Being a manager doesn’t just mean doing your job to the best of your ability. It’s about leading a team to make sure its members are doing their jobs to the best of their ability as well. Whilst motivating yourself might come easily, it can be more difficult to motivate a team composed of people with different strengths and weaknesses. No two employees are the same, so some may require more attention and maybe even more discipline than others.
Although at times it might feel like you’re having to make several complicated cogs work together as a well-oiled machine, management doesn’t have to be as overwhelming as it sounds. Here are a few tips to make sure you get the best out of your team.
Set clear targets
The simplest way to begin motivating a team is to set targets to work towards. Come up with ones that you can use to measure productivity, whether that’s sales secured, profits earned or people reached. If your team members know they need to achieve a certain target in a set timeframe, they’ll have a clear endpoint to work towards.
Consider whether it would be best to set each member of your team an individual target to achieve, or whether to set the team a target to achieve as a whole group. Setting individual targets could encourage competitiveness amongst your team members, which could motivate staff to work harder to try and achieve more than their colleagues. You could even add incentives for those who achieve the most, whether that’s something as basic as a bottle of wine, a half-day off or even a financial reward. This will also help make everyone accountable for their own work, making it easier to identify those who are struggling or even coasting through their job.
While there are some good reasons to set individual targets, there are some instances when they wouldn’t work as well as group targets. For some projects, it’s important that workers have other colleagues to bounce ideas off each other and seek advice from. The competitive nature of personal targets could stop these important collaborations, and even see some staff members purposefully sabotage others so their outcome is better than other team members’. In the long run, this would damage the company’s profitability or productivity.
Whichever type of target you choose, make sure your targets are precise and understood by all, with a clear way of measuring success and a clear deadline. Once you’ve reached one target, set another almost immediately, ideally slightly more difficult to achieve than the previous one.
Listen more
While you may think you know the best way to achieve a task, there is always room for improvement, no matter how experienced you are at managing a team. It’s important that your team see you as approachable and as someone who will listen to any ideas or concerns that your team members have about the company, no matter how critical they may be. Make sure you put aside time to regularly speak to members of your team one on one, asking them how they think current projects are going and whether there are any improvements that need to be made.
Some colleagues might find it intimidating to bring up concerns to even the most approachable and friendly manager. Traditionally the boss is seen as a very powerful figure and the one who can improve career prospects or end a person’s time at their company. Many people would rather hold back their concerns than upset their boss or even show weakness.
To make sure you understand the concerns of even the quietest members of staff, use an employee engagement survey. These could be completed confidentially online to help stimulate strategic changes in the team. The resulting data could even provide you with the right information to keep track of your team’s wellbeing. For example, the system available at inpulse.com provides emotion-based data so you can track any dips in morale before they affect your turnover or productivity. This same system is also designed to give you actionable information you can use to implement immediate changes and make sure you’re prioritizing the most important tasks.
Embrace change
Once you’ve gathered that information, it’s vital that you act upon it. It’s also important that you are seen to be acting on it by other members of your team. If colleagues have disclosed information they feel is important and nothing is done with it, your team members could become demoralized. The first step to show that you are using the data is to share it with the rest of the team. Choose two or three concerns that consistently crop up in the data and assure your colleagues that you will be looking at what steps can be taken to combat these.
Now you have acknowledged these problems, decide what action you will take to resolve them. If the issue is a lack of resources, think about whether it would be value for money to invest in procuring more. If it’s a small, one-off payment like a new piece of equipment, software or even new furniture for the break room, the decision will likely be an easy one to make. If the problem requires recurring payments, like a subscription or even employing another member of staff, it’s important to consider whether you can afford to implement these changes over the long term. Rectifying some issues will require the restructuring of things like job roles or work patterns. Consult further with those involved before implementing any changes to how your team works.
Once you’ve implemented these changes, it’s important you run a similar employee engagement survey to follow up. Compare the new set of data to that of the previous survey to see whether the changes you have implemented have had the desired effect. It may be that the same problems continue to appear in your survey results. If this is the case, examine the language used by respondents to see whether they are expressing the same level of concern and distress as they were previously. Look at whether the amount of people raising the same problem has gone up or down. While some problems might take a long time to resolve, it’s important to acknowledge even the smallest of steps in the right direction.