Beverley posted an excellent article last week on understanding different learning styles of your team when it comes to effectively managing them. This is really crucial if you’re managing a diverse group of people with people from different cultural backgrounds and even different generations. You also need to keep in mind that different people from different countries will have different ways of learning. Rote learning for example is prevalent in countries like India, as a result, fresh out of college employees tend to stick with ‘streams’ instead of thinking customer care and marketing or employee engagement are all inter-dependent. I’ve also seen creatives perform like super stars given the right motivation yet produce crap when that is taken away from them.

We all know that when a person is learning or growing at a given job they tend to be more engaged with what they’re doing. It’s knowing the right touch points for every person you manage that makes you an effective manager or team leader, and keep employees engaged.

1) What’s Your Management Style?

I’ve heard some managers say that their team needs to adjust to their way of working to get the best results. While this might be great when it comes to meeting deadlines, and goals, it becomes a bit challenging for a team when you’re working for a manager that doesn’t meet you half way. It becomes especially challenging if you’re managing an older group of employees because they’re more set in their ways of working. Some managers will figure out as they go along instead of sticking to a set management style. The best way is what produces the best results with your team and you.

2) Having Clear Goals and Objectives

Setting goals and objectives starts with top management and trickles down to the individual contributor. If your CEO doesn’t know what the business is about and what it’s supposed to achieve, the business has a strong chance to just dwindle and die. Once you know how much you’re going to grow this year, you can break it down to which department or team is going to contribute what and the figures you need from each person. This will help you figure out which areas you need to improve most and where your team needs to learn.

3) Feedback on Tasks and Processes

Every team needs tasks and processes to work with, some teams are forced to come up with their own work flows and structures, some are given clear tasks. Having an agreed upon process provides clear tasks, and the how of meeting those goals that you have. Effective leaders tend to provide the structure to a team that has clear tasks and the tools to measure those tasks. If they’re not meeting their individual goals you need to figure out what’s wrong either in the process or in the way a task is done. Your best individual contributors will tell you how to improve that so they perform better. Allowing your team to contribute gives them ownership and they will move things forward. However, if you’re not listening to your team, or your team is not motivated enough to tell you anything, you won’t be able to improve.

4) Hand holding Out of the Box

Different people from different educational backgrounds are used to a set of teaching and learning styles. I’ve seen that those who graduate out from education systems with rote learning tend to need help in out-of-the-box thinking. They might be great when it comes to routine tasks but not that helpful when it comes to brainstorming. You need to engage with them so that they learn other perspectives in a given problem. At the same time, those who always think out of the box tend to need some structure to stay focused.

5) Documentation

It’s no use training people and improving your business processes if you don’t have documentation. Even if you do it just at the team level, it’ll still be useful to the organization and you as a manager in the future. The little things a sales or marketing person does to get clients count in a big way, just like the way your customer care person deals with resolving a customer complaint. If a winning technique is not documented, it’ll be lost forever, to you, and your organization. Documentation also cuts down the learning curve for any new team member who has to quickly adjust and contribute to the processes you’re running. It serves as a reference for those who are already working and gives them the right place to add their contributions for improvements.

Photo by: Mark Brannan