10 Tips to Build Team Management Skills

Teams work towards achieving a common goal. Team Management refers to the methods, procedures and tools for organizing and coordinating with the team members who are working towards the common goal. Team management helps in building strong teams whose individuals are in alignment with the objectives and mission of the organization. A few important tips to build team management are:

1. Successful recruitment: It all starts with forming a team. As a team leader you need to ensure that you have the right people on board and into the right roles to ensure they work together seamlessly. Also, by ensuring you have the right people for the right roles, you also take care of attrition.
2. Training the team: The gaps in the team’s skills or capabilities must be constantly analyzed. Skills must be updated from time to time to be more at par with the latest technology or process.  Additionally, the training required, who needs it, why it is required and how the training is provided must be planed.
3. Boosting team confidence: Confidence is one of the most important tools that every individual must possess.  With confidence, a team will gain the strength to overcome obstacles, work smoothly and obtain the desired results. Some of the ways to boost confidence includes provide timely appreciation, counselling, assign a mentor to members, and so on.
4. Emotional intelligence: Our life experiences affect the way we perceive life around us. When negative emotions bundle up, they tend to cause hardships in working productively. As a team leader, you can maintain emotional harmony in the team. Emotional intelligence helps reduce conflicts, reduce stress, improves working relationships and builds team spirit.
5. Guidance and feedback: It is very effective when as a leader you not only guide your team members but also coach them and provide honest feedback with specific data points to improve. Feedback when given well and is constructive enhances an individual’s performance and helps in the overall performance as a team too.
6. Helping in change management: Change is constant, however, managing change is not quite easy. Change can be adopted and accepted when the causes for the change, and the benefits involved are understood. An effective leader can play an important role at explaining this to the team and convince them to view the change as positive.
7. Resolving conflicts: Conflicts are inevitable in a workplace where there different individuals, different perspectives, and different ideas. Constructive conflicts bring out the best in terms of skills, ideas, processes, and efforts.  Ensure that conflicts do not disturb the equilibrium in a team. Finding resolution using negotiation and reaching consensus democratically helps.
8. Delegating effectively: Delegation though sometimes daunting has great advantages. The amount of work you do can be expanded, it helps immensely in attending to the important tasks first by helping your prioritize well, and provides opportunity for others to grow. The key to effective delegation is to identify what, when and whom to delegate.
9. Varying motivational strategies: Different people have different motivators, and as a leader it is your responsibility to ensure the team’s productivity is always at its best. To achieve this identify the factors that work differently for different people, ensure that you motivation them with suitable rewards, tweak your leadership style to suite different people.
10. Management by objectives: Team management can be done using MBO concept that provides leaders the following steps:

• Set organizational objectives: Roll out objectives and targets that must be met.
• Cascade the objectives to employees: Break down objectives for section of the organization.
• Monitor: Monitor SMART objectives track deviations from the goals.
• Evaluate performance: Evaluate work and set steps to improve.
• Reward performance: Inspire and set example for others to follow suit.