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While things like remote work and AI have changed the way we work, it hasn’t made big changes when we look at how to manage a team. The tools may have changed, but most of the skills and techniques required to keep your team focused and make sure your projects meet their deadlines have stayed the same.
In this article we’ll talk about the ins and outs of team management, what the benefits of effective team management, which tools you need to make it happen, and we’ll give you 3 tips on how to manage a team successfully.
As with all things, there are different styles you can adopt when you first begin to manage a team. And the style you choose will ultimately dictate what your relationship with your team members will be and the skills you need.
There are five major ways you can choose to manage your team:
Autocratic is the prime example of a top down leadership model. Leadership, whether for a single team or for the entire organization, makes the decisions, often without input from team members, and workers execute those decisions.
While it is a strict management style, and most widely used in military organizations, there are a lot of other industries where this approach will be the most successful.
This style usually works well in teams with many junior employees, teams that make use of untrained labor, and teams with a high turnover.
The most common approach to team management in modern organizations is democratic leadership. Here team members share opinions and insights, and you as the team manager, make decisions based on the input from the team.
This approach works really well in teams where members have specialist knowledge and the team manager’s role is to maintain the strategic overview.
This could be in marketing teams, where the head of marketing relies on the designer or design input, a copywriter for input on copy and messaging and an SEO expert for input on which keywords to target.
Additionally, it is a great way to create a sense of shared responsibility and to increase loyalty.
Whether we’re talking entry-level telemarketing or senior account executives, motivating team members through rewards and penalties is very common in sales organizations, and that’s exactly how transactional team management works.
In some cases the incentive is free movie tickets or a bottle of wine to the first person to make their quota, but payment schemes that tie wages or bonuses to either individual or collective performance is probably the most common way to do transactional team management.
Hands-off leadership, which is sometimes referred to as laissez-faire leadership, is when the team manager sets the overall goal and deadlines for projects, and then relies on the experience and knowledge of the individual team members or getting projects and tasks across the finish line.
This approach works well when you’re managing very senior employees, but it ultimately requires a lot from your project management tools. Essentially you need a way to track progress so you can forecast and monitor things like time-spend and delays while not interrupting the team members.
Collective leadership does away with the role of the team manager entirely. Unless the collective leadership approach is an organization wide decision, there will usually still be a team manager who’s responsible for things like employee development, but the operational leadership is the responsibility of the team as a collective.
Everyone pitches in with everything from strategy to execution in an effort to achieve growth, and all team members are equally responsible for successes and failures.
This management style is usually only seen in small teams where all employees have similar seniority. This is because the top down approach to leadership (which collective leadership is not) simplifies planning and managing large groups of people.
With that said, it’s not only applicable to small teams.
American video game developer, Valve, took the collective leadership approach on a company wide level with the ‘Flatland’ approach described in their employee handbook from 2012.
In the handbook they describe their decision by saying: “When you’re an entertainment company that’s spent the last decade going out of its way to recruit the most intelligent, innovative, talented people on Earth, telling them to sit at a desk and do what they’re told obliterates 99 percent of their value. We want innovators, and that means maintaining an environment where they’ll flourish.”
To help you succeed with your team management we’ve gathered the 3 best tips on how to manage a team right here.
There’s a good reason why the famous adage “there’s no ‘I’ in team” is still around, and while the responsibility of team success falls on the people in charge, the actions taken to reach success falls on all team members.
A common mistake among newly appointed team managers is to take on much of the execution themselves, but when you are managing a team, the most important thing you can do is to delegate.
Most teams consist of people with a wide range of skills and backgrounds, and it’s the job of the team manager to know which team member is best suited to complete each task, and delegate those tasks accordingly.
However, it’s important to note that task delegation shouldn’t leave team members feeling like they’re carrying the load. Each delegated task should be followed up by support and guidance.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of assigning tasks based on previous successes, but empowering your team is just as important, as it helps ensure that your team will thrive even if a team member is reassigned or leaves the company altogether.
As a team leader it is your job to understand which employees are ready to take on more responsibility and then help them do that.
Some ways to empower team members could be:
Effectively managing a team means you need to keep communication channels open both within the team and towards wider stakeholders like other departments, partners or clients.
One part of this is to ensure that team members know exactly what is expected and what the overall goal is, which will help them feel supported in their role and make their job easier.
The other part is to make sure that most, if not all, communication related to progress and production happens in channels that will not disappear if one or more team members fall ill or leave the company. Essentially, when it comes to open communication, channels such as emails, shared documents and other trackable lines of communication far surpasses direct messages, meetings and calls.
