5 Tips to Perfect Your Team Management Skills

Former Chicago Bulls and LA Lakers coach Phil Jackson once said:  “The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.”

If you spend all of your time trying to achieve results independently, you’ll rarely end up with your desired goals and outcomes. Likewise, without effective team management, you’ll never be able to succeed as well as you can with a team.

In this blog post, we’ll break down why team management is imported, what a team that implements effective team management looks like, and how to develop better team management skills in your organization.

What is Team Management?

Before we can examine how to implement proper team management, we need to fully understand what it is. Team management is the ability to connect team members together to complete their tasks (often called Objectives and Key Results [OKRs] in the enterprise) and execute common team goals. Team management involves a manager, the people on their team, goal setting, team culture development, and project management to stay on track.

When a manager implements proper team management, employees understand how to progress towards their goals. Team management encompasses soft skills a well as technical know-how and organizational skills.

The Benefits of Better Team Management

There are clear benefits to management implementing better team management tools and structure in their department. A manager should seek to improve their team management skills and techniques just like they would any other skill they have in the workplace. Let’s look at some practical ways that organizations benefit from team management.

Improves Brainstorming

When your team has implemented effective team management processes and procedures, it frees up brain cycles for better brainstorming. Ironically, having better methods (right brain) is the key to unlocking your creativity (left brain). In addition, when team members are clear with expectations, they can spend more time thinking outside the box.

Improves Productivity

Improving productivity is on the top of every manager’s wishlist. One easy way to improve productivity is implementing better team management in your organization. When employees are clear on direction, they can focus on the task at hand.

Conversely, if effective team management is not found in an organization or a team, productivity will suffer. As a result, employees will work on the wrong things at the wrong time.

Improves Overall Morale

Building upon our productivity discussion, having better team management at work is vital to improving overall morale. When employees know exactly what’s expected of them, they’ll be happier and more focused on their jobs. When they’re more content, the satisfaction with their work will also be improved.

We cannot stress enough the importance of having good morale in the workplace. Morale will spread across your organization regardless if it’s good or bad. How you manage your team will directly impact your team’s overall success and confidence.

Improves Employee Creativity

When employees feel like they are aware of what’s expected of them, the organization’s goals, and what the future holds for them, their creativity will be boosted. The purpose of a manager when it comes to effective team management is to free up their employees’ time and attention to do their job and keep everything else out of the way.

Improves Stress-related Issues

Stress management is a critical need that organizations are starting to give attention to in Human Resources departments. When employees are stressed out at work, they’ll perform at a level less than their best. In addition, high levels of stress at work or home can lead to other health problems as well.

When practical team management skills are not implemented, stress at work can be the result.

Discover More:

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5 Tips for Effective Team Management

We’ve broken down some of the most common reasons for implementing effective and product team management, so you’re probably ready to see some practical ways to do that. We’ve compiled a list of five key things you can do to improve your team management process and procedures in the workplace.

Transparency and Communication

Most modern organizations are running at a breakneck pace trying to meet their goals, grow their customer base, and stay one step ahead of the competition. With so many moving parts in organizations, having transparent communication is a must-have for effective team management.

When an organization has effective communication tools, employees can work together towards their common goals. A digital workspace like Spike is a vital part of implementing transparent communication in an organization. It builds a layer of productivity on top of email to transform how organizations communicate.

Spike starts with email and turns it into a chat-like experience. It then adds in video meetings, voice messages in your Inbox, collaborative Notes, Tasks and To-Dos, and streamlined file management.

Spike’s real-time presence indicator helps teams know who’s online and who’s away from their desk so when urgent questions arise, they know who’s available. Spike does all of this with a single application tied into your enterprise email service. It’s compatible with Google Workspace as well as Microsoft 365.

Goals Must be Clear

If goals in an organization are not clear, then employees will be moving in different directions. They’ll be working on what they think they should be working on. Managers have to clearly state the goals and key objectives so everyone is on the same page.

Spike can help members clearly state their goals through collaboration tools such as Spike Notes. With Spike Notes, key objectives can be documented and progress can be tracked with collapsible lists, check boxes, file uploads, and seamless sync to all devices.

Workplace Collaboration Must be a Part of the Organization Culture

As we stated in the beginning, when you work well with people, you can accomplish so much more than you can alone. Collaboration is a crucial part of most organizations, and the tools you choose to implement collaboration are vital to your success.

When employees are comfortable with their tools and understand how they work, they’ll be more productive and the overall company culture be improved.

Spike is a complete digital workspace that combines everything you need for effective collaboration with your team into a single app. You can eliminate multiple collaborative apps when you deploy Spike.

Smart Delegation is Key

A manager that leads a team will have to become an expert if they are to be successful. Effective delegation is a time-management tool that allows you to focus your efforts on the overall project strategy while the details are performed by other people on your team.

When you’re delegating tasks, consider what the task involves and who would be the best person on the team to complete it considering the expected impact it will make on the project.

Delegation is a vital part of an effective team manager, but some managers find it challenging to relinquish some of that control without fear of failure. It’s important to understand that if you’ve properly delegated the correct tasks to the correct people on your team, clearly communicated expectations related to said projects, then you’re team will be better for it.

Constant Feedback (Positive and Negative)

When you’re managing a team, you’ll need to have the ability to give continuous feedback to your team as they move along with their projects and goals. This  includes both positive and negative feedback. Therefore, you need a communication platform that makes it easy to quickly review status updates, mockups, and content submissions.

Legacy communication systems make it challenging to give feedback quickly and keep your projects moving forward. Spike is the best platform to build a continuous feedback loop with chat-like messaging, document sharing, and a built-in calendar.

Spike’s built-in calendar makes it easy to schedule recurring events while adding a video meeting link automatically. With Spike Video, you can quickly jump on a video call with your team, share your screen, and collaborate live with another person.

Summary

To recap, success when considering team management comes down to having proper communication tools, setting clear expectations and goals, having a collaborative environment, learning when to delegate, and building a feedback loop.

Spike is the ideal app to build out these programs and protocols as it combines many of your current apps into a collaboration powerhouse.