Working as a manager can sometimes be tough, and it’s easy to underestimate how much hard work has to go into making it work. With the UK’s latest unemployment figures showing a near 50-year low of 3.5%, it’s never been more important for managers to keep teams working at their optimal best as the labour shortage adds workloads to employees filling capability gaps across industries. Getting better at managing your team will make life much easier for you and the people you’re managing in the long term. And even if you think you’re a good manager, there are always plenty of things you could do better.
Even the best managers out there have a lot to learn, and you should be keen to learn more and develop your skills as a manager if you want to achieve the best for the business and do right by your team. If you’re reading this, you probably already know that and want to start the process of getting better at managing your team.
With that in mind, in our latest business growth guide for HR and management teams, we’re going to explore a list of different steps managers can take to start achieving more when it comes to driving team success. If you’re able to develop each of the skills discussed below, your whole business and team will be able to see incremental improvements.
Delegate Tasks to the Right People
When managing a team, delegating tasks to different people will be one of your most important and pressing tasks. If you want to make sure that you’re always delegating important tasks to the right people, you first need to know what each person on your team is able to offer in terms of their skills and abilities. If you’re falling short and you don’t know each person’s skillset inside out, you’re probably going to regret that later. Take the time to delegate tasks in a careful and considerate way; doing so will ensure the outcomes for each completed task are maximized.
Be Honest and Transparent
When you run your business in an open and transparent way, and you’re always as transparent as you can be when it comes to how you deal with your employees, the whole business will benefit in the long term. Your employees want to feel as if they’re in the loop, and they won’t feel that way of it always seems like the people in upper management are keeping information from them. So try to be honest and transparent and keep them informed when anything is happening with the business that might impact them in some way.
Show Decisive Leadership
Showing a more decisive type of leadership will help your employees to feel confident in your abilities. They’ll improve their own performance levels when they see where the business is heading and what it’s striving to achieve. Being deceived and clear in your leadership might be tough if you don’t naturally have those traits and skills. But failing to work and operate in a decisive way will only lead to confusion and doubt in your team, and that’s definitely not something you want to deal with as a business owner or manager.
Spend Time Building Positive Working Environment
Spending time building positive spaces inside your business can only be a good thing. When your employees have a workplace that’s light, nicely designed and positive, they’ll look forward to coming to work. You don’t want them to feel as if every minute in the workplace is a chore because then they’ll simply be counting down the minute until they can leave, and that’s not what you want at all. So spend some time trying to build a positive working environment that everyone can benefit from.
Have a Strategy for Managing Conflict
There’s always going to be a chance that some sort of conflict arises in your team. In a way, these conflicts themselves are not such bad things. There are certainly worse things than having employees who don’t agree with one another. However, a line needs to be drawn somewhere and you can’t let these disagreements become disruptive to the team’s work or the business in general. So try to have a strategy in place for managing these conflicts and mediating between the people who are in conflict with one another.
Lead by Example
Leading by example is one of the most important things you can do as a manager. No one in your workplace will take you seriously if you’re telling them to do one thing but following a completely different path in terms of how you conduct yourself and conduct your work for the business. So if you want people to take your message and guidance seriously at work, you need to show them how it’s done and lead them by example. This simple change in how you approach things can definitely help your business grow and progress in so many ways.
Deal with the Challenges of Remote Working
One issue that more and more managers are now struggling with is remote working. When you have to deal with the issues of remote working, it can be tough to stay on track and keep standards high. But if your business has decided that some or all of its staff members are going to be working remotely, it’s up to you as a manager of a team to adapt to that new situation. Find new ways of working and new tools that help you to keep your team on track and achieve everything it can, no matter where each person is working from.
Work on Communication Collectively
Working on communication is definitely something you’ll want to work on if you want to get better at managing your team. If you aren’t communicating with your employees and they’re not interacting with you effectively either, the whole business is going to suffer. You should try to improve team and employee communication as a collective whole. It’s not something you can dictate to your staff members. Instead, you need to make sure that you’re doing your part to improve communication and showing them how they need to communicate with you in return.
Offer a Clear Vision
Offering a clear vision of where the business is heading and why each member of your team should buy into what you’re trying to achieve will help a lot too. You want to make people feel part of an important journey and process of growth. They’ll become much more invested in everything the business is trying to achieve if they can see a clear vision ahead of them. It can also stave off any issues related to motivation that might otherwise occur. Try to show them what they can achieve by giving their all each day.
Recognize Everyone’s Achievements
It’s important to be able to make people feel good about themselves as well. When you recognize each person’s effort and achievements, they’ll feel much more valued by the business and that can only be a good thing. Try to recognize the good work they’re doing and reinforce the positive behaviors that you want to see from them moving forward. When they achieve something, let them know that they did well and maybe find a way to reward your best-performing employees too. When you do that, you’ll also find that it’s a lot easier to keep hold of your top talent.
Trust Them to Do What They Were Hired to Do
Putting your trust in your team can make such a huge difference in how they perform. When you really show them that they’re trusted and that their work is valued, they’ll give their all and reward that trust. And employees that don’t do that will also reveal a lot about themselves and whether they have a future inside the business. So when you go through a hiring process and you hire talented people, be sure to make the most of them and trust them to do what they were hired to do in the first place.
Offer Development Opportunities
It’s definitely important to make sure that you’re giving your employees the chance to better themselves and become better at what they do. That’s obviously something that’ll help them to go further and grow as individuals, but it’ll also help to improve the outcomes for the business as well. When your employees improve themselves and gain new skills, those skills and abilities will ultimately be put to use for the good of the business going forward.
Adapt Your Management Approach
Adapting your management approach depending on the needs of the individual is something you should try to do as well. Not everyone responds the same way to how you approach management, and some people might need more or less or different things from you than others do. That’s just the nature of managing a group of different people, and you need to find a way to deal with that.
As you can see, there’s a lot that goes into managing a team of people. When you get better at managing a team, your employees will develop faster and get better at what they do, and performance levels should rise across the board. That can only be good for the business in the long term.
How are you tackling the current worker shortage and keep your team motivated for the best outcomes?
