Seven ways to get the best out of your team as a Manager

​With conflicting priorities, mixed skill sets and increasingly busy workloads, as a Manager sometimes it’s hard to know exactly how to get the best results from your team. Here are our top tips to ensure your team performs at its best.

1. Insist on excellence

Monitor your team’s performance, as a whole and on an individual level. Do not overlook mediocrity but rather communicate with your team members to identify problem areas and establish strategies to overcome these and maximise performance.

2. Establish trust

A team relies heavily on trust – trust in the skills of each other, trust in their Manager to guide them to success and trust in the processes and systems to help them get there. If one team member is unreliable the trust between an entire team can become fragile. Address individual shortcomings or poor performance directly in order to promote and maintain trust in your team.

3. Develop strong relationships

Building rapport between team members as well as between yourself as a Manager and those you lead is a critical success factor. Recognise the importance of personal lives, provide regular feedback and organise team building activities to promote strong internal relations.

Try to be flexible. Be accessible and make yourself available to hear feedback, discuss ideas and solve issues with your team members. Rigid management styles too often lead to heavy handedness and not all teams thrive in that type of environment.

4. Be organised

People perform better when they know what they’re aiming for. Set clear long and short term goals for each employee, which will in turn aid your team in reaching collective goals and organisational goals. Enforce deadlines, track performance and analyse each team members’ progress, providing them with tools and support if they need help to achieve their targets.

An effective team is more powerful than any one individual. Identify each employee’s strengths, establish clear lines of communication and delegate freely to ensure all team members are working at their optimum productivity. Delegation also stops Managers from doing too much of the day-to-day tasks, freeing up more time to invest in strategic planning, team management and professional development.

5. Mix it up

Establish a team that compliments each other’s strengths. A team does not function as effectively if it lacks diversity. Different personalities, key skill sets and individual strengths must be considered when assembling and optimising a team, as these all contribute to overall success. It’s important for each team member to understand their unique role in the group.

6. Exploit potential

Empower your employees by delegating tasks aligned with their strengths, and try to give them a bit more than what you know they can achieve in order to challenge, motivate and encourage them to perform to their true potential. Also spend time developing and overcoming each employee’s weaknesses, as it’s important to have a well-rounded skill set.

7. Reward and recognise

A sense of accomplishment is a large contributor to job satisfaction and everyone likes to be told they’re doing a good job. Recognising achievements sustains high performance and inspires the rest of the team to go above and beyond too.

As a Manager, there’s a lot you can do to maximise your team’s efforts. Equipped with these tools, hopefully yours will achieve even greater success.