If you want your team to succeed, you have to manage it!

If managerial skills came in a bottle, the directions on the back might read like this:

• Set Goals
• Organize Resources
• Motivate Team Members
• Remove Roadblocks
• Measure Progress
• Rinse and Repeat as Necessary

At each of those steps, a healthy dose of communication is required also. An effective manager communicates with the team and facilitates communication between team contributors. The best managers empower their teams by incorporating contributors’ input about a project’s risks, schedules, and objectives upfront.

This approach leads to crisper goals, more accurate time and resource projections and, most important, a team that feels ownership for their success. When each team member understands how their role is critical to meeting project objectives, their motivation to meet expectations increases.

Teams perform best when management is a collaborative, networking process versus a top-down approach in which team members are dictated to. The manager remains chief coordinator and the ultimate judge of team progress toward the shared result however.

Additionally, managers of high-performance teams strive toward a transparent work atmosphere in which the activities and progress of each team member are available at a glance. Results orientation improves team productivity and brings clarity to internal and external dependencies. The team as a whole also develops the agility to adjust their efforts as the project unfolds.

The use of shared project and team tracking software ensures that everyone is on the same page during the project. Furthermore, the software facilitates a manager’s ability to provide timely and accurate performance feedback to individual contributors. Formal performance reviews are more objective and lack unpleasant surprises, because the employee sees the same data the manager upon which the manager bases their assessment of the employee’s performance to objectives.

Bernhard S