Being one of the older generation of IT people (I started in 1967) I had the good fortune of being inducted into this Guild under the guidance of a "supervisor." That job doesn't exist any more: today everyone reports directly to a "manager."
The problem with that is that managers spend most of their time doing "management stuff." (I've been a manager for years and I still couldn't tell you what that management stuff really is, but somehow it eats up a lot of time.) Managers don't have any time to "supervise" people. Even though the word "manager" implies that they are "managing" people, there seems to be a vast difference between supervising and managing, in terms of the actual relationship between the manager and the subordinate.
Supervisors spend almost all of their time focused on their staff. Not just prairie-dogging over their cubicle partition to catch them doing crossword puzzles, either. In fact a good supervisor knows that we all need an unscheduled break occasionally in order to maintain our sanity.
Supervisors keep in touch with how their subordinates are doing. Have they acquired the right skills to do their job? Have they got the confidence to use those skills? Are they getting enough feedback from you and the rest of their superiors to know whether they're doing OK? How are their social skills? (In my day most of us didn't have any, but even today people who choose careers in IT aren't always the most social members of the species.) Sometimes two people who seem nice enough don't hit it off and they just need a playground monitor with a loud whistle. IT is a cosmopolitan vocation; is anyone having trouble with English as a second language? How about writing skills: we all have to do a lot of it but it doesn't mean we're any good at it.
And yes, how is their personal life? You don't have to be a licensed therapist but everyone appreciates a sympathetic ear and who knows, perhaps you really can help solve a problem. Furthermore, these days with the myriad forms of job insecurity, there is a whole lot more spillover of work problems into home life than the other way round, so you can help spot them before they spin out of control.
To sum up, I've found that the single most effective thing I can do to make sure my people give their best and get the most back from the job is to simply fill in that missing box on the org chart, and be a good old-fashioned first-line supervisor. It's not easy because managers don't have enough time. But then, delegating some of that "management stuff" to your subordinates so you have time to do some "supervision stuff" is a really good tradeoff.
