Effective management is critical for business success. Good leadership is needed for teams to be productive, deliver value, and help a company grow. However, being an effective manager is easier said than done since management and working styles can differ.
If you’re in a team and looking to grow your management skills or are already in a leadership position and want to expand your skills for more business success, read our top tips below. But first, let’s define what effective management and business success are.
What is effective management?
Effective management means employees thrive and the business achieves its goals. It might look different depending on the industry and what work employees do. However, job satisfaction is a standard indicator of constructive team management, no matter where or how you work.
What is business success?
Business success can also depend on the company. For a small startup business, this could be consistent growth and profitability. For an established company, it could involve international expansion and happy shareholders. As everyone’s definition of success varies, each business will have its own criteria for measuring success.
Tips for effective team management
As effective people and deliverables management go hand in hand with business success, here are some top tips for team management:
Manage your workload first
As a manager, you can often be pulled into several tasks and projects simultaneously. Managing multiple tasks can make completing your work and managing others very challenging. To be an effective manager, you must prioritise to ensure that you can stay on top of your work while still providing feedback and supporting your team.
Understand your management style
Everyone has a different working style, depending on their personality, sensitivity, and role type. Identifying your management style is very important, as it can help you work better with others.
For example, you might be more task-oriented than people-oriented. If you’re more task-oriented, you might be so focused on getting things done that you neglect to engage with your team members, making them feel isolated. In a remote working environment, this awareness is critical, as disengaged team members can cause problems with deliverables and ultimately affect the team’s morale, making achieving goals more difficult.
In this case, it’s also essential to understand your team’s different working styles. Making more time to check in with team members regularly and creating transparent project plans so everyone is on the same page can help.
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 challenging to keep tabs on your team’s progress. However, micromanaging can become toxic and prevent your team from being able to learn and grow in the long run.
For this reason, it’s essential to learn how to delegate and trust your employees and team members to deliver. While some team members might need more guidance and direction, micromanaging your team shows that you don’t trust them. Feeling micromanaged and disempowered can lead to job dissatisfaction and disengagement. So, developing ways to inspire and motivate your team without constantly checking on them is much better in the long run.
Share positive feedback
As a manager, there will be times when you need to provide constructive feedback. However, sharing sincere and positive feedback can help motivate and reward employees for a well-done job. It’s also important to share your team’s successes with the broader company, as this can help to encourage good performance.
Incentivising your staff is also an effective way to achieve good performance through intrinsic and extrinsic motivating factors. For example, taking the time to understand your staff’s working styles can help 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 drive performance and encourage good work through extrinsic means. Remember, acknowledgement and appreciation can mean a lot!
Consistently develop your skills
Effective management means developing your skills and delivering value to your team and company. One way to do this is to get a mentor with whom you can regularly check in and who can guide you on being a more effective leader in your chosen field. A mentor can be someone from your own company or outside of it. But it’s essential to have someone who understands your role and how you can best grow within and beyond it.
Another way to build team management skills is to take online courses. We regularly discuss the importance of developing so-called “soft skills” on this blog, and you can take many online courses to help broaden your knowledge. These include business management and leadership courses and topics like human behaviour, communication, and people management.
A Harvard Business Review article called 9 Trends That Will Shape Work in 2024 and Beyond discusses how necessary conflict management skills are in the current workplace. As these skills do often not come intuitively, it’s vital to prioritise honing these skills, especially for new managers. Conflict management involves diverse skills, including communication and problem-solving, which are all “soft skills”.
In today’s world, “soft skills” are also called “durable skills”, including interpersonal, management, empowerment, and counselling abilities. These skills are “durable” because they are uniquely human and will remain relevant in a world of increasing technological innovation.
How to approach learning management and business skills
As we’ve mentioned above, good leadership is crucial to growing and maintaining a successful business. Teams can grow and change, and we are always learning. Forces beyond our control will always influence our work, so improving your management and business skills is vital as part of a lifelong learning process to stay adaptable.
Building learning 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 becomes more digital-first and automated, adding human value through improving our interpersonal skills is becoming more critical.
With all the developments in online learning platforms, taking a specialised short course in any field has become more accessible than ever!
Build business management and leadership skills at SACAP Global
If you’re looking for a user-friendly way to improve your management skills and help grow your business, look at the practical online short course offered at SACAP Global.
Regardless of your industry, our specialised courses provide a foundation for developing more effective interpersonal skills. Learning these can translate into more effective management and more significant business success.
A team of subject-matter experts design our online courses. We focus on applying psychological theory and methods to solving problems which means we offer a practical, on-the-job learning approach to business management, leadership, people management, coaching, and understanding human behaviour.
Our most popular courses include Intro to Management and Leadership and Employee Motivation and Wellness. We also recommend Advanced Interpersonal Communication and How to Have Critical Conversations to develop valuable conflict-resolution skills.
On a personal level, managers can also upskill in other areas to help them navigate a sometimes complex and overwhelming work environment. These online courses and workshops include: