Team Management

The management and the team - How they work together

Come to think of running an organisation, how many times the thought crosses our minds that why will an employee or in other words a team member be loyal to the organisation. 

Any organisation and its P&L are babies of the stake holder, but for the team its only a 'job'.

Well, no matter how much we bang our heads on this topic, the only solution according to gurus have been to give the team a sense of ownership in his respective areas. He has to own that area and the task involved. Hence Team management can be defined as the ability of an organisation or may the individual (as the case may be) to administer and coordinate a group of individuals to perform a given task.

 This can involve many factors namely:

Communication

Communication skills are essential for success in almost any role, however these skills and techniques will be different from what we used as a regular employee. The same can be classified further into two more categories:

1. Communication with in the team, wherein one has to chair the session as a leader

2. Communication outside the team, where one has to deal with the management.

An effective channel of communication will allow messages to be transferred accurately without delay to the intended recipient, this will speed up decision making processes and the operations of the team. Furthermore, effective communication will increase the flexibility of an organisation and cause it to be less susceptible to changes in the external environment; as a faster decision making process will allow organisations a longer time period to adapt to the changes and execute contingency plans

Goal, Role / Objective setting

A team leader will first evaluate the mission of the team to understand what is required to accomplish the task. Then, they will identify the strengths and weaknesses of their team members and assign roles accordingly. They must ensure that all team members know what each other’s responsibilities are to avoid confusion and to create an effective channel of communication. 

This way, all the team members will put in effort in order to attain the goal. If there is not a common goal, team members who disagree with the objective in hand will feel reluctant to utilise their full effort, leading to a failure to achieve the goal. In other cases, team members might divert themselves to other tasks due to a lack of belief or interest in the goal

Dedication

The top priority for team managers is delegation . No matter how skilled one is, there's only so much that he/she can achieve working on his/her own. With a team, one can achieve so much more, that's why it's so important that work should be dedicated.

Performance Appraisal

Appraisals can be a way for team members to provide feedback to one another or for team members to provide advice to the leader. This will allow individual members of the team to reflect on their performance and aim to do better by amending their mistakes; furthermore appraisals create an environment where the chain of command is non-existent and team members can be honest towards one another. This is effective in a way that the team can provide progressive feedback towards other members and can advise the leader on how he or she can improve their leadership. After each member reads their appraisals, they will understand how they can strive to improve, benefiting the team in reaching its objectives.

Motivation

Theory of Scientific Management claims the main form of motivation for employees is money. The main drawback of this method is that it does not take into account other forms of motivation besides money such as personal satisfaction and ambition. However, we also need to bear in mind that different people have different needs when it comes to motivation. Some individuals are highly self-motivated, while others will under-perform without managerial input.

Keeping all these point in mind can definitely help in better team management