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As a manager, knowing what actions are required, when to implement plans and how to get things done is all pretty straight forward. These are the management things that you do as part of your job. You give your team directions and help them get stuff done. That’s how it works right?

What if I was to ask you what specifically you do to help your team achieve their best? What do you bring to the table as a manager to facilitate getting stuff done? 

Do you set a direction and some targets and then leave them to it, poking your head up every now and then to see how everything is going? Are you hands on, rolling up your sleeves and working with the team, having input in every decision? Do you support the decisions your team makes and empower them to work in their own way as long as targets are met?

In reality, there is no one style of management that will work for every situation. As a manager, you need to have a variety of management skills to draw on and be flexible enough to pull the right lever at the right time.

Even great managers sometimes pull the wrong lever sometimes – either on purpose, or as a well-intentioned effort to get the team on track, or to empower and motivate an individual.

You should have a general idea of what your team needs from you. Taking the time to do some self-reflection on what you think your team needs from you, and how you can actually achieve this, is time well spent. 

Leading a team discussion about what you believe you need to provide to your team is much more powerful than starting with a clean piece of paper. It shows you are taking this exercise seriously, you have thought about what your team does, what they need, the barriers they face, how you currently lead and support them, and, importantly, where you see that you are currently deficient and letting them down.

The last point is very important, having the courage to admit to your team that you are letting them down will be a real challenge for a lot of people. You are the manager, you know everything, are never wrong and only ever act in the best interests of your team, correct?

Having worked in a range of teams over my years, I have identified some common things that teams need from their manager, I have identified the following 10 things that managers need to provide to their teams:

  1. Know your role and boundaries – seems like a given, but this is where a lot of managers go wrong. There is no one single answer to what your role and boundaries are. These will change from team to team, between organisations, and are probably mostly driven by the people and personalities in your team.
  2. Be present and interested – I’m not telling you to be a micro manager embedded in the team, I’m saying you need to be available for your team when they need you, and you need to be interested in their work, in their problems, in them as people. You need to share your time, your knowledge, your experience and your war stories. Be interested in your team, find out their hobbies, what their family are doing, find out what makes them tick and share the same of yourself. 

  3. Communicate – but understand that the most important part of communication is listening. You never learn anything while you are speaking. Taking time to listen to your team, to understand what they do, their issues, barriers to performance is time well spent. Learn the art of conversation, learn to be clear in what you are saying, take the grey out of work discussions. If you are not a good speaker, learn, join toastmasters, and practice until it comes naturally.

  4. Set clear boundaries – this is a very important step. Linked to point 1, but this is related to setting specific team behaviours and identifying decision making delegations that you are comfortable with. Once set, don’t interfere unless the boundaries are not achieving what they were set for. Getting these boundaries set, agreed upon, documented and understood is a key step in empowering your team, you are not telling them how to do their job, you are setting limits within which they have free reign to do their work as they see fit. As long as the work gets done…

  5. Be real – you need to be yourself, just because you’re a manager doesn’t mean you have to change. Most people have a well calibrated bulldust radar, and you are doing yourself no favours by trying to be someone you’re not. On the flipside, harness who you are, be yourself, show your weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and your team will respect you for it.

  6. Courage – as a manager you need to have courage. You will have challenges where it would be easier to take an easy option, take the soft way out, ignore a behaviour or an issue. You need to have the courage to speak up, to have the hard discussions, to make tough decisions for the good of the team. 

  7. Open to new ideas – yes, you are the manager, but you don’t know everything. In fact, you should be building a team of people who are smarter than yourself. Encourage your team to bring new ideas to you to challenge the status quo, to challenge how you are doing things. Put in place a process for testing and developing new ideas and recognise and reward people who push the boundaries.

  8. Top cover – you need to insulate your team from organisational noise. You need to keep unwanted change away from your team and stand up for them when required. 

  9. Provide recognition – your team members need to be recognised for effort as well as results. The recognition needs to be genuine, it needs to be given regularly and the recognition needs to be quality. This can be as practical as buying quality sausages for your team BBQs from your local butcher rather than from a chain supermarket, or it can be taking the time to promote your team’s achievements with the rest of the organisation. Peer to peer recognition is as important for some people while others may prefer their name in lights on the company newsletter. Understanding your team will tell you what the triggers are.

  10. Walk the walk – this is probably the most important point in this list. You are setting expectations, targets, boundaries and values for your team. You need to be the one championing these, living and breathing them, continually raising them and enforcing them when required. If your team sees you doing something that is in conflict with what you are saying or what you have said they must do, you will immediately lose credibility and you will undermine what you are trying to achieve. I am not saying you only get one shot at this, but it is far easier to lose credibility and to undermine team values than it is to build them in the first place.

The problem with most managers, and most organisations for that matter, is that they only review how they are managing their troops when things go wrong; there is significant conflict in a team, performance has dropped, standards have dropped, absenteeism is through the roof and staff turnover is out of hand.

Have the courage to have the difficult discussion with your team, and accept with an open mind the feedback you receive. You will probably hear things you don’t want to hear, but to be the best manager you can be – to be the person your team needs you to be – you need to listen, learn and set in place a process for improving.

Unless you make change as a result of this review, demonstrable change, change that your team recognises, you are likely doing more harm than good. You have asked your team for their input and advice, and they have freely given it. This information is gold. Use it for self-development, for improving connections with your team and for driving your team to be the best it can be. Don’t waste it.