Effective management is critical for business success. For teams to be productive, deliver value, and help a company grow, good management and leadership is needed. However, being an effective manager is easier said than done. Especially since management and working styles can differ.
If you’re in a team and looking to grow your management skills, or, if you’re already in a leadership position and want to expand on your skills for greater business success, read our top tips below. But first, let’s define what effective management and business success are in the first place.
What is effective management?
Effective management allows employees to thrive in their roles, and a business to achieve its goals. This might look different depending on the industry and what work is being done. However, job satisfaction is a common indicator of constructive team management, no matter where or how you work.
What is business success?
Business success can also look different, depending on the company. In a small start-up business, this could be consistent growth and profitability. For an established company, business success could involve international expansion and happy shareholders. As the definition of success varies, each business will have its own criteria for measuring success.
Tips for effective management
Since effective management and achieving departmental goals contribute to business success, they often go hand in hand. Here are some top tips for team management:
Manage your workload first
As a manager, you can often get pulled into several tasks and projects at once. This can make it very challenging to both complete your work and manage others. To be an effective manager, you need to prioritise ruthlessly, to make sure that you can stay on top of your work, and provide support and feedback to your team.
Understand your management style
Everyone has a different working style, depending on their personality, their sensitivity and the type of role they are performing. This makes it very important to identify your own management style, as this can help you work better with other managers and team members.
For example, you might be more task orientated than people-oriented. This might help to get things done but could leave team members feeling very isolated. In a remote working environment, this is critical, as disengaged team members can not only cause problems with deliverables. It can also ultimately affect the team’s morale, which can make achieving goals more difficult.
It’s essential to also understand your team members’ individual working styles so that you can customise your management of them based on their needs. Collaboratively create transparent project plans so that everyone is on the same page when it comes to deliverables, but is able to bring their own flair and creativity to how they achieve them
Learn to trust and delegate
As a manager, it is easy to fall into the trap of trying to control and manage everything. Especially in a distributed team where it might be more difficult to keep tabs on your team’s progress. However, micromanaging can become toxic and prevents your team from being able to learn and grow in the long run.
For this reason, it’s important to learn how to delegate and trust your employees and team members to deliver. While some team members might need more guidance and direction, if you micromanage your team, it shows that you don’t trust them. This can lead to job dissatisfaction and disengagement. So, it’s much better in the long run to develop ways to empower your team without having to constantly check on them.
Motivate your team
As a manager, there will be times when you need to provide constructive feedback. However, sharing sincere and positive feedback can help to motivate employees, and reward them for a job well done. It’s also important to share your team’s successes with the wider company, as this can help to encourage good performance in the long run.
Incentivising your staff is also an effective way to achieve good performance, through both intrinsic and extrinsic motivating factors. For example, taking the time to understand your staff’s working styles can help to motivate them in a way that resonates with them and their personal goals. On the other hand, setting up a bonus structure, or other creative rewards can also help to drive performance and encourage good work through extrinsic means.
Foster a learning culture
As we’ve mentioned above, to grow and maintain a successful business, it’s important to have good leadership. Teams can grow and change, and the reality is that we are always learning. There is no final destination when it comes to running a team, or building a business, as our work is always subject to forces beyond our control.
Building a learning culture into your business can be a productive way to encourage learning on- the- job and foster a lifelong learning culture within your company. As the world evolves to become more digital-first and automated, adding human value through improving our interpersonal skills is also becoming more important.
Consistently develop your skills
To deliver value to your team and the company you work for, effective management means focusing not only on developing your team, but also on developing your skills. One way to do this is to get a mentor, who you can regularly check in with, and who can provide guidance on how to be a more effective leader in your chosen field. A mentor can be someone from your own company, or outside of it. But, it’s important to have someone who understands your role, and how you can best grow within it, and beyond it.
Apart from getting a mentor, who can help guide your career, another way to build your team management skills is to take online courses. We regularly discuss the importance of developing so-called “soft skills” on this blog, and there is a plethora of online courses that you can take to help broaden your knowledge. These include courses about business management and leadership, but also related topics like human behaviour, communication and people management.
With all the developments in online learning platforms, taking a specialised short course in any field has also become easier than ever before too!
Upskills in business management and leadership
Looking for a user-friendly way to improve your management skills and grow your business? Take a look at the various online short courses offered by SACAP Global.
Our specialised short courses are designed by experts in their field. This means that we offer practical and easily applicable content in business management, leadership, people management, coaching and applied psychology. Our top performing short courses include Intro to Management and Leadership and Managing and Motivating People.
Regardless of the industry that you work in, our specialised short courses provide a foundation for developing more effective interpersonal skills. Strengthening these skills can translate into more effective management, and greater business success.
All our short courses are hosted on an interactive learning platform, so you can also be assured that when you register, you will be learning on one of the world’s most innovative educational platforms available today!