Team Management: How to Effectively Manage Your Team

Team Management 101

Team management is the key component to teams that perform well, and companies that grow. As the famous saying goes:

“People don’t quit employers, they quit their bosses.”

So how do you make sure you are managing your team in a way that allows them to coordinate work, build relationships, and feel valued in their work? Practice the following traits to learn how you can build more effective teams.

In this article, you’ll learn why exactly team management is important, what a well-managed team looks like, and tips and tricks of the trade.

What does team management matter?

Happy employees are more motivated to be collaborative, productive, and aligned. As a manager, knowing why team management is important can help you identify any areas you may need to improve.

Managing a large and diverse team can be quite challenging. Having a workforce management system to help you from onboarding to conducting performance appraisals could make your job more straightforward and efficient. You want to have a way to manage communication with and among employees, whether that's through a chat app like Slack or through email or through a business texting app, so that everyone's on the same page - and so that your team operates as smoothly as possible.

Intrinsic motivation

When a team member feels valued and happy to be at work, they perform better. Here at Workast, our culture is very “family-centric” and we want to make sure every employee knows that they are a part of a team. A good management philosophy is to focus on the individuals. Support their success, treat them how you’d like to be treated, and lead by example. A good team management style will lead to employees that are intrinsically motivated to do more. A team leader should focus on promoting the best working environment to help boost teamwork, morale, and productivity. This in turn will lead to reduced stress at workplace and build a positive culture.

When you’re able to cultivate positive values in your team, there will be instances where you don’t need to remind employees to do what needs to be done. They would initiate tasks without being asked. With this, your productivity and output quality will be higher. 

 77% of US workers said culture has a strong impact on their ability to do their best work.

Reduce turnover costs

It’s no secret that turnover costs are a huge cost to businesses in all industries. Saving that cost by retaining employees does a lot to your bottom line. By keeping the employees you have, you can give more perks and benefits to the employees as well - rather than having that money go into turnover. 

What’s even more challenging with turnover is the inconvenience of replacing people who left with good hires and training them to meet or exceed performance standards.  More than the tangible costs of training, it’s the amount of time and resources you dedicate to equipping new hires with the right skills and knowledge to perform the job excellently.

Traits of a good manager

While there are many different beliefs and viewpoints as to what makes a good manager, there are traits and values that good leaders hold. 

While the individual traits may look different across different niches and can be subjective. Knowing, the crucial components of effective leaders and team management can help develop your leadership style. 

Another great trait every leader should have is accountability. Holding yourself responsible for all facets of operation handed to you will be a great testament to your ability to adapt to your role and embrace the company as if it were your own. 

Tips for Effective Management

Be direct and transparent

Team-wide clarity needs to be given to avoid any confusion. Tasks, deadlines, goals, and projects will fall through the cracks without transparency and direction. Make sure your teams are set up to succeed by giving them the transparency and open direction that they need to complete their work.

It would also be great if you had training in fierce conversations. You have to face the fact that you’ll encounter people with different personalities and some of them could be really difficult. But if you’re able to give redirecting feedback appropriately to correct the negative behavior, the behavior will be nipped in the bud, and won’t have a chance to influence others.

Communicate the vision

Communicating the vision helps employees know what their role is, and where the company wants to go. Keeping teams on track, means, regularly reinforcing the company vision. It’s impossible for a manager to lead a team if their employees don’t know what direction they are moving. Place emphasis to make sure your teams know the vision often for a well managed team.

Encourage friendships

Whether it’s someone on your team or someone in a completely different department - employees are happier when they have friends at work. Team building activities and building rapport with employees need to be a critical part of any manager's day-to-day activities. Employees who say they feel like part of a group at work are 2.3 times more likely to feel engaged at work.

Here at Workast, our team has a Slack channel where we post a lot of pictures of our kids, dogs, or what we had for lunch. As a remote team, we don’t get to always see each other as much as we’d like, so we have instilled a culture of friendship and teamwork through as many remote activities as possible.

Provide all materials your team needs

Having a good file structure will help your team find everything they need and speed up your projects. You can use a document management software to create this structure. But, if you don't want to set up a completely new system, you could also just make use of your cloud storage service and upload all relevant materials there. For example, if your team is creating a lot of contracts, make sure that you provide them with suitable contract templates so they don't have to create their documents from scratch.

Task accordingly

Delegating work to team members is part of being a team manager. Making sure you are delegating the right tasks to the right person is important as well. Assess the group by checking the strengths and weaknesses to find the right person for each task. And if so, do they have everything they need to complete the task? Make sure you are assessing individuals for their own skills and competencies. A manager is expected to assign tasks to employees based on skill, experience, and competency. They must trust that every team member can complete assigned tasks on time.

In Workast you can easily see the overview of tasks for each member of your team and their deadline to help you make sure you have tasks aligned with competencies.

Praise the positive contributions

Recognize a job well done. As managers, it’s important to provide constructive feedback when necessary, but it’s even more important to celebrate wins. A good leader will make an effort to know that their team knows when they are doing a great job.

Being an effective team management leader will help both the team and the organization get more done. 

Are you an effective team management leader and have tips you would like to share? Send us a line or drop us a tweet and we might share your story on our blog! Here’s to happy teams!