How to effectively manage a team

In partnership with monday.com

Have you ever had a manager that radiates kindness and practices compassion while also being authoritative and effective? Being a good manager is something many of us aim to be during our marketing careers. Yet, leadership is difficult and often misunderstood. When it’s your responsibility to manage a team, how do you thrive and succeed? Taking on a challenge like being an effective manager requires planning, patience and time. While at the start of your career you’re typically only tasked with your own workload, it’s now your duty to lead, motivate and inspire your team.

So how do you lead and manage a team in a way that ensures you’re maintaining respect, staying true to yourself, and achieving your professional goals without comprising others? When we live in a world where 79% of people quit their jobs due to lack of appreciation, it’s your responsibility as an effective leader to ensure people stay put and make the most out of their working weeks.

Here are a few top tips on how to be a good manager including different leadership styles and techniques to manage conflict within a team.

Choose a leadership style

Choosing and implementing a leadership style will enable you to be a great leader. Essentially the first step of your management journey is deciding which leadership style works for you as a professional. During this elimination process, you’ll want to consider how you’ve been managed in the past (including both positive and negative experiences), that can impact how you manage others going forward.

The International Institute for Management Development developed 5 main categories for leadership styles including authoritarian, participative, delegative, transactional and transformational. Before going into your management role, you’ll want to think about which style reflects your abilities best.

Delegate tasks equally

Part of being a leader is individually assessing your team members and finding out their strengths so you can play to these when delegating tasks. It’s vital that you establish a strong connection with your team so that you can truly understand if they can effectively complete tasks you ask of them. People perform better when they’re engaged in work and enjoy what they do which means you must delegate tasks in the most fair and equal way you can.

For example, when an important project is set by higher management in order to create fast-paced collaboration that’s efficient, it’s helpful to add the project into monday.com. Here you can equally delegate elements of the project to different team members. Doing this enables you to see the project status and who is on track to complete their tasks on time.

Set goals and expectations from the get-go

All successful team management starts with a basic goal and expectation setting. Be sure to ask your team their 6 month and 5-year professional plan to understand where they want to be in future. Consider delving deeper into their “why”, and ask your team why they want to achieve their goals and how you can support them to do so. Get your team to physically write down their goals and make note of this somewhere so you can review these goals further into their employment.

Clearly communicate with your team

Communication and transparency allows your team to understand the processes within the organisation. If you work for a particularly large organisation you’ll want to keep communication as clear as possible with your immediate team as well as any communication with external/supporting teams as this ensures full autonomy with upcoming projects and campaigns.

37.9% of employees meet with their manager weekly, which is why you should consider catching up with your team as much as you can (without going overboard). Flexible platforms like monday.com allow you to communicate with your team and may reduce the need for meetings. Particularly its whiteboard feature which allows for collaborative team meetings remotely.

Give honest feedback

Not everything is going to be smooth sailing when you lead and manage a team. Giving honest feedback on both positive and negative experiences will allow your team to grow and thrive. A strong team is made of those who listen and acknowledge feedback, then work to improve. When giving feedback, ensure you use a constructive method to allow your team to know what they can do in the future. You may also want to consider giving feedback as an effective technique to manage conflict within a team.

Lead by example

How can you be a good manager if you’re not leading by example? Team members will look to you as a leader for guidance, advice, and support which means you need to ensure all the decisions being made are moral and fair. “Do as I say, not as I do” has no place in a positive, healthy work environment.