Team Management (Collins Business Secrets)

There are times as a team manager when you have to let people go, even if you would prefer to keep them.

Ultimately you have to ‘manage out’ people who won’t work within the team; otherwise you don’t have a team.

Are you achieving the best you could in life?

• Do you want to work with people who you don’t trust?

If you don’t manage your boss, no one else will, and your team will suffer.

Seek out clarification of all aspects of the objectives being passed down.

There is no place in a team for people who think they are inherently better than their team mates.

thinking of them as a unit that needs to be protected

If you can’t trust your team then you will not be confident that they will work without you watching. If they can’t trust you, then they won’t believe that you are worth working for

A real team manager works for the team. Without a team there is no job for a manager, so the manager’s role is to be a ‘servant leader’ to the team.

Your boss can allocate resources to your team, control the supply of tasks, and protect your team when times are tough

If their suggestion or idea isn’t going to be implemented, then explain why.

Create an environment where team members are willing to speak.

Avoid bringing people into meetings where there is nothing of relevance to them.

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense

One of the biggest challenges for a team manager is deciding who needs to know what. You have to give people enough information to allow them to make judgements and motivate themselves, but you mustn’t give them so much information that they cannot absorb it all or slow down on work because they are so busy getting information.

Team briefing happens when a team manager arranges to meet regularly with the team to talk about what is happening in the workplace

In order to delegate effectively, you need to ensure that the team member you delegate to has the four STAR elements of Skill, Time, Authority and Responsibility.

If you delegate tasks effectively, you should then use the time you personally ‘save’ to do these other things: arranging monkey-feeding sessions, catching people doing things right, communicating with your team, carrying out public relations activities on behalf of the team, supporting individual team members, managing the miseries, measuring the teamwork and managing your boss

Good delegation utilizes people’s strengths, weeds out weaknesses, spreads the workload equitably, maximizes output, develops a multi-skilled team, shows trust in people, encourages responsibility and prepares people for promotion