Inferior staff are what you were before you were promoted to be the team boss. You can do their jobs better than them, that’s one of the ways you got promoted.
Happily, the containment strategy for Inferior staff is a much more straightforward task than containing Extension staff. There are four reasons for this.
First of all, you will have created a team spirit. This will usually be based on the peculiarities of the Inferior staff, as these will generally be the bulk of your staff. So they will already be, to some extent anyway, “bought in” to you and what you are trying to achieve on the surface.
Secondly, you can do their jobs. This means you know what they are up to, and they are going to find it difficult to slip anything past you that you won’t find out about, probably beforehand.
Thirdly, one of them is probably someone who was one of your close peers not long ago. He or she will tend to want to retain that special relationship with you, and part of his/her strategy for doing so will be to tell you what is going on. This is called “keeping you in the loop”, not “sneaking to the boss”, by the way. The street-credibility of the Inferior in question is best maintained by referring to it as “keeping the boss’s feet on the ground before he/she disappears into the management ivory tower”.
Fourthly, they all believe they were better than you, are still better than you, and therefore they will be next in line for your job after your next promotion. As it is clear that you are likely to have considerable say in who gets promoted under you as your replacement, they will tend to want to stay in line and better still, to emulate you.
All of these considerations will tend to ensure that Inferior staff contain themselves, with little effort on your part. If they ever step off-message, you will know about it immediately, if not before, and be able to address it quickly with minimum damage in any case.
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