Team management tips and strategies 

No business is an island—its success and employee contentment rely on teamwork. However, unlike more tangible skills, effective management is often shrouded in mystery and hard to attain. Why? Well, it’s mainly because there’s no one-size-fits-all approach or a handbook that’ll turn a bad manager into a prophetic leader.  

Fortunately, there are plenty of actionable tips and approaches that can get you up to speed. These strategies provide some of the knowledge necessary to get the best out of your team and cultivate robust relationships.

1. Be communicative and provide frequent, quality feedback   

As a leader, you should strive to foster communication with and throughout your team. Regardless of the situation, a proper manager must be readily available and able to devote time to individual team members and their needs. A unified communications platform that allows for multiple interactive formats can be a big boon for keeping everyone organized and updated.

Feedback is an invaluable part of communication. It's also necessary to help everyone achieve team goals, stay motivated, and improve—not just at their primary skill or station but across multiple domains.

Valuable types of feedback   

Negative feedback is also essential to get the best out of your team. However, it should be constructive criticism with the onus on improvement, both in business and potentially other aspects, such as interpersonal team member interactions.

Feedback should be delivered often (but not too often) to show your team that you care and notice what they’re doing—feeling ignored can be the worst feeling of all. Additionally, everyone works at their own pace and focus. Providing regular, consistent feedback can keep everyone orchestrated, on track, and motivated.

Feedback can be a simple yet meaningful way to keep your team happy and focused while honing skills and increasing employee retention. The enhanced company culture is comprehensive, and employees should be encouraged to offer feedback to team managers. 

2. Be transparent   

Transparency is vital, but so is deciding how much it benefits each scenario. According to Harvard Business Review, each situation will dictate how much transparency is most beneficial: "It may be a lot, or it may be a little. Often, it may be none."

Reporting things upward to one's boss requires total transparency without fear, sugarcoating, or being murky about details. Tact and thoughtfulness can "turn a potential negative into a positive."

How transparent should you be?   

Confidential information, such as the status of an employee (whether financial, personal, or otherwise), potentially mandates much less transparency for apparent reasons. When making a business decision, it can be best to limit transparency to a few key actors: those who hold influence over that decision and those who will be most affected by its results.

For example, a manager at a cybersecurity firm can be transparent about diverse goings-on, including ideas for increasing outreach or expenditure issues such as penetration testing costs, to signal their trust in the collective. However, it's a delicate balance. Being too transparent or involving too many people can slow or halt the process and lead to an ineffective compromise that's reluctantly agreed upon by many people but not ideal for any specific purpose. 

3. Use a Socratic tool to decide on transparency and ethical decisions    

When unsure, try the filter test, a Socratic tool. Address these three things before deciding to tell someone something:

• Is it true?

• Is it kind?

• Is it useful?

The latter question can also help you gauge how personally transparent you should be. You want your team to know you, but it's detrimental to share every detail of your life.

Equally important to transparency is to shine a light on questionable conduct or poor behavior. Ethics issues should not be overlooked, lest it send the wrong message that such acts are condoned. Ignoring improprieties can poison a team and weaken the work culture.

Finally, timing can be just as crucial as the information being shared. So make sure you employ transparency when it's most productive and least likely to cause confusion or contention.

4. Earn trust and respect    

On the back of the COVID pandemic, the recent remote working environment has created a new challenge: earning trust and respect remotely. Here are some essential readable indicators of trust:

• Competence. You can build trust by showing your team that you know what you’re doing and you’ll do as you say.

• Benevolence. Show your team that you mean well, have their best interests at heart, and are willing to put the team ahead of personal needs or wants.

• Integrity. Team members are empowered when they see their manager act in accordance with honesty, morality, and strong personal values. 

5. Delegate intuitively   

Delegation is an essential skill that team managers can leverage to optimize tasks. Streamlining workflows via delegation can help de-load schedules and give employees valuable experience and confidence.

However, many managers may be reluctant for multiple reasons. They may be unsure of how to delegate which task to which employee. They may feel guilty burdening their team members or may lack belief that others can successfully carry out the task. Yet it's an essential skill, and leaders who delegate generate 33% higher revenue according to a Gallup study. 

6. Explore decision-making from multiple angles   

A recent Oracle study reports that 85% of leaders in business experienced decision distress— they regretted, felt guilty about, or doubted a decision they made in the past year. It's important to know that such feelings are common and to keep some Harvard-backed tips in mind.

One way to improve decisions and morale at the same time is to involve team members in the process, such as through a brainstorming session. When making managerial decisions, like promotions, it can help to consult with fellow leaders. In fact, networking with other leaders, whether online or offline, can provide you with some game-changing ideas and mentalities. 

7. Managing remotely and prioritizing mental health    

The remote work shift is likely permanent, at least in many industries. Accordingly, leaders can become better at managing remote teams by individualizing their interactions based on employee personalities and work habits.

Employees should be made to feel comfortable being themselves. Some require more feedback and communication, which can be easily achieved through advanced collaboration tools like remote work software. Likewise, the more difficult undertakings, as well as training, can be at least semi-automated nowadays. AI doesn’t just help protect from cyber threats, but it also allows teams to learn at a faster pace and get customized learning experiences.

Some will pop in for frequent questions, whereas others will wait and send a list of queries. Other employees prefer working during earlier hours, while some focus better later during the day (or night).

Despite these differences, it's necessary to promote a healthy work–life balance. One way to do this is to check in with employees and help dispel the stigma around talking about mental health. Managers and team members who feel overwhelmed by an ever-growing to-do list can make use of these indispensable productivity tips for efficient workflows.

8. Inspire creativity    

In a study conducted recently, 1,500 CEOs divulged their number-one skill for business leaders: creativity.

Whether you’re managing remotely or in person, a good shoulder should inspire creativity in the team. You can do so through multiple avenues, including frequent, specific encouragement and praising workers for their innovations, insights, or novel ideas.

Another great way to foster creativity is to promote collaboration between individuals or teams (for example, design and manufacturing teams). Getting together and exploring each other's ideas is a fantastic way to develop something new. Part of this depends on the previously mentioned skills of team member awareness and proper delegation.

Conclusion   

No strategy is an end-all-be-all for management issues or inefficiencies within your team or organization. But if you merge them, adapt the details to each team member, and monitor the results, you just might come up with a winning formula that’s not just instantly felt, but also reusable and able to become a proactive, instead of a reactive tool.