How Good Are Your Management Skills?

Good management means understanding how teams operate. It's worth remembering that teams usually follow a certain pattern of development: forming, norming, storming, and performing   . It's important to encourage and support people through this process, so that you can help your team become fully effective as quickly as possible.

When forming teams, managers must create a balance so that there's a diverse set of skills, personalities, and perspectives. You may think it's easier to manage a group of people who are likely to get along, but truly effective teams invite many viewpoints and use their differences to be creative and innovative.

Here, your task is to develop the skills needed to steer those differences in a positive direction. This is why introducing a team charter   and knowing how to resolve team conflict   are so useful for managing your team effectively.

Finding great new team members, and developing the skills needed for your team's success is another important part of team formation.

You can improve your recruiting skills with our Recruiting Skills   Bite-Sized Training pack, and with out articles on Hiring People – Questions to Ask   , InBox Assessment   , Using Recruitment Tests   , and Aptitude Testing   .

And you can develop people's skills with our articles on, among others, Successful Induction   , Understanding Developmental Needs   , Training Needs Assessment   , and the GROW Model   . You'll also find our Bite-Sized Training session on Mentoring Skills   useful.

Having the right people with the right skills isn't sufficient for a team's success. Managers must also know how to get the job done efficiently. Delegation   is the key to this. Some managers, especially those who earned their positions based on their technical expertise, try to do most of the work themselves. They think that, because they're responsible for the work, they should do it themselves to make sure it's done right.

Effective managers recognize that by assigning work to the right people (not just those with the most time available), and clearly outlining expectations, teams can accomplish much more. But it's often difficult to trust others to do the job. As a manager, remember that when your team members have the right skills, training and motivation, you can usually trust them to get the work done right.

Another necessary management skill is motivating others. It's one thing to motivate yourself, but it's quite another to motivate someone else. The key thing to remember is that motivation is personal. We're all motivated by different things, and we all have different levels of personal motivation. So, getting to know your team members on a personal level allows you to motivate your people better. Providing feedback   on a regular basis is a very powerful strategy to help you stay informed about what's happening with individual team members. You can test your motivation skills   with our quiz, and use your answers to develop your skills further.

Sometimes, despite your best efforts, there are problems with individual performance. As a manager, you have to deal with these promptly. If you don't discipline, you risk negative impacts on the rest of the team as well as your customers, as poor performance typically impacts customer service, and it hurts the team and everything that the team has accomplished. It's very demotivating to work beside someone who consistently fails to meet expectations, so if you tolerate it, the rest of the team will likely suffer. In our article on team management skills   , we explore this issue in further detail and give you some examples.

Team performance will also suffer when differences between individual team members turn into outright conflict, and it's your job as team manager to facilitate a resolution. Read our article on Resolving Team Conflict   for a three-step process for doing this. However, conflict can be positive when it highlights underlying structural problems – make sure that you recognize conflict and deal with its causes, rather than just suppressing its symptoms or avoiding it.

An element that's common to all of these management skills is effective communication. This is critical to any position you hold, but as a manager, it's especially important (you can test your communication skills   with our quiz here   ). You need to let your team know what's happening and keep them informed as much as possible. Team briefing   is a specific communication skill that managers should improve. Also, develop the ability to facilitate   effectively, so that you can guide your team to a better understanding and serve as a moderator when necessary.

Many managers are very comfortable with planning, problem solving and decision making, given that they're often skilled specialists who've been promoted because of their knowledge and analytical abilities. As such, one of the most important issues that managers experience is that they focus so intensely on these skills when they think about self-development that they fail to develop their people skills and team management skills. Make sure that you don't focus on these skills too much!

However, if you need to develop these skills, see our major sections on Problem Solving, Decision-Making, and Project Management. You'll find many rich skills improvement resources in these areas.

Good communication helps you develop facilitation skills, and it also helps you avoid some of the most common problems for managers. Some of these common mistakes are thinking that you can rely on your technical skills alone, asking your boss to solve your problems, putting your boss in the awkward position of having to defend you, and not keeping your boss informed. Our article on Team Management Skills   highlights what to do to avoid these, and other managerial problems that you should be aware of.