How to Manage a Team
Managing people has got to be up there as one of the hardest parts of any job; equally, it has the potential to be the most rewarding too.
When you’re learning about how to manage a team, you’re typically being taught methods on how to get the most out of your team, how to lead them to success and put them in roles that encourage best performance.
As managers, we all want to be successful in our roles – we want to build a team that respects us, likes us and wants to be successful with us.
In reality, we’re not always blessed with being given a full team of people who are all willing and able to join this same ideology.
And the problem is, no one really teaches you how to manage the more ‘difficult to manage’ people – the ones that don’t want to be managed, the ones that think they know better, or who don’t want to be there at all!
Throughout my career, I’ve encountered many, many people who have challenged me, and have worked out several tactics to enable me to manage my way through the situations.
In most cases, I’ve managed to develop them into really good team members, but in some, I’ve had no choice but to manage them out the door.
None of it has ever been easy, and I know I’ve made lots of mistakes in the process of learning on the job. It’s also made me realise just how much of a lonely place being a manager can be, especially if you’re in a middle management position where you feel you can’t ask your senior manager for help for fear it reflects badly on your own capability.
Everyone is different, and as a leader, you need to find ways of tapping into each person and working out what drives them and how they can be an asset to your team.
Often there is a reason behind a perceived difficult to manage person that once uncovered, can be fixed with the right approach. In other cases, it can be a case of square peg, round hole, and you need to have the confidence to know when to stop bending over backwards trying to make it fit.
The truth is, that it won’t just be you who is noticing this issue, the rest of the team will be affected by it too. In many cases when I’ve managed someone out of a role, someone has come to me and said that they are relieved and how much the atmosphere has changed for the better since they have left.
If you want to learn some easy methods of having difficult conversations, and managing different personality types, so that you can feel confident in your approach too, then join our community.
