Sustaining It Both Ways

Keep checking in on the standard and the support, even in a hard time.

A team member trusted her supervisor’s mix of high standards and real support for months. Then her supervisor went through a demanding stretch of his own, and their one-on-ones, which used to run a full thirty minutes, started getting cut short or rescheduled. She found herself wondering whether the support had ever been real, or whether it had just been easy to offer when things were calm.

Holding a high bar and backing it with real support in a single conversation is a manageable thing to do once. Sustaining it as a supervisor, so that your direct reports can still trust that support months later, takes a lot more work. That ongoing consistency is the test of whether a “high expectations, high support” environment is real.

When Support Thins Out Temporarily

A real difference exists between support disappearing because something changed in the relationship, and support thinning because the supervisor themselves is stretched thin right now. Both can look similar from the outside: shorter check-ins, less attention, a slower response to a question. One of these is worth calling out to your supervisor. The other is often just as true of a hard time, but it tends to resolve once that time passes.

Telling the two apart works best through a direct question rather than a guess. Something as simple as, “I’ve noticed our check-ins have gotten shorter lately. Is that just this month, or has something changed?” gives the other person a chance to tell you which one it is, instead of leaving you to sit with the ambiguity and draw your own conclusions.