How do people handle working for significantly less intelligent supervisors?

Question

I'm a college student with a part-time job in retail. I like my new supervisor, but she has significantly less cognitive ability than several members of her staff. I would estimate that her IQ is probably in the higher double digits (~85-95) while she has several staff members who are in the 130-160 range (students and professionals who just like working for the store.) However, she doesn't seem to realize the gap and often becomes agitated when I try to explain things to her. I find myself having to slow down and explain things to her at a much simpler level, and even then she doesn't always get it.

How to handle this?

I tried to put it as politely as possible, and that may be contributing to why I'm coming across to some as arrogant. The fact is that her deficits are interfering with her ability to do her job, period. What I'm trying to explain and help her with are her own job functions, which she's managing to screw up even after I sit her down and try to help her with them. As far as "emotional and social intelligence," those are lacking as well. Her poor people management skills have nearly gotten us into legal trouble on more than one occasion. She's almost certainly out the door in the next few months, but I was looking for advice on dealing with her until then.

Answer 1

Well, for starters, I'd say come down off your high horse. It is much easier to learn to deal with all types of people when you don't artificially create distance between you and them.

Seriously, your condescending attitude comes across even in your question here. It is all very well and fine to be intelligent; however, there is also emotional and social intelligence that goes well beyond simple IQ. Learning and cultivating these skills, like mentoring, collaboration, team support, etc. will go infinitely farther than beating someone over the head with the "obvious" fact that they aren't as smart as you.

Answer 2

Its gonna be tough, but the best thing is to put your superior cognitive ability to work in recognizing and developing other new and useful abilities. Some of those abilities are:

Compassion. Your supervisor is probably supervisor because she has remained on the job while other, more gifted employees have moved on. This may be the best and most she ever achieves, and it may be critical to her quality of life. Knowing that, she may be operating under tremendous stress because baby's new shoes, the mortgage, a car repair depends on getting through one mor hour, one more day. Be kind, you will move on and accomplish bigger and better things.

Tolerance/patience. The world is filled with situations like this. I can almost promise that you'll find it time and again in your working life. To give in to your impatience, to express your superior intelligence overtly and condescendingly may cause you regret. To tolerate ineptness while doing your best under the circumstances is your best bet to leap-frog such persons.

Humility. There are many kinds of intelligence. Sometimes people who have underdeveloped abstract reasoning abilities may be uncannily gifted in such things as relationships, being sensorily aware of their surroundings, or simply very very shrewd and sly. Humility will allow you to learn from them, sometimes things to emulate, sometimes things to avoid, but in either case they become your teacher rather than just a source of irritation.

A sense of humor. Life and the strategems that people adopt to deal with it are often absurd - both in the vaudevillian and existential senses of the word. An ability to mentally stand outside the situation and "watch the cosmic comedy/drama" is a supremely rewarding skill.

Finally, just as a note, sometimes I've found that the slowest had other character traits which were absolutely sterling.

Answer 3

It's hard getting use to a job at first, I am sure your higher ups wouldn't have hired her for a supervisor position if she wasn't smart enough to handle it, she just needs time and patience and help from all of you to help her get used to how things should be handled, not all retail stores are ran exactly the same and getting used to new staff is hard enough, some people just don't give others a chance to show their true potential, she may feel uncomfortable right now, help her get used to it.

Answer 4

KNOW THAT YOU ARE MORE EQUIPPED TO DO THE JOB, AND HER INSECURITIES ABOUT THIS WILL EVENTUALLY BE NOTICED AND PERHAPS YOU WILL HAVE HER POSITION ONE DAY.....