Team Success Equals Management Success

Want to add to your success as a manager?….create ongoing team success!

One of the key competencies to management success is the ability to manage not only individuals, but the collective team. Some call it “team work management.” Other descriptions include team performance management or team work management. No matter what you call it…the bottom line is it does impact a company’s bottom line! Team success equals a company success.

I like the phrase, “team work management,” which I saw in an article on this topic. A link to the complete article is included at the end of this post.

For this post, I wanted to draw attention to it’s definition and some of the components mentioned in the article that are necessary for successful team performance management.

Please note – this is a skill!!…and an absolutely necessary skill to be a competent and complete manager.

Team management is in essence the optimization of manpower to attain results. Individuals with complimentary skills together form teams, which (hopefully in synergy) strive to attain specific results. Though the priorities might be different for different business entities the end result of team management would always be to increase the profitability of the organization.

I’m going to share the 4 core components included in the article and add comments.  Here they are:

1.  Clarity of vision – I call this going from “me to we.”  Each team member has a conscious and unconscious agenda that drives how they behave within the group and how they prioritize their work.  I have a cool “team building in a box” exercise in my workshops that helps team members make the critical shift from me to we.  This is one of the positive elements of group think.

2.  Selecting the right personnel – Better, targeted hiring is essential to a productive team. To do so,  are you clear on what qualities and skills are necessary for the success of each role within the team, which then directly impacts the success of the team?

This philosophy by the way is a management best practice and is researched and discussed in the book “Good to Great.”  This book is a must read for every management professional.  Don’t have it in your library? – you can get it here: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t

3. Holistic approach – see the team in the context of the entire company and how it is specifically contributing to key company objectives. The article terms it this way, “drive the various departments as a single unit. There will be scores of departments in organizations and to attain their proposed objectives these units need to work in tandem by overlooking the boundaries to ensure better coordination and results.” This of course requires great collaboration between the leaders of these departments.

4.Team accountability – as a compliment to touching base one-on-one with individual members, creating ongoing  team and public accountability in the context of team goal setting and reporting meetings is the bow that wraps all the other components together and supercharges productivity.

A key reason for why effective team management needs to be apart of every managers capabilities portfolio can be found in this 2 minute lesson from Management-in-Minutes – entitled “Team Management – The Power of the Group,” which you can  access here.

Finally, obviously this post does not exhaust the topic, but serves as a great springboard for personal assessment and an initial checklist.

Coaching Tip: Where are you at with your knowledge in this area and what practices do you have in place that supports these productivity components?

Also, you may want to have someone come in and springboard your team synergy with some team facilitation.  I am happy to do that as well. Feel free to contact me if you wish to discuss – joann@joanncorley.com

Here is the link to the full article from which this post was sourced.
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The Human Side of Project Management

Whether you use this phrase or not, we are all managing projects on some level….we are all a project manager. This is a key attitude to professional success.

There are 3 core components of managing a project: the process, the tools we use, and how we manage the human side of it.

What’s the human side?….how you manage yourself and the team members you’re working with.  As I said in a previous post, professional success is all about effectively managing the critical components of any endeavor…we are all managers.  Here’s the link if you’ve not read that post: post title – A New Way of Looking at Management.

I ran across a post on a project management blog entitled Integrity in Project Management.  I found this so curious.  The post addressed how one relates to those involved in the project with a spirit of integrity in the following 3 ways:

Be Impartial, Be Thorough, Be Focused on the End Business Results.

I would like to suggest an additional component to this list and that is… in managing the human side of project management and what should be included in every project management training is understanding and the honoring the work style of each team member.

The reality is each team member will have a different relationship to how they work with people, information, technology, and tasks.  Some will work with each of these with much more ease than another. If you want to build and maintain an effective rapport with each member, knowing and honoring their natural work style is critical!

Also included in the natural work style and an essential element to know is the natural decision making style. There are 4 common styles: decisive, methodical, spontaneous, inclusive.  How each team members works with information, works towards deadlines, their style of collaboration is influenced by their natural decision making orientation.

So here’s your coaching tip: Take the time to observe the behavior and assess your team members work styles and ask yourself these questions:

– What’s their natural orientation in relation to working with people, tasks, information, and technology?

– What do you observe about their decision making style

–Make a plan on how to incorporate this knowledge to increase your effectiveness.

If you need any advice or help, don’t hesitate to contact me.  You can go to my Management Life Line and get free advice there.