Congratulations! You have got a new job as manager. New challenges will be coming up now. Managing a team and pulling them together is a big task for a manager. Team management is an art and a manager needs to develop it well for better employee engagement. It requires a great sense of unity, common interests and responsibilities closely associated with a task. Team management skills are highly important to keep teams together, to promote strength, support, and reliability.
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Why is teamwork important?
To be a part of a team is one thing and to perform as a team member is another. Team management will make sure that everybody is following a synergistic way of doing work. In a teamwork, the work will always be properly managed, maximizing strengths and bringing out the best in each team member.
The key to attaining growth and success lies in the ability to simultaneously perform as an individual and in line with other employees. The importance of teamwork can be seen regularly in almost all teams like sports, medical and IT and more. And in these fields importance of teamwork is growing because of the following 5 significant reasons:
- It motivates unity in workplace
- Offers different perspective
- Provides learning opportunities
- Improved productivity
- Promotes workplace synergy
But at times working in a solitude becomes difficult and the managing team brings ups several challenges. Let’s have a look at some major challenges in team management.
Challenges in a team
1) No trust
Trust is crucial for a team and is developed when team members start knowing each other. Team members need to know each other and which is a challenge in a growing team. A manager needs to have both professional and personal relation to developing a common trust.
2) Too many cooks
Another challenge comes when too many people are involved in a project. “Too many cooks in the kitchen”. When there are too many people involved, the feedback on a project can lead to more harm than good. Different opinions and voices will pull people in different directions and the actual objective is lost.
3) Low engagement
If a team loves what they do, they will be willing to go the extra mile for your business. And team engagement is the key to enjoying a role. Team engagement is crucial to business success and teams should be interested in what they do. It can be challenging to stay detached without the involvement of all team members.
4) Lack of transparency
As the teams are growing, expectations grow and transparency is becoming a much-required norm in business. If there is no transparency, the trust will suffer. It is important to provide a greater visibility to goals, projects, and earnings.
5) Satisfactory appraisals
At the time of appraisals, maximum employees are usually not satisfied with it. Reaching up to the expectations of teams is also a challenge. It becomes difficult to reduce the grievances of annual appraisals and give them satisfying perks.
Team management tips
The art of team management is the ability to deliver clear vision to team members and leading a team in a rewarding and inspiring way. When the work environments start getting busy, it leaves a little time for team leaders to make sure that the team members are feeling creative and happy. So, when it comes to your team, how can you make sure that employees are performing their best.
With these 5 simple and effective team management tips, you can master team management.
Be transparent
Be as open about your decisions and challenges to your teams as possible. It sounds like a big claim but being transparent is the key to the happy working environment. It will help to develop a feeling of mutual respect between team members and managers.
Until and unless the team is not clear about their goals and context of work, they cannot perform well. In turn, employees will feel an important part of the team and operate accordingly. They will feel secure in their positions and feel free to contribute ideas and suggestions, thus enhancing creativity.
Using tools
As you now know that transparency is a cornerstone of high-functioning teams, and this increases the need of using tools for transparency. Teams use ProofHub web app to achieve effective management to have an overview of projects. With this tool, transparency and accountability increases as everyone have a say on the project. They will have a high-level of visibility over the project and also understand the part they are playing on a project. Thus, creating accountability among team members. As the tasks in a project are assigned to a specific team member, it will make responsibilities clear and understand the role they are playing within the big picture.
In the task management tool, all the tasks and responsibilities will be displayed transparently and the managers will not have to take much hands-on-approach to know which task is assigned to whom.
Team management activities
Team management activities for the team are just as important as producing results for the business. Team building activities and games should be enjoyable and involve everyone in a team. It can be an add-on to brainstorming session also. It will help the teams to know each other, how they think differently, solve a problem and have fun. But sometimes it can be tricky when team building activities tend to induce more eye rolls among teammates than high-fives.
Workplace team building activities are the way to go to bring initiative and do some fun. Your teams would love to play the fun games. Have a look at the list of some popular categories of activities.
List of activities:
- Blindfold activities
- Problem solving
- Quick team building
- Creative team building
- Outdoor games
- Icebreaker games
- Draw as a group
- Create stories together
- Provide valuable feedback
One of the best ways to improve performance and team management is providing feedback to team members to support them to develop professionally and personally. Offering constructive feedback will help them attain goals and in case of negative feedback, they can make sure to hold regular opportunities to check-in.
Have a look at the 4 types of feedback and its impact
- Motivating feedback – Improves self-esteem of team
- Corrective feedback – Chances to maintain self-esteem
- Flattering feedback – Creates mistrust
- Provocative – Reduces self-esteem
Giving your team a constructive feedback will provide advice on how you feel your team members are progressing and help them in growing further. They can improve on areas you feel could be improved.
Performance appraisals
To understand the abilities of employees for growth and development, it is important to evaluate the performance of employees for a systematic performance appraisal. This will not only motivate teams to work better but also retain them for a long run. Offering satisfactory perks and appraisals is an important part of team management. Take time thoroughly to review the yearly performance and conduct meeting to discuss performance for appraisals.
Dealing with difficult team members can be tough, but following the above team management tips will help you turn your problem employees into star workers. If your team members are not pleased with your way of management, give it another chance, improve your team management skills and see how miracles happen.
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