Managing rhymes with manipulating, with a major difference: manipulating usually depends on deception while managing should depend on openness.
Thousands of articles are written every day around the world trying to capture the essence of management and how to best in it. Although management is based on certain rules, when the ‘people’ element jumps in, most rules jump outside the window. Management is part numbers, part intuition, part psychology/sociology, part knowledge, part experience, you get the point. It is not a single element, has no single success rule, is everchanging, and always needs adjustment.
The ‘people’ element is tricky. A single ‘person’ requires psychology to understand but when you add a lot of ‘persons’ you get a team, and the team often needs a different approach, most easily understood with the study of sociology.
So, read below and give special attention to point number 11.1.
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Teams are made of people
To have a team you require more than one person and teams must have a leader in order to move forward otherwise sooner or later hell will break loose. Each and every one of your team members may have different abilities, skills, time concepts, reactions, and ‘buttons’. You cannot expect everyone to work the way you do and you have to build your team based on the strong elements of each member. Each person has a ‘button’: an attitude they hate, a word that makes them angry, a procedure that suits them. Your job is primarily to find all these little elements and combine them to create something that is stronger than the sum of its components. And that is exactly what a team should work for. A ‘recipe’ to make all the ‘elements’ elevate the final result. Each element may need a different abroach, explanation, guidelines, mentoring. And although this may sound inefficient at the beginning, with time, people, as part of the greater team, will learn and adjust to the work to be done. Learn to read your people.
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You are human (so are they)
Your team members, like you, have a personal life and a business life. In these weird times we live in, these two ‘lives’ merged into one: Life. Their troubles in work may interfere with their personal life and vice versa. People are not machines to switch off when they go home or get to work. Accept and anticipate that, sometimes, you may have to deal with issues that are not strictly business. Just like in the case that your team may sometimes have to deal with you and your personal issues. You are human, with your own strengths and weaknesses, idiosyncrasy, and so are all the members of your team. Accept it. Get a work, get a life, combine them, and move forward.
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Learn to manage (also, manage what you learn)
A big part of management requires a certain set of knowledge. Of your industry, competitors, products, services, procedures, etc. you have to know what your goal is, set it down, create procedures and guidelines, and then assign your team to it. Adjusting all these is a continuous task and should be done regularly. Misinformation, noise, ‘overdata’, will always be there to distract you whether you like it or not. Learn to manage, read, educate your team, but also be ready to discard necessary and time-wasting elements.
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Pinpoint what you manage
As you have a team, most probably there are probably other teams, other departments in your company, that have their own sets of rules, procedures, and guidelines. Just like your team is made of certain people, so is your company comprised of different teams. You have to know your boundaries, respect the other teams so that they respect you and your team members. Just like you anticipate your team to stick to the rules you set down in order to get things done, so is the management expect their teams to stick to the rules set down by them. Pinpoint the tasks you have to complete and trace down who you need to cooperate with.
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Make mistakes, accept mistakes, take responsibility
Along the way, despite all the degrees, consulting, preparation, training, experience, mistakes will happen. And mistakes must happen unless you are too old or too slow. The minute you accept that mistakes will happen is the exact minute you have to start anticipating them and preparing for solutions. Write down different scenarios of what can go wrong and ways to fix it when it happens. When your team knows that mistakes will happen and there is a plan to fix them, their mindset will process everything that they do and also process in their minds the possible mistakes that may occur. Usually, this alone is a safeguard for much fewer mistakes. Fewer mistakes, no No mistakes at all. Work, make mistakes, fix, adjust, repeat. And if your team makes a mistake step forward and take responsibility. After all, it is your team.
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Protect and trust your troops (to protect you when you need them)
As head of your team, you have certain responsibilities. And one of all those is to protect your team. After all, your team is there is do the job/task given to you and you rely on them to do it. Protection is not only for making a mistake, it is also support. Support within the company, within the team, from clients, vendors, suppliers. Support with a personal issue they have. Watch their backs if you want them to watch yours. And the more you protect them (don’t overdo it) you build trust in yourself. Just like the more your teamwork, you build trust in them. Trust is essential. Seek it.
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Be open, honest, fair, ask and give feedback
Be open with what you want to accomplish, how and why. Your team members are not stupid. If they are then you should get rid of them. Be honest, straightforward, but also polite. State the team goals, make sure they understand them and move forward. Feedback is also essential and you should happily accept it. After all, they might tell you something you don’t know, didn’t notice, didn’t anticipate. The opposite is actually really dangerous. If you don’t get feedback, nobody comments on anything, there is no argument or discussion, there might be deep problems with trust and underground games in place. Silence and blind obedience may be a sign of a revolution.
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Promote independence
You cannot do everything. You should know everything. Know everything that happens in your team but allow them to be independent. Give them tasks, jobs, create smaller teams within your team, assign mentors. Allow them to work at their pace and then make adjustments. You are there to lead the team, not solve every issue of the team, over and over again. Independence is an element of trust. Guide them, be there for them, work with them, but don’t do their work. think of the bigger picture.
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Learn to let go
Sometimes a member of a team is good enough for a certain period. Sometimes they lose interest, find something better to do. Discuss the issue or problem, offer solutions. Allow time for the team member to adjust again. If it doesn’t work out, pity. Part ways in a good manner. Losing a member of your team shouldn’t be a problem. Keeping losing members of your team is a problem.
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Have backups
Never, ever, allow for a certain member of your team to be the only one that knows how to do something. Every task should have at least 2 team members that know how to do it. It should have a primary and a secondary member assigned, but never one single person. If something happens your team might stop working. If you don’t understand this single simple suggestion and you need further analysis, you shouldn’t be the leader of your team or any team whatsoever.
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adjust all the above
All the above are mere suggestions, distilled from experience, knowledge, and observance. Your team, like every team, is unique so you have to adapt it to your style of management, and, also adapt yourself to the team. It needs finetuning, sometimes more, sometimes, less, but it does.
11.1 get a new team
There are times and situations where you did your best to create a team, unite a team or advance a team, but it didn’t work out. Maybe there are deep problems in the roots of your team, office politics, alliances, friendships, couples, and you cannot get to fix it no matter how hard you try, how empathetic you become, or forgiving. And like many things in life, it may be easier, faster, or better, to purge rather than fix. Maybe you are the problem but, in this case, you are the leader of the team, not the other way around. You have the responsibility, the title, and authority so you have to make the decisions. If the team is not working, get another team. Business needs guts, collaboration, and other MBA BS, but, first of all, it needs guts.
