How to Achieve Effective Team Management

Team management as a term may sound redundant, like “parents of children” — ostensibly, a team can’t exist without a leader, and a parent cannot exist without a child. But, there are many managers in corporate America who don’t have teams, which is to say they don’t have to wrangle direct reports or a coherent group of people working on the same project or within the same department. This article isn’t for those managers; it’s for managers who have to roll up their sleeves, come to the office, and read the moods and progress of a group of people all tasked with producing work. While a manager’s first priority is seeing that work gets done — preferably by the people tasked with doing the work on time and on budget — a manager who rises to the stature of a leader also guides their team toward a vision and broader set of goals.

Just as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs defines the human experience from the lowest common denominator (survival, i.e., food, clothing, and shelter) to the highest (human expression, self actualization), the span within which managers operate is vast. Some managers simply herd their teams to complete basic tasks by due dates, while others teach their team members vital business skills and guide them to question, innovate, and imagine what’s next at their company or in their field. Whether you’re a new manager just trying to keep a project on track, or a seasoned manager hoping to inspire, retain, and educate, there’s plenty of room at the broad table where team managers spend their careers.

Ideally, good managers strive to lead their teams, empower them, show them the vision, and let them contribute to achieving it. Employees don’t like a boss who has idealistic goals and no concept of how to tactically achieve them — that’s inspiration without a roadmap. Conversely, employees don’t like a manager who’s all tasks and no big picture. Ideally, managers who lead share a broad vision with their team. Then, they help team members perform or develop the skills to execute on that vision, giving the work meaning by connecting it to a broader corporate or even social agenda.

The management architecture of a startup and that of a Fortune 500 company can vary widely. Managers typically have direct reports who work specifically for them, but many managers have a mix of direct reports and occasional reports. This latter type of reporting structure is known as matrix management, and involves an employee assigned to one department who sometimes works with leadership in another department. Matrix management is especially common in project work. For example, a communications professional typically works in the marketing and PR departments, but can get pulled into an annual report, which involves reporting to and collaborating with the investor relations and finance teams. Project managers may not even be aware of this term, but when they are assigning resources (people) to a project from other departments, they are matrix managing.

Companies have increasingly accepted that today’s (and tomorrow’s) worker wants flexibility and adaptability from an employer, not to mention job satisfaction and fulfillment. Since training and hiring employees can be an expensive enterprise, leaders are increasingly tasked with creating a work environment where employees feel that they’re engaged and learning vital new skills that keep them competitive and current with respect to their fields. Companies, of course, have budget constraints: Not every employee can get a raise or bonus each year, and economic cycles may mean happy hour Fridays fall by the wayside for a time. But, managers who want deep loyalty and engagement from their employees do need to nurture their teams.

Warren Bennis (1925-2014) pioneered the field of leadership studies as an area of academic study. He postulated that leaders who were what he called “humanistic” and democratic made better and more effective leaders than those who took a more imperial or top-down approach. This means that bosses with open-door policies and “no question is too dumb” attitudes may make better leaders than those who intimidate their teams with high expectations and hard-to-satisfy demeanors.

Following are the most common leadership styles and approaches:

• Servant Leadership: This leadership approach was first defined by Peter Greenleaf in a 1970 essay. Servant leaders (and servant institutions) are less motivated by a desire to accumulate power than by a desire to make an impact on the audience served and fulfill the mission of their organization. Therefore, servant leaders share power or empower their teams, rather than manage down over them. Many so-called B Corporations and for-profit “impact” companies embody a servant leadership mission, but as individuals, servant leaders can occupy a role in any kind of business or nonprofit corporation.

• Autocratic Leadership or Command-and-Control Leadership: Google “autocratic leadership” and the results also point to authoritarian leadership and then a sea of images featuring characters like Darth Vader and various real-world dictators. Its synonymous counterpart, command-and-control leadership, concentrates absolute power in the hands of a manager who sits above their team in a hierarchical fashion. Autocratic leadership is top-down, “speak when spoken to” leadership, where team input is not sought or valued, and one leader calls the shots.
  
  This leadership style does have some merits: In a crisis, for instance, the autocratic leader with well-established background knowledge knows just what they want direct reports to do and can act quickly and decisively. First responders, the military, and other work environments may have a high degree of autocratic functioning. However, this leadership style may leave little room for innovation, process improvement, or employee engagement, since employees may not get a platform to test out ideas. There may be only one way to save a life, but not only one way to design a logo.

• Democratic Leadership or Engage-and-Create Leadership: This leadership style gives team members more of a voice in decision making. While there is a leader at the helm, they solicit input, feedback, and ideas. Then, they go with the concepts that seem to make the most sense. Democratic leaders typically provide employees with a high degree of interaction, feedback, and recognition, as such a leader’s job involves coaxing ideas and contributions out of the team and facilitating brainstorming. This kind of leadership may be common in creative groups (media, marketing), education, consulting, and service businesses where teams have the power to adapt and tailor to client or consumer demand. There’s a “we” and “us” mentality, not a boss-employee hierarchy. Keep in mind, however, that even though democratic leaders open up the leadership process, they must nonetheless work to keep their teams harnessed and focused.

• Laissez-Faire Leadership: This leadership style leaves management largely in the hands of team members, reasoning that if team members complete their deliverables on time and sufficiently, there’s no need for management intervention. This leadership style may work functionally — for example, if a reporter is out of the office all day gathering information for stories and leaves their editor uninformed as to their exact whereabouts. As long as the writer files the promised copy or delivers the occasional scoop to trounce the competition, management is happy. Maybe, a venture investor or researcher investigates opportunities and new fields of study, checking in with management only when it’s time to authorize a check. Still, at some point, many of these workers will need a manager’s guidance about corporate themes, a new vision, or shifting priorities.

• Econ 101 Leadership: This type of leadership assumes that team members are motivated solely by financial goals, such as achieving sales quotas or other metrics tied to bonuses or payments. While this leadership style may work well in specific contexts (sales, business development, new business teams), it doesn’t factor in some of the other reasons people enjoy work, such as developing personal relationships with colleagues or within an industry, skill building (which may or may not correlate to immediate financial gain), or attaining a particular (non-financially related) status as a form of reward.

Teams can take on many forms, but all teams need management. A retail store manager with a small team of salespeople may divide their focus between very routine HR duties (scheduling, time cards) and one-on-one coaching about how salespeople can close more business, tout seasonal specials, or manage ongoing customer relationships. But, at a large public company, a C-level manager with vice president-level reports may be deeply involved in complex, one-time corporate initiatives as well as routine, repeatable projects, like quarterly financial reports.

McKinsey & Co’s Five Managerial Archetypes

Management consulting firm McKinsey & Company defines managers within a framework of “managerial archetypes,” which it breaks down according to four factors:

• Time: How much time does the manager devote to their own work versus the work of managing team members?

• Process Standardization: Is the work process standardized and structured (as it is at a factory, for instance) or looser and customized (as it is at a creative agency)?

• Work Variety: How varied is the work of individuals reporting to a manager? Is the manager managing a team populated by one type of worker (say, regional sales reps) or a team that performs a variety of roles?

• Skills Required: What degree of training or experience do team members need to possess? Are direct reports largely independent or do they need supervision?

McKinsey’s five managerial archetypes are as follows:

1. Player/Coach: The leader must train the team and work closely with them over time (such as in a consulting environment). The player/coach typically has no more than five direct reports.

2. Coach: The leader manages the team, which has some background training. However, the team will gain additional on-the-job training that may take up to a year. The coach has up to seven direct reports.

3. Supervisor: This leader manages workers who follow a relatively standardized work process and a relatively short ramp-up time. A supervisor (such as an editor at a media company) can handle up to 10 direct reports.

4. Facilitator: This leader manages workers with extremely standardized roles that require minimal or very short training periods. A facilitator (such as at an accounts payable department) manages up to 15 direct reports.

5. Coordinator: The leader devotes the bulk of their time to overseeing employees’ day-to-day duties, which consist of highly standardized work. The coordinator (such as a call center manager or a dispatcher of residential contractors) works with staff members who already know the work or need minimal training; this manager has up to 15 direct reports.

From McKinsey’s framework, it’s clear that the complexity of the work at hand, the training time and trajectory required for individual workers and the group collectively, and the manager’s hands-on time all determine the pace at which and the tone in which the team will work. Healthy teams share universal traits. The team is inclusive, works toward common goals, consists of team members with well-defined roles and duties, and has, under a cohesive and consistent leadership, found ways to communicate effectively and share information.

Of course, no two teams are alike. And, managers appointed to lead a team need to proceed cautiously to establish trust with and respect from employees. Here’s a review of tactics and themes to consider when entering a new team in a leadership role:

• Being a First-Time Manager: If you’re a first-time manager who’s been promoted from the rank-and-file on a team, or if you’re a new manager leading your first team, it’s important to establish trust with and confidence from team members. While your instincts may tell you to establish authority by knowing the answers and having ideas, there’s a better way to win trust: radical listening. By letting the team know you plan to take the time to sit down with them as a group and individually and really listen to their concerns, suggestions, and input, you establish a tone of cooperation and begin to build team members’ trust. In this way, you’ll also gather input on new ways to complete work that remove pain points for individual workers or subgroups.

• Leading a New-to-You Team: If you’ve been newly appointed the leader of an established team, you can expect to see team members on good behavior or competitive behavior as they angle to establish themselves in your eyes or even compete for new and better work. Turf struggles may unfold before your eyes. If you’re wandering into an established group, use radical listening as well as recognition and team-building to communicate to team members that you see their roles and contributions and that they can trust one another.

• Managing a Remote Team: If you’re leading a largely remote team, it’s important to understand staff members’ motivations and take extra steps to get to know people individually while also creating a virtual community. Managers often establish this virtual community by using regular calls or an online watercooler environment where employees can bond on a one-on-one basis. While many workers salivate at the prospect of becoming remote workers and relish the newfound time they unlock by skipping commutes or breaking their day into a different schedule, these benefits also come with risks: Teleworkers may work more than necessary to prove themselves or may feel unseen or uninformed about corporate priorities. Check out this article on effectively managing remote teams to make sure you’re maintaining regular live contact and using the right technology tools to mitigate these risks.

• Managing Projects and Managing Project Teams: When you manage a project, the team’s assemblage of members may be temporary or interdisciplinary, collaborating for the scope of the project and then disbanding and returning to core teams. Since the project may have a time limit, tight deadline, and/or budgetary constraints, recognizing the team as it reaches milestones or completes gates from the to-do list becomes an important part of your process as a manager.

Fortunately, there are dozens of ways that technology can assist in project management, from project overviews and graphic representations of a project’s progress to personal reminders and kudos about individuals’ responsibilities and task completions. Team- building before and after a project’s completion is also highly recommended. Engaging in these activities helps develop trust and camaraderie, so projects run smoothly.

“It takes a village to raise a child,” Hillary Clinton once famously wrote. It also takes a village worth of skills to manage a team, because managers must nimbly toggle between the roles of intuiting from, encouraging, explaining to, teaching, cheering on, and disciplining the employees tasked with working under them. These “soft” and “hard” skills fall into four categories: social, conceptual, technical, and executive.

Social Skills for Team Management

To effectively manage a team, you must be a social psychic and must always communicate. These soft skills are instrumental to getting the best work from your team.

• Social Psychic: To lead your team, you must read your team — strong emotional intelligence (EQ) is essential. Team managers are part mentor, coach, cheerleader, confessor, and judge. This means that good managers learn to read whether a team member’s silence stems from frustration, external distractions, anger, or hesitation or confusion about a project. Good managers can figure out if a team member is procrastinating due to perfectionism or fear about a project. They can also intuit whether the team member is burned out and needs to temporarily vary their work pace, requires help from a teammate, or needs a day off.

• ABC: Always Be Communicating: While the acronym “ABC” stood for “always be closing” to the real estate brokers in the play and movie Glengarry, Glen Ross, good managers actually need to “always be communicating.” Good managers use communication as both an offensive sword and a defensive shield. Good managers know how to defer to higher-ups in order to negotiate for their team. They also know how to impress upon team members the significance of priorities and timelines, how to council team members on what knowledge is confidential or proprietary, and how to tamp down interpersonal issues between team members. Transparency, which involves a willingness to answer almost any questions and to hold oneself accountable, is also a hallmark of team leadership.

Train Your Troops for Team Management

If you plan to be an effective leader, you must also master the following abilities:

• Help Team Members Develop Their Own Skills: Good managers know that team members each bring their own skill sets to the team and that individuals need to continue learning new skills and tools to feel engaged at work. Part of a manager’s function is to cultivate and grow team members’ skill sets based on their aptitudes and interests. To foster a safe environment for growth, team members need to be allowed to try tasks outside their skill set, make mistakes, and learn through constructive feedback. Team members need core duties and stretch goals.

• Pace the Team: Like athletes, teams need days with “heavy workouts” and days of maintenance training. No one can perform at a hundred percent capacity all the time. Imagine a coxswain on a rowing team demanding that the whole boat crew perform to maximum exertion not just during races, but also in every workout. The team would burn out quickly, sustain injuries, and ultimately fall apart under the pressure. Managers can prevent team burnout by either “passing the baton” of deadlines between members of the team, or pacing deliverables on a project with some wiggle room for errors or hurdles. Many managers learn that when they assign tasks, it can be effective to tell a team member how long to spend on them. If, for example, a team member is tasked with brainstorming a list of potential social media posts to promote a given product or making a planning document for a particular project, the manager should set clear time and scope parameters for the assignment, such as a few hours (or days) on the work and five ideas or components to be delivered. Since team members have competing priorities, advising on time usage can help them.

• Develop the Team as an Organism: While team members have their own goals, agendas, and motivations for working in the group, they also need to develop a sense of the team as an organism and what it can achieve. Team members need team skills. Managers can create a team ethos by learning to lead meetings effectively and showing team members that problems solved by the group or ideas jointly brainstormed have more weight and potential behind them than those concocted alone. Learning to facilitate group decision making, to build team consensus, and to explain to team members whose ideas don’t make the final plan’s cut are all skills managers need to cultivate. Learning to lead brainstorming sessions can also help team members learn from one another and build on one another’s ideas.

Flex Your Muscles to Achieve Effective Team Management

Good managers and leaders observe and gather information and know when to flex and change.

• Observe and Gather Information: Wise managers avoid developing personal friendships with members of the teams they oversee because doing so undercuts a manager’s ability to objectively measure team performance. While management requires the human touch — coaxing employees to do their best — it also requires metrics. For corporate higher-ups, managers must use data to assess how well projects went and how closely goals were met. They must also use data and team feedback to flag pain points or issues that hamper efficiency. Additionally, they have to collect input from team members and stakeholders (which may include members of other teams drawn in for projects, outside consultants, or contractors or service firms hired to help).

• Know When to Flex and Change: Managing change is a modern manager’s biggest challenge. Change is a constant in many fields, and managers must constantly teach team members to pivot or adapt as corporate priorities, client demands, or economic cycles impact business. In order to teach team members to flex and change, managers need to know how to flex and change, too. The business leader John Kotter’s many books on change management discuss ways in which leaders at all levels of a business must form their own internal team to lead change. Getting employee buy-in and input and pushing teams through their fear or resistance (or over-enthusiasm or misunderstanding) of new methods or priorities are critical skills managers must develop. And, they must develop them on a personal level as well as within the broader context of a company. 

Using Executive Skills Like a Boss for Effective Team Management

Hard skills such as mediating and disciplining and upskilling in conflict management are challenging but crucial skills for a successful manager.

• Mediate and Discipline: Managers of teams must mediate disputes between team members with personal gripes or work style differences, and, in worst-case scenarios, they may need to discipline team members. Seeing managers confront conflict head on is good not only for the individuals in conflict, but also for the rest of the team. If a problem rears its head, team members who see their manager proactively floating solutions and diffusing conflict feel reassured that they work in a fair and collaborative environment.

• Upskill in Conflict Management: Petty slights and all-out team squabbles can take a toll on team productivity. Any time humans get together, misunderstandings are inevitable, which means managers must sometimes play the role of referee. The book Taking the Stress Out of Stressful Conversations by Holly Weeks is a classic primer for managers on approaching conflict and confronting the escalating emotions of unhappy team members. Conflict management tips, as outlined by Berkeley Human Resources, involve acknowledging a problem, allowing conflicted employees to discuss feelings, defining the problem and the underlying needs beneath it, and then working toward solutions and tracking progress, so the problem doesn’t reoccur.

Managers play a key role in retaining talent at companies — particularly because employees make career decisions based on how well they like and respect their managers. In a 2018 Randstad study about employee turnover, 60 percent of workers surveyed said they had left a job or would consider leaving a job if they didn’t like a supervisor, yet 58 percent said they would stay at a job with a lower salary if they liked their manager. Some 74 percent indicated that enjoying their team and colleagues would encourage them to remain in a position.

As discussed, it’s clear that managing is not for the faint of heart. Those who ascend to management certainly gain in status and pay grade, but without first-hand experience leading teams, many new managers fall prey to the following common mistakes. But mistakes aren’t just common among new managers; any manager can fall into these behaviors if they’re not careful. Left unchecked, these problems can eventually create a toxic work environment, which can, in turn, lead to staff turnover and stress.

1. Displaying Favoritism: Consciously or not, some managers play or seem to play favorites. Managers who have cherry-picked a new hire or who must manage long-term team members alongside newer team members need to remember that the team is an ecosystem, not a loose collection of relationships. Like a symphony conductor coaxing a coherent and moving song out of the musicians, effective managers make sure to give each player the occasional solo while keeping the overall group on track for success. Managers can avoid favoritism by remembering to include all team members in social invites, reminding themselves that direct reports are not friends, and regularly scheduling time to talk one-on-one with each employee.

2. Appearing Unapproachable: In addition to supporting their teams, many managers have their own specific to-do lists and pressures from outside the team. As a result, some managers make themselves unavailable or unapproachable to their team members. Still, others wear a stern face that makes workers too intimidated to ask for help. Learning to proactively approach team members before problems crop up, to anticipate learning curves, and to find time-efficient ways to communicate appreciation or remind team members of availability can go a long way toward offsetting this issue.

3. Sticking to One Method for Doing Things: Good managers listen to their teams and know that team members can often contribute good ideas about a project’s process. Conversely, managers who are dead-set on seeing work done in a specific way and who don’t allow for experimentation with new methods can miss out on productivity enhancements or new workflows that just might make their job easier. Even when a new approach fails, managers can show the team they’re flexible and turn the effort and its outcomes into a teachable moment.

4. Forgetting to Provide Sufficient Resources: To do their work, team members need access to resources, from conference rooms to rental equipment to new software. If the copier is down while the team is designing print collateral or a manager fails to secure budget approval for a data service subscription that’s necessary for research, the failure falls on a manager. Similarly, if resources are available but team members aren’t given time to train regarding their use, that too falls on a manager. Team members may feel doomed to failure if resource planning becomes a routine problem, and this can impact not only productivity but also morale. 

5. Failing to Cultivate Trust: If team members don’t trust one another or their manager, they can’t do their best work. Similarly, if a manager misuses their authority — taking an abusive tone, blasting past work-life boundaries, micro-managing a competent employee — team culture can quickly erode. Managers must never speak negatively of individual employees or single out employees in front of their peers. Leaders with perfectionistic tendencies need to extend a long leash to new team members so that those team members can gradually work their way up to their manager’s standards rather than suffer through feelings of inadequacy.

6. Failing to Take Responsibility: Managers are accountable. They need to commit to doing their part so their team members can do theirs. Any time a team member fails, it’s a partial (if not total) reflection on management. Asking a team member what happened in instances of poor outcomes can make way for dialogue about how a project might’ve functioned better. Managers need to take a proactive approach to problem-solving; taking team problems to upper management should only be a last resort. Managers also need to take responsibility when dealing with stakeholders. For instance, if a customer is unhappy with a late service delivery, the manager can’t blame it on the team member who was out sick (even if the flu is going around). The manager can, instead, consider other moves to soothe the customer, ranging from a service discount to a bonus with delivery, and investigate whether hiring a temp or giving another team member overtime might’ve helped.

7. Forgetting to Manage Up and Facing Friction with Higher-Ups: Managers who surprise their own bosses with budget or other issues, who lead teams with consistently high turnover rates, or who require their own boss’s defense for mistakes or questionable behavior have placed themselves on thin ice. Just as the team manager is accountable to their team, the team manager’s higher-up is similarly accountable to theirs. When managers create challenges with key stakeholders, such as customers, investors, or employees, or create issues that garner negative media attention or public relations headaches, employees may intuit that they themselves are on the chopping block. Or, they may worry that their entire department or project might be reassigned to a different leader or team.

8. Forgetting to Have Fun: Teams need to celebrate their victories as well as their roles in achieving those victories. They also need to simply appreciate one another so that when the going gets tough or when work is dull, they still have a sense of camaraderie and purpose. Whether a manager can get the crew out to raise a glass after work, to take an overnight retreat together, or to participate in a low-stakes bowling or mini-golf outing, creating a context where every team member is an equal and can be themselves can go a long way toward fostering goodwill.

Revealing a little bit about your non-work side, explaining the big picture and keeping a consistent message, rewarding and recognizing team members and their successes, making personality assessments, and instilling motivation are the main ways of building trust on your team.

The hit TV show The Office features as its main protagonist Michael Scott, a regional manager for the fictional paper company Dunder Mifflin. In many ways, Michael Scott is a walking cautionary tale of how not to manage: He’s the prototypical middle manager who distracts his team, tells inappropriate jokes, considers subordinates his friends, and occasionally gets wrist-slaps from corporate. And yet, his team is loyal — he’s built trust among them. Trust is a key trait of a healthy, successful team. Here’s how team managers can cultivate trust on their teams:

• Give to Get — Employees Need to Know Their Manager: Trust starts at the top. Managers who want to instill trust and learn what motivates employees need to reveal a little bit about their non-work side. According to Harvard Business Review, the higher in rank an employee rises, the less they are trusted, which means managers must make a special effort to connect. Whether that means talking about neutral personal interests, like a favorite sports team or hobby, displaying family or favorite vacation photos in the office, or encouraging team lunches, managers must open up if they want employees to do the same.

• Explain the Big Picture and Keep a Consistent Message: Team members thrive when they know how their contribution fits into the giant jigsaw puzzle of a corporation. It can motivate many team members to hear why a task, approach, or corporate philosophy is in play and how cooperating with that particulate corporate model can reward them individually and collectively. Managers who are consistent concerning their priorities create a culture of accountability and logic that team members can follow. This method of working in concert with an organization’s overall business strategy is generally known as alignment. By communicating group goals and then breaking them down into individual tasks, each employee sees how they contribute. 

• Reward and Recognize Team Members and Their Successes: Give praise where it’s due, and show team members that everyone gets a moment in the spotlight and that their contributions are important. According to research from Officevibe, 90 percent of employees say recognition boosts employee engagement. More than 80 percent of employees say they’d rather receive recognition than a gift. The Global Recognition Study among U.S. employees echoes these figures. Wise managers can build recognition into regular team meetings or debriefings, pointing out special accomplishments by team members or letting the group know that a team member’s approach to a task exemplifies new thinking that the top brass wants to see from employees. 

• Study Your Team: Personality Assessment: Dozens of personality tests and assessment programs help managers and human resources offices understand what motivates workers and gets them out of bed in the morning. These personality assessments, if taken by teams and then interpreted with expert help, reveal significant work style and motivation differences that can help managers better lead their teams. The tests can also help team members work better with one another.

Personality assessment findings may become a springboard for a nuanced discussion about an employee’s strengths and preferences. And, knowing those attributes can help a manager coach and reward an employee, motivating them to get through their list of less-appreciated tasks in order to take on a project that will speak to their passions. Knowing if the team is dominated by a certain personality type can also help when it comes to hiring decisions, as managers can balance the team’s energy with hires whose traits diversify the mix. Moreover, managers can obviously benefit from seeing an objective rendering of their own strengths and weaknesses as leaders.

Generally, these assessments help outline an individual’s motivations, blind spots, and methods for making sense of the world. The popular Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) test, for instance, establishes each person as one of 16 personality types, each consisting of four pillars: People are either introverts or extroverts; they use sensing or intuition; they find themselves dominated by thinking or feeling; and, ultimately, they judge or perceive information. Extroverts who take energy from socializing with others, for instance, may find collaboration and open office architecture stimulating. Introverts, on the other hand, may feel like constant collaboration is draining and may want to concentrate solo for bursts, then huddle briefly with their work partner to compare notes.

The DISC personality test measures dominance, influence, steadiness, and compliance. Belbin’s Team Roles identifies nine team roles and indicates in which of those roles a team member flourishes; typically, each member excels at two or three of the nine roles. Deloitte, meanwhile, has identified four team member types: pioneer, driver, guardian, and integrator. No matter which assessment protocol you try, team personality differences will make themselves clear.

• Master Motivation: Developing a nuanced understanding of motivation is a must-do for any team manager. The young worker motivated by getting a raise and polishing their skills and resume and the middle-aged worker motivated by work-life balance and a preference for more work-from-home days may require vastly different approaches. The former may want to know exactly what skills they need to develop in order to carve a path to promotion, while the latter may sacrifice a raise, work fewer hours, or telecommute in order to achieve work-life balance. Theories on motivation abound, but here are several theories on motivation at work.
  • Theory X and Theory Y: Developed by Douglas McGregor, an MIT professor, these two theories of motivation take opposite tacks when it comes to interpreting workers. Theory X assumes workers are not self-motivated and need to be managed under high supervision, receiving clear rewards and penalties for performance, such as in a factory setting. Theory Y assumes workers are self-motivated and seek job satisfaction and growth. Thus, they can be managed without intensive supervision. 
  • Herzberg Motivators and Hygiene: In the 1950s and 1960s, Frederick Herzberg studied workplace motivation, noting that certain traits and practices consistently delivered satisfaction, while others consistently delivered dissatisfaction. To create a motivated workforce, the theory posits, sources of dissatisfaction (“hygiene”) must be eliminated or reduced, and sources of satisfaction must be increased or introduced. Working on one aspect alone doesn’t work: Giving someone a promotion or raise when the workplace is otherwise toxic isn’t motivating, but cleaning up toxic dynamics and offering the raise is motivating.
  • McClelland’s Human Motivation Theory: Developed in the 1960s by David McClelland and described in his book The Achieving Society, this theory says that human motivation boils down to one of three things: achievement, affiliation, or power. An employee motivated by power, then, would prefer to experience the reward of running a project team than to merely get a compliment.
  • Sirota’s Three-Factor Theory: This theory posits that the three pillars of a healthy and motivated workforce are equity/fairness (salary, workload, etc.), achievement (work is challenging but not impossible), and camaraderie (an environment of teamwork, collaboration, and cooperation). 
  • ERG Theory: This theory posits that humans pursue concerns in order of necessity related first to their existence (survival), then to relatedness (interpersonal relationships), and then to growth (self-actualization, personal development). An iteration of Maslow’s Hierarchy of human needs, this theory suggests that people who can’t reach the higher tiers of existence double down on the lower tiers, which explains the materialist (who over-values money as its own reward and, therefore, lacks relationships or fulfillment) or the office clown (who over-values relatedness to compensate for a lack of growth).
  • The Pygmalion Effect: While sorting others’ motivations and playing to them can present a tricky business for managers, managers need to know that their perception of workers can also influence team results. According to the Pygmalion Effect or Pygmalion Theory, coined by Sterling Livingston in 1969, a manager’s outlook about a team member can produce a self-fulfilling prophecy. If a manager is suspicious of a team member’s ability to deliver, that team member may be unable to deliver. If a manager shows confidence in and enthusiasm about a team member’s final products or results, that team member may not only meet but also outperform expectations. Since managers are only human, biases and projections can color workers’ potential, so work on your blind spots.

Leading a team is like growing a garden. It requires patience and a willingness to adjust your approach when outside forces create difficult or unforeseen conditions. However, there are several proven ways to disaster-proof your team. Here’s a look at some of the more successful options available to managers:

• Put Individual Appraisal Systems in Place for Team Members: While team members love in-the-moment recognition for work well done, longer-form assessments are vital to helping managers and team members look at employee progress. Many managers work on an individual development plan (IDP) with each employee, defining their core tasks as well as goals for output or for new skills that the employee will pursue in the coming quarters or year. An IDP becomes a tool that both manager and employee can use at annual review time. The plan can also demonstrate to the employee, the manager, and the manager’s manager measurable progress and efficiency. 

• Consider Other Appraisal Methods: While IDPs make for an effective tool for managers and direct reports to outline areas the employee plans to work on or uphold, there are additional appraisal methods. The classic performance review is a top-down assessment by the manager about the employee, but other assessment methods factor in voices and viewpoints aside from the employee’s and manager’s. So-called peer-based reviews (which have pros and cons if internecine team politics exist or data is used to “grade on a bell curve”) involve feedback from colleagues. 360-degree reviews incorporate feedback from subordinates, colleagues, and supervisors. Check out these free employee performance review templates to help motivate your team, align individual goals with those of the organization, provide clear communication regarding work responsibilities and objectives, identify training needs, encourage positive relationships between employees and management, and more. 

• Put Project Review and Assessment Tools into Play: In addition to evaluating individuals, managers need to evaluate group projects. By taking a step back and looking at how well a project was completed, managers and team members can together take a “scientific method” approach to issues and then collaborate to resolve them. Were more resources or time needed for key parts of a project? Could a project have delivered even more if hatched with different technology? Many project technologies can track and provide data, but a manager needs to hit the pause button so the team can assess, collaborate on takeaways, and share in solutions. Engaging the team in its own success empowers team members. Many managers use objectives and key results (OKR) framework planning for teams, a method for keeping teams aligned with corporate visions and goals and related tasks. Intel, Google, and many other technology startups have successfully leveraged OKR.

• Teach Collaboration: Team members like to collaborate — especially if they’re millennials. Data from Premier Global Services indicates that 90 percent of millennials want to collaborate and rate collaboration highly among work activities. However, collaboration doesn’t come naturally to all personality types or all members of all generations. Cloud-based technology and project management frameworks can help drive collaboration by automating common-sense tasks that team members may pass to one another. For instance, a nonprofit organization planning a fundraiser might use a cloud-based project management environment to assign pre-event tasks, from securing a liquor license and auction prizes to deciding who’s bringing ice on the day of the event.

• Communicate Priorities: Teams have priorities and so do managers. Smart managers communicate what is top-of-mind each day, week, and quarter, and they teach employees to understand their part in fulfilling different priorities. Articulating priorities can help team members understand why management has “chosen its battles.” Doing this can also help managers point to neutral, rational information to explain why team member A’s project has received attention and team member B’s has been back-burnered for a few days.

• Use Proven Team-Building Methods to Make Your Team Click: Building trust requires work. To build team member trust, managers must get teammates to feel comfortable displaying honesty and vulnerability in front of one another. Team-building exercises create safe, controlled environments in which teammates must turn to one another for help with problem solving, conflict resolution, or collaboration in order to complete a task or win a competition. Whether escaping a faux panic room, shooting paintball guns at one another, or taking a more measured approach to an offsite, there are dozens of ways to team-build. Back-to-back drawing is designed to improve communication skills. Some team-building professionals say all team-building exercises share B.E.C.C. — a chance for team members to bond, empathize, connect, and communicate. Try these team-building techniques:

  • Top Team-Building Experts Recommend the Best Activities to Match Your Team's Needs
  • Top Team-Building Games: Experts Share Their Favorites
  • The Biggest and Best Resource for Team-Building Questions
• Consider the Entire Team: Whether you’re adding a new employee (who will become a kind of chemistry experiment for the overall team) or finding budget for freelance help so that the team can focus on core priorities, smart team managers always keep the whole team in mind. They may develop a charter or set of values for their team. They may also develop a sense for matching team members with tasks that interest or challenge them, pairing together team members who inspire one another, and keeping team member personalities in mind when thinking about task allocation.

Leaders, as well as teammates, need to pursue continuing education. Fortunately, many employers provide reimbursement and/or time support for work-related training. Such training can include non-credit continuing education certificate courses taught at a local college or through an online program, tactical courses provided by an online educator like General Assembly, or specific skill-related professional certification courses offered by a trade association.

Here are some other ways team managers can upskill without losing valuable on-the-job time:

• Get a Coach: Working with a professional leadership coach can help you identify strong and weak areas regarding leadership style and background.

• Look for a Job: No, don’t get a new job — just look for one. What skills and approaches do successful local or nationally known companies ask of team managers? Do you need to learn a particular project management approach, be familiar with certain technology tools, prove certain metrics? You can also ask a recruiter to look at your resume and provide you with feedback about whether the work you do and the way you currently do it are in demand or out of vogue.

• Self-Assess: Just as team managers can benefit from leading their teams through personality tests and skills assessments, managers can also benefit from pursuing these programs themselves. Articulating your management style to employees can help them understand how to deliver what you need.

• Choose the Right Project Management Tools: Depending on the nature of your workplace and the projects you lead, it may make sense to review whether and how you’re using project management software, Gantt charts, and other common tools that managers utilize to schedule and run projects. Revisiting ways to use the tools and optimizing approaches can lead to more effective management.

• Keep an Idea Map or Mind Map on Your Office Whiteboard: Idea maps or mind maps are visual representations of your ideas. Managers who map their goals for the team and keep this map visible (at least in their office) are providing not only an image of their view of the team’s goals, but also an illustration that team members can relate to as they pursue their tasks. Mind maps illustrate priorities as well as possibilities, tangents, and creativity.

• Leverage Cloud-Based Task Management Tools: Tools such as nTask or Zenkit are designed so that teams can see all the tasks involved in a project. For managers who aren’t project managers, but nonetheless oversee the occasional multi-team member activity, visually displaying team members’ tasks can help everyone stay on track and understand the importance of their roles and deadlines.

• Use Scheduling Tools to Remind Yourself or the Team Who’s Available When: The app When I Work, among others, can help managers remember who’s working when and in what time zone. This is particularly important for teams with remote members.

• Create a Virtual Hangout Space for Your Team and Hang Out There with Them from Time to Time: This is particularly important for managers of teams with remote members. A work environment where quick one-on-one chats are possible can mitigate the lack of community or concerns about missing out that remote employees sometimes experience. Even on-site staff can miss human interaction, though, and offering a virtual tool for quick huddles can help preserve a sense of community. There are dozens of casual chat room apps where team members can collaborate or chat informally and interact with the group or an individual. Make yourself available in one of these environments and observe the areas in which employees are struggling, sharing, or exchanging advice. Popular hangout tools include Google Hangouts, Slack, and Socialcast.

You can learn from World Cup, Caterpillar, Google, and Apple about team management approaches that function well and — even better — lead to innovation and success.

Additionally, you can consult the following expert sources:

• Peter Economy (Inc.)

• Simon Sinek

• Lolly Daskal

• Kira Makagon

• Stowe Boyd

• Matt Mayberry

Empower your people to go above and beyond with a flexible platform designed to match the needs of your team — and adapt as those needs change. 

The Smartsheet platform makes it easy to plan, capture, manage, and report on work from anywhere, helping your team be more effective and get more done. Report on key metrics and get real-time visibility into work as it happens with roll-up reports, dashboards, and automated workflows built to keep your team connected and informed. 

When teams have clarity into the work getting done, there’s no telling how much more they can accomplish in the same amount of time. Try Smartsheet for free, today.