Managing Teams: The Ultimate Guide to Get The Most Out Of Your Team

Ethan Kim

Content Specialist

December 19, 2024

17 min read

Just like everything else in life, teams need to be well-managed consistently to make a difference. But how to successfully manage a team? How do you supervise a team? How to manage your team members? What strategies for managing team leaders can you use? What exactly is team management in business? These and many more questions will be answered below. Plus, you’ll get the best tips for effective team management, so keep reading.

How to Manage a Team Effectively

When answering the question on how to manage teams effectively and with success, you need to know that managing productive teams takes time, the right skills, practice, experience, effective team management strategies, a bit of luck, and always looking for more guidance to support you along the way. But you also need team control tools and techniques to learn how to lead and manage a team and, at the same time, maintain the operations going smoothly.

Ultimately, when you want to manage a team effectively, you need to know each group member well to ensure that you can get the most out of the best skills each team member has. You need to consider management as a team to drive your group the right way.

Are You a Team Manager or a Team Leader?

Most people tend to confuse both terms but the truth is that they're quite different and it's very important to understand that each one has their own specific roles.

While a team manager is someone who is responsible for keeping all the group members on the same page and ensuring that everyone executes their workflows, a team leader is someone who is responsible for making sure that the entire group understands the company vision and culture. You can say that a team manager is more focused on the daily tasks while a team leader is more focused on the big picture.

8 Team Management Types: Different Ways of Leading and Managing Teams

When you are managing a group, there isn't only one way to do it right. You have many different types or styles that you can adopt. Some of the most common team member supervision types that you can find within a company are:

#1: Laissez-faire management:

In this leadership team management style, the manager allows each crew member to work on their own. Autonomy is encouraged by the company.

#2: Servant leadership:

In case you prefer this style of supervision, you'll need to dedicate a lot of attention to each group member to ensure that they grow as much as they can.

#3: Autocratic management:

As you can easily understand by its name, one of the main team management ideas of this administration type is that managers make their own decisions without asking for anyone else's opinions.

#4: Collaborative management:

This is the opposite of the previous team management type. In this case, the team manager is always eager to listen to get the input of his colleagues and will always try to make decisions with the group, never alone.

#5: Transformational management:

With this style, you’ll need to learn how to handle your group. Simply put, team managers are always looking to motivate and inspire their workforce.

#6: Democratic management:

In this style, team members are asked to share their insights and opinions whenever there is a decision that needs to be taken. The main goal of this style is to create more responsibility for the collaborators.

#7: Coaching management:

The team manager will always act as a coach and deliver feedback, support, and guidance to the coworkers.

#8: Transactional management:

In this type of team control, the team leader delivers clear instructions to the group and has a system of penalties and rewards set.

There isn’t the best way to manage a team; you need to discover how to manage a group of employees according to their personalities and skills and the company vision.

10 Skills You Need to Have For Effective Team Management

As you can easily understand, as a team leader, you are a very important influence that determines how your staff works. Your position is basically in the middle of the company leadership that has specific goals and the workforce who need your support. This isn't an easy spot to be in because it demands a delicate balance. This is why you need to have some specific skills on how to manage employees including:

• You need to be a leader that guides and inspires your coworkers.
• Time management is crucial to maintain a good balance.
• You need to be able to delegate tasks, but only to the right employees.
• Skills like active listening and strong communication are crucial.
• You need to be oriented to problem-solving and decision-making.
• A good team leader needs to adapt quickly.
• Dealing with and managing conflicts is part of your job.
• Using leadership techniques to manage team performance and setting realistic goals is something that can be a bit hard to achieve.
• Understanding and empathy are two very important skills that you always need to keep in mind.
• Your mind should always be on looking for ways to grow to ensure success.

3 Main Benefits of Productive Team Management

There's no question that the main benefit of managing an effective group is to maintain everyone in sync in terms of goals. However, there are many other benefits:

#1: Happier Employees:

When your employees are happy, they will be more productive. When asked how you manage your employees, you can say that your employees know what you expect from them, and they deliver it. They feel the support directly from their manager.

#2: Reduced Employee Turnover:

As a result of having happier employees, the turnover will be automatically reduced. As someone who needs to know how to manage a team as a leader, you know how difficult and how costly it is to keep hiring new employees. They need time to fit in within the company, and within the group, and they need to be trained.

#3: Productivity Increases:

When your employees are happy, they tend to produce more. They know what they have to do, and what the ultimate goal of the company is, and they want to comply with it, they don't want to fail. Your employees are highly engaged with your company.

When you’re asked about how you manage your employees, you can say that you look at your employees and try to make them as happy with their work as you can. How to handle group work is a crucial question since it involves a huge part of the company's future. When you adopt group supervision practices that allow you good team management, everyone wins.

Top 8 Tips on How to Manage a Small Team

Here are some managing a team tips that may help you on how to handle a group of employees, especially when you’re managing a small team:

#1: Team Collaboration Should Be Encouraged:

Making your employees engaged with your company is crucial to make them happier and more productive at the same time. So, when you are learning how to manage an efficient group, you’ll discover that if you stimulate team collaboration, they will feel more connected with their coworkers and with the company as well.

When you want to know more about how you manage a team, one simple way of doing this is by using a software like Flowlu that allows you to customize all the things related to your project or ​​projects. From keeping track of the deadlines to tasks, sending and receiving notifications, getting real-time assessment from colleagues and team leaders, communicating with your team via chat or comments, and more, are some of the features that can improve collaboration.

#BIG_BANNR#

#2: Set a Clear Vision:

When you want to learn how to be a team manager and how you handle your team, you should always set a clear vision of your goals, in both the short term and long term. When your employees are aware of your goals and trust you, it will be easier to maintain the focus on what needs to be done. This is a great way that helps you on how to control staff to ensure that everyone is on the same page.

#3: Feedback and Recognition Should Be Valued:

There are always things that can be improved in what concerns how to best manage a crew. But without feedback, you may not have any idea of what needs to be improved and how you can do it. Review should be given not only to employees but employees should also provide their assessment to team managers. This is a great way for both to learn and grow. In addition, recognition should also be valued. When you acknowledge and recognize the work or positive attitude of an employee, he will be more motivated than ever.

#4: Effective Communication is Key:

We all know that communication is key in every aspect of life. So, when you’re looking at how to handle your colleagues, it shouldn’t be any different. Communication should always be regular and clear for strategic team supervision.

#5: Remote Work Doesn't Need to be a Problem:

Ever since the Covid-19 pandemic, remote work is always on the table for many companies. The truth is that even though the pandemic is long gone, companies and businesses discovered that remote work may be a good idea for some roles. However, learning how to handle your employees that are working remotely may be a bit harder than managing teams in the workplace. From miscommunication to different time zones, there are some obstacles that you can overcome when you want to know how to handle a unit effectively and how to manage a team well. Delivering regular feedback and trying to maintain communication as active as possible are two ways of making sure that your workforce is motivated.

#6: Delegate Tasks:

Many managers find it very hard to delegate tasks. One of the reasons is that when they do it, they don't take into consideration the employee skills or personality. When you are looking to learn how you can manage your team, one of the first things you need to do is to know the strengths and weaknesses of each one of your employees. This way, when you need to delegate a task, you know exactly who will perform it better.

#7: Promote Team Member Development:

As we already mentioned above, a manager needs to be always there to support their team members. If you are wondering about how to manage my team, more than support, a manager should also deliver guidance and help each member grow individually. You may use courses or conferences, mentorship programs, or even feedback to help you grow them.

#8: Adapt Your Management Styles to your Team:

When we mentioned above that there are many different types of team control, we are stating that there isn't only one that you should follow. You need to be aware of the different leadership styles available but before you put one in action, you need to get to know your group a bit better. You first need to understand how they work individually and as a group and decide on the type of management that you'll adopt to get the most out of them.

When you use the same style over and over again without considering the differences of your colleagues, you are making a big mistake. Instead of motivating some coworkers, you may be losing them forever.

Bottom Line

Learning how to manage a team at work is a very important task for every manager. It’s important that you can have multiple team administration techniques at your disposal that can help you on how to manage your employees and on how to manage team members.

Discovering how to be a good manager is a path that may take some time. After all, the team management process isn’t immediate and may take time to develop. But you’ll be able to discover how to manage your employees effectively by looking at them, the company, and your skill.

Above, we described several practical approaches for productive team supervision that are seen as the best practices in team management currently. We disclosed different methods of supervision to ensure that you can be a successful team leader.

After reading this article, you should be asking yourself some questions: how would you manage your team? How to manage a team leader? How do you handle a team? Hopefully, we were able to provide you with all the tools you need to decide how you will manage your coworkers, and how you will handle your team. One of the tools you can use is Flowlu. Our work management tool has all the required features that allow you to meet your goals, create a series of steps for building better relationships between you and your employees, improve teamwork, keep track of the task progress, and plenty of other resources. Start creating your gold team now. Just open a free account today.

How you manage a team and how you handle a team will be decisive for both you, the employees and the entire company or business. This is why it is so important to determine how you will manage a team and how you manage a team in different situations.