How Great Casino Supervisors Lead Under Pressure

Coaching Your Team

Now, on to maybe the most uncomfortable part of being a supervisor, coaching the team. I’m referring to when you have to correct dealers on procedures or mistakes, or be involved in some way with progressive discipline.

Coaching your dealers on mistakes made or how to improve their skills establishes you as a leader and is one of the bases of team morale. Using coaching skills to build up your team and bring out the best in them is a mark of the best supervisors in the business. Whenever possible, offer positive feedback to your team. It helps keep morale high and everyone performing at their best.

Like our other verbal skills, you’ll need to know what to say and how to say it. What to say will come in the form of:

• Correcting monetary mistakes
• Correcting procedural mistakes
• Informing the team of procedural changes or promotional information
• Reinforcing good performances
• Yearly performance evaluations

These are the times you’ll have to speak to them about something that could present an uncomfortable situation. But if you know how to say what you need to say, you can do it with confidence, and the chances of it becoming uncomfortable go way down.

Here are some things to keep in mind about how to have these conversations:

• Never belittle or scold anyone
• Don’t have the conversation in front of other coworkers (it’s rude and embarrassing)
• Offer help learning or practicing if needed
• Be clear and concise with your message, don’t beat around the bush
• Offer positive feedback of some kind in addition to whatever the issue is

Dealers know that you have to talk to them sometimes about mistakes. It’s unavoidable. If you keep these things in mind and have the conversations in the most respectful way possible, they’ll respect you as a leader, and you’ll likely stand out in an industry so full of people who aren’t great in these situations.

Prioritize Tasks

This is a big one. If you know how to prioritize your duties, you’ll never be overwhelmed, and it’ll be noticeable to everyone that you keep your cool no matter how busy you are. It’s quite common for supervisors to lose their cool and get overwhelmed when they’re busy and there is a lot to do. Managers do it, too, for that matter. Not the good ones, of course, but hey, that’s the world we live in. The best managers keep their cool no matter what is going on. And all of those managers developed that trait when they were supervisors.

When you’re a floor supervisor, there is a lot to do, most of which we’ve gone over. One of the keys to doing the job effectively is prioritizing all those tasks and doing them when they need to be done, so no other part of the job suffers.

Here is the hierarchy of tasks and the order in which they should be completed:

1. Safety first! Broken glass, fights, fire, anything that threatens the safety of the staff or the guests comes absolutely first.
2. Direct monetary transactions like markers, marker buy-backs, large buy-ins, or color-ups require almost immediate attention. Why? Because they need to be dealt with in order for the game to move on. We don’t want to keep people waiting or stop the game (remember game pace?)
3. Non-monetary tasks like making rewards cards, answering guest questions, and general guest service interactions
4. Internal tasks like submitting fills, rating adjustments, checking the racks, tasks that do not keep the guests waiting
5. If everything is done and caught up, watch the games!

A little side note here is that when a manager calls and asks you to do something, whatever it is, it goes to the top of the list; they’ll want that dealt with immediately. Safety will always be the most important, of course, so we’ll call manager requests 1a in order of importance.

If you keep this in mind, you can prioritize everything as it comes up, because it will all come up for sure! There will be times when there are piles of these things to do, but if you keep your priorities in mind, you’ll be able to deal with everything in a calm, cool, and collected way that will solidify you as a good supervisor and a good leader.