Essential Skills For Effective Team Management

As a business owner you probably already know that you cannot do it all yourself. You may have hired someone to create your logo, for example, or to design your website. You may have hired an accountant to help you with your year-end taxes too. Striving to grow your business often requires larger scale projects. These projects cannot be outsourced to a single provider. You need to delegate and build a team. That means you want to tap into your team management skills. The following skills will help you effectively manage an online team and grow your business.

1. Leadership Skills

Leadership actually encompasses a number of skills. For example, you want to be able to inspire, motivate, and identify the strengths of your team members. A good leader is someone who is able to listen to people and then optimize their strengths, while minimizing their weaknesses. This enables you to build a strong team, capable of creating the desired outcome.

If you feel as if you’re lacking in leadership skills, try to identify the particular area in which you feel insufficient. You can then take steps to focus on improving that specific skill. For example, if you don’t think you’re a great motivator then you can talk to your team to find out what motivates them and implement tactics to help them stay engaged and excited.

2. Planning

To be a good team manager you need to be a good planner. You have to be able to identify your goals, set milestones, measurements, and expected outcomes. It’s important to know how to keep yourself and everyone else organized. Good planning doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, the simplest systems are often the best. Keep in mind that while you do want to be in charge of the planning, you can delegate the management and follow-up. You can hire a project manager to keep everyone on track and on task.

3. Hiring Skills

To hire the best people for your team you have to look beyond their skills. Of course you want someone who is going to be able to produce fantastic results. But you also want to make sure they’re going to work well with you and with your other team members. Make a list of attributes that you need in your team members and hire accordingly.

4. Communication Skills

It’s important to be able to communicate what you want and need from each team member. Good communication skills include an ability to listen as well as talk. You need to be able to understand what your team members are telling you so that you can respond accordingly. There are systems in place that you can leverage to make communicating with your team and online team management much easier. Basecamp and other simple project management tools can help you streamline delegation and stay on track to achieve your goals.

5. Team Management Assessment

Finally, a good team manager is ready, willing, and able to assess the success of the team and make necessary adjustments and changes. Establish specific times to assess success. They may be when milestones are delivered, as well as when the project is complete.

Effective team management becomes much easier when you’re able to identify and fine tune your own skills. Often, simply being aware of what is required to lead a team can help you succeed.

So take the time to get to know the skills you have in building a team, fine tune these skills and you’re on your way to building a great team for your business!