MANAGERIAL SKILLS
Team management
- Build and manage successful teams through trust and empowerment
- Improve your lines of communication
HOW TO
The problem with people doing fieldwork on complicated issues they feel strongly about is that
they’re not sitting behind desks doing simple tasks just for the money. In
other words, they tend to be driven and individualistic and strong headed. The
benefit is that this makes the people, and the work, interesting. The downside
is that, as a manager, you’re in for herding cats. Now just try to get those
wild things to ride bicycles in the same direction together.
When you form a
team, or assume the leadership of one, your status changes in fundamental ways.
Most importantly, you are now responsible, whatever happens. Don’t look around:
if someone on your team is underperforming, you didn’t make the right hire or
provide the right environment; if you’re not meeting your objectives, you
didn’t manage the project optimally; if someone does something stupid, it’s
still up to you to fix it; and so on and so forth. Don’t be the boss that shuns
responsibility, invokes adverse circumstances, hides behind procedures and pins
the blame on others. Taking responsibility relieves your staff and earns you
respect.
You also have to
give up on your own individualism. Managing a team of colleagues, in the
challenging field of intellectual output, is a labor of love: if you’re not
sincerely interested in other people’s problems, it’s not worth the raise! Most
solutions will be found by getting to know staff better, building trust, and
testing mutually agreed ideas. This entails, naturally, a huge investment in
facetime – and that’s not the app. Managers don’t have to be best buddies with
their team, but they must spend considerable time talking one-on-one, often
about more personal views or issues that will inevitably be reflected in the
workplace.
Of course, this
also means that, to avoid working endless hours, you must be more productive
than others, and learn to delegate and empower. In doing so, a few things are
important to have in mind.
When you form a team your status changes in fundamental ways
Constant clarity
on your part is critical—and hard when you get overwhelmed, which is exactly
when good communication is most needed. You must be precise and transparent on
virtually all fronts: your goals, your contribution, the input you expect from
others, who’s taking the lead on what, the difficulties the organization or the
team may face, and the problems raised by individuals to the extent they affect
the group. You want to be as thoughtful and tactful as possible, especially on
delicate issues. But as a rule of thumb, nothing should ever come as an
unpleasant surprise to your team. In other words, share and explain, explain,
explain. It’s a frequent mistake to assume that, because something has been
uttered once, it’s been heard, understood and acted upon.
That said, there
is no point in trying to lead like a sergeant, a schoolmaster or a guru. You
can’t drill your team into doing things right; you shouldn’t patronize staff as
pupils; and it’s naïve to aspire to become an inspirational figure. (That may
happen nonetheless, but only if you stop trying to look and speak like one.)
Rather, delegation and empowerment is a process in which staff come to take
ownership, grasp what needs to be done, and feel confident enough to become
proactive. The clarity described above only sets the scene for this to happen.
Another crucial
component is listening. To succeed you must create a situation whereby staff
articulate their own vision for accomplishing their assignments, flag potential
problems and share concerns, seek advice and additional information, set or
request deadlines, etc. That’s when you switch to helping staff do more for and
by themselves, instead of telling them exactly what to do or, worse, doing it
for them.
To transition from
a prescriptive leadership to a supportive one, you need two more things. One is
staff motivation. This is something a manager can encourage and harness, but
shouldn’t seek to create ex nihilo: if you end up having to constantly nudge
your team to keep momentum, you’re compensating for what should be there in the
first place and exhausting yourself pointlessly. That means the scene must be
set from the moment of hiring, investing the time needed to find team members
with not just the right qualifications, but also the right outlook and
temperament to play the role required of them.
The other is to
create the right “structure”. Staff will emancipate and take the initiative
within a certain framework, which must be reassuring but not oppressive.
Countless formal procedures may be effective on a factory shop floor; not so
when it comes to intellectual output. Conversely, a totally unstructured
environment will quickly prove overwhelming. The correct balance of regular
reporting, scheduled meetings and individual evaluations must be found,
iteratively and collectively. The use of project management tools and
applications likely will be part of the mix, again based on trial and error.
Straightforwardness is indispensable to building and maintaining trust
None of the above
guarantees success of course. Some work relationships are just not meant to pay
off. Every one of them, however, is a considerable investment in time and
resources. From a recruit’s perspective, it also amounts to taking a personal
risk and accepting an emotional engagement. For all these reasons, it is vital
to face emerging issues as they surface. Typically, a relationship that will
not work gives early signs of malfunctioning. Problems left unaddressed often
become more vicious and entrenched. Meanwhile, it’s all too easy, as a manager,
to lose oneself in the latest emergency, which day after day keeps us from
tackling thorny personnel matters that put everyone ill at ease and undermine
efficient functioning.
But that’s
precisely the point: poor work relationships are destructive to all. They sap
an employee’s self-confidence; they drag the team down; they torment the
manager; and they hurt the organization. They are, in fact, a collective
failure and must be managed as such. Again, no need to blame the employee: as a
manager, you hired, you trained, you assigned and you assisted. And it is your
duty to bring such relationships, responsibly, to an end. This can only be done
by discussing problems as they arise and reaching, whenever possible, a mutual
understanding on what’s going wrong and why it can’t be solved otherwise. Here
more than anywhere else, there should be no unpleasant surprise for anyone.
Such
straightforwardness is indispensable to building and maintaining trust.
Managers and staff alike tend to be far more paranoid than is warranted.
Despite exceptions we’ve all had to endure, at one point or another, most
people are naturally hardworking and well-meaning when placed in the right work
environment. And the great thing with being a manager is that you have full
latitude to create the structure and atmosphere that gets the best out of
people. Give it the best of yourself!
9 January 2017
Illustration credit: A group of cats engaged in a cycle-race in Hyde Park by Louis William Wain Kowal on Wikipedia / public domain.
