11 Effective Tips for Team Management

Congratulations on your promotion to a manager! While you will enjoy higher pay, managing a team is demanding and overwhelming. You are no longer solely responsible for your work. You also have to take charge of every aspect of an entire project. Read on for five tips to effectively manage your team.

1. Hire the right employees

While finding the right members of your team is challenging and time-consuming, it is crucial to the productivity of your projects. To hire the right person for a job opening, you should:

• Clearly define the job before hiring
• Develop an employee hiring strategy
• Create and use an employee hiring checklist
• Carefully review applications and credentials
• Ask the right questions during the interview to learn more about the candidates’ strengths, weaknesses, skills, and talents
• Check references and background

2. Manage time effectively

If you often feel like there is not enough time in the day to complete crucial tasks for your project, you should make effective time management a critical part of your team’s projects. You can achieve this by eliminating time-wasting activities such as excessive phone calls, frequent meetings, and too much use of social media, among other distractions. You should also ensure that your team members have their priorities in check by creating definitive schedules.

Contact coAmplifi to invest in workforce management software to ensure real-time monitoring of your employees as they perform tasks to improve time management.

3. Develop clear goals and objectives

Setting clear and concise short-term and long-term goals and objectives is a crucial part of team management. It enables your team to understand what is expected of them and how much effort they should dedicate to their work. Be sure to involve your team in the goal-setting process to ensure that you read from the same page. Your goals should also be realistic and achievable to avoid missing deadlines and confusion.

4. Delegate tasks to the right employees

When multiple employees work on the same project, tasks and responsibilities can easily fall by the wayside. For this reason, you should dedicate time to knowing your employees to identify their strengths, weaknesses, talents, and skills. This will ensure that each employee handles functions that suit their skill set and knowledge to keep them engaged. It could also mean teaming up different members of your team to work on specific workloads together to meet deadlines and improve productivity.

You could also use task management templates to help you identify your employee's capabilities to delegate tasks accordingly and make changes to minimize heavy workloads. Be sure to provide sufficient information about a specific job to the team member you entrust it to.

5. Regularly review progress

Delegating tasks to your team members is not enough. You further need to review progress regularly. While this is a time-consuming process, it is crucial to enable you to ascertain that no team member lags. It is also an excellent opportunity to help them strengthen areas they are weak at. Consider questioning your staff or requesting routine reports to enable you to review progress. Avoid over-burdening employees who complete tasks on time and encourage those who may be lacking to do more.

6. Provide feedback

One of the most significant ways to support your team members to grow personally and professionally is by providing constructive feedback. Valuable feedback offers your team members insights on areas they could improve to increase productivity. Providing constructive recognition and praise is also an excellent way to keep your team members motivated. According to a recent study, employee recognition can reduce the chances of burnout by 45% and 48%.

However, feedback should not be one-way. Consider giving team members the chance to review your leadership strategies. This will enable you to determine whether or not you are putting in the necessary effort as a team leader. Be sure to invest in a feedback tracker to help you schedule and manage feedback sessions.

7. Ensure effective communication

Effective communication is the heart of any excellent team management. With proper communication, employees have clarity on the team’s goals, tasks, and deadlines, eliminating stress and confusion. To foster effective communication within the group, you should:

• Maintain open communication channels. You could schedule regular one-on-one sessions, host team meetings, and encourage transparency to ensure a seamless flow of information within the organization to help your team run smoothly.
• Invest in communication tools such as Slack and Google hangouts to help your team interact, give feedback, and voice concerns

8. Define roles within the team

Apart from delegating responsibilities such as marketing, programming, or development within the team, you should also define roles. Every team member has different personality traits that you could leverage to help your team be more productive and foster synergy and cohesiveness. For instance, some team members may have excellent communication skills while others are great for morale. Some roles you could define within your team include:

• Creator: An employee who is excellent at handling creative challenges, generating ideas, and developing solutions
• Champion: Individuals who can promote ideas, drive change and rally the team
• Facilitator: An employee with good communication skills and who can manage relations internally and externally
• Implementer: A team member who can take charge of the daily team responsibilities and handle administrative work

9. Resolve team conflicts promptly

Your team members are likely to disagree on specific issues when working together, leading to conflicts in the workplace. Unfortunately, these disagreements do not often work themselves out, so you should step in to help the members involved reach a compromise or develop a solution. Failing to manage conflicts promptly negatively impacts your team's productivity and the communication between employees.

10. Train employees

Training your team members is an effective way to reduce costs and employee turnover. It also allows you to give personalized feedback to help members improve their skills. Be sure to focus your coaching sessions on specific tasks within your project instead of team-based training. This allows your team to thrive in new responsibilities introduced to their work.

11. Lead by example

Your team members look up to you for inspiration and guidance, so you should ensure that your actions are good examples to them. Be sure to commit to your work, take responsibility for your actions, and behave professionally if you expect the team members to do the same.

Endnote

Effective team management helps you create a productive team to achieve your bottom line. Be sure to implement the above team management tips to make your work more manageable.