsibility instead of apologising for it. They make decisions quickly, communicate them clearly, and move on. No committees, no consensus-building, no endless discussions about whether everyone feels heard.

If you want to supervise like a surgeon, you need to accept surgical levels of responsibility. The trade-off is worth it: your team becomes dramatically more effective, and everyone knows exactly what's expected of them.

Most importantly, your people actually improve instead of just feeling supported. And improvement, not feelings, is what separates great supervision from glorified friendship.

The surgeons figured this out decades ago. Time for the rest of us to catch up.

Looking to develop more precise supervision skills? Check out some excellent resources on professional development and practical training approaches.