Every manager should have and strive to improve their team management skills. Managers and the teams they control benefit from effective management skills.
These abilities can ensure that everyone on the team is on the same page and that each team member understands what is expected of them at work. Managers can successfully lead when they have the ability to manage a team.
What exactly is team management?
The ability of a manager or organization to lead a group of people in completing a task or achieving a common goal is referred to as team management.
Effective team management entails encouraging, communicating with, and encouraging team members to perform to the best of their abilities and grow as professionals.
However, what constitutes effective team management varies depending on the work environment and the people involved.
Some managers succeed with an authoritative approach, while others prefer to manage their teams in a more relaxed manner. Some team members may react differently to different management styles.
Understanding your own leadership style and what works best for your team is a critical component of team management.
What is the impact of team management?
Team management is important in the workplace for several reasons:
- It encourages a unified approach to leadership within a company or team, particularly when team building is used.
- It facilitates problem solving through the use of negotiating and critical thinking.
- It promotes open communication between managers and team members, as well as the importance of good communication skills and active listening.
- It ensures that managers and team members are working toward a clearly defined common goal.
- It assists managers in clearly outlining their team members’ roles and expectations.
Understanding the significance of team management and working to improve your team management abilities can help you become the most effective leader possible.
The more effective you are at team management, the more successful your team will be at work.
Effective team management skills examples
- Put the emphasis on serving rather than managing: – A team member has called to say she is ill and will be absent from work. You offer to complete some of her outstanding tasks rather than adding them to the workload of other team members.
- Don’t always believe you’re correct: – During a team meeting, you express your thoughts on a technical problem that one of your clients is having. One of your senior technicians offers an alternative viewpoint to your analysis. Instead of assuming your point of view is correct right away, you listen carefully to what he has to say and then engage in a constructive discussion about it.
- Prioritize the transparency: – Rather than assigning team tasks individually, use a project management system to assign and display tasks and overall project goals. When team members understand their role in a project and their responsibilities, they are more likely to hold themselves accountable for producing high-quality work.
- Establish boundaries: – A client has informed you that one of your technicians has failed to perform the required maintenance tasks on a regular basis as per their service agreement.
Rather than sending an email to notify your technician that the maintenance tasks need to be updated, you meet with them in person to clearly outline your expectations and discuss the employee’s recent poor performance.
By meeting in person, you demonstrate to your team member that you value their performance and that failure to complete work assignments will not be tolerated.
- Create a positive work environment: – After losing a large account, the office morale is a little low. You decide to lift everyone’s spirits by hiring a mobile massage therapist to give them shoulder and neck massages.
When everyone has calmed down, you sit them down with doughnuts and coffee to discuss lessons learned and how the team can improve service delivery in the future.
- Put a strong emphasis on effective communication in the workplace: You notice a lack of communication in the office, which is affecting service delivery.
To address this issue, you call a team meeting to discuss processes and where the breakdown in communication is occurring.
To help team members, you can install a mobile app on their phones that allows them to enter updates when they are working outside of the office.
- Encourage and nurture the development of your team: – An exciting conference involving new technology is taking place. Although most conferences are attended by senior engineers and management, you have a talented junior engineer on your team who can benefit from attending. You decide to bring this up at the next management meeting and request that the junior engineer be allowed to attend.
- Be open to new experiences: – Despite the fact that the office rules require all employees to report to the office in the mornings before visiting clients and responding to call-outs. You recognize that this has a negative impact on productivity and wastes team members’ time.
You make the decision to allow team members to visit clients first thing in the morning at their discretion and when it will benefit their overall productivity.
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