Important habits for successful employee management
You know what it takes to be an effective leader, you just need to put this into practice! To do this, try to grasp the important habits below and turn them into part of your daily routine. This will ensure that you’re successfully managing your team and making a great contribution to the business.
Delegate well
There is nothing worse than a micromanager. Not only will your team find it irritating, but it shows that you don’t trust them to manage and complete their work to a high enough standard, by the deadline. Plus, it will take up your time and distract you from your own workload.
As such, part of effective management is being able to delegate well. This means understanding each individual team member and where their strengths and weaknesses lie. This will help you to get into the habit of assigning projects or tasks to those you think will achieve the best results.
Set goals
Setting goals is crucial to ensure everyone in the team is getting the most from their role, and working at maximum productivity. You can work with each individual to find out what they want to achieve, how they can reach their goals and how this will contribute towards the business as a whole. Encourage them to set their own goals, but ensure you OK these and support them with action plans that will allow them to achieve their aims.
But setting goals doesn’t just extend as far as your team. It can be helpful to set yourself goals as well, these might even be directly related to the targets you’ve set with your staff. These will help to ensure you’re always striving for results, supporting your team and developing your own career.
Reward good work
In order to successfully manage your team, you need to understand the importance of recognition and reward. No one wants to feel undervalued or that their hard work is going unnoticed, therefore you need to put incentive and reward schemes in place to keep your team motivated and driven. Recognizing the work your employees are doing will keep them striving to hit targets, increase revenue and reach their goals.
And these schemes don’t have to come at a huge expense to the company. You might choose an employee of the week, month, year etc. but it’s also about dropping them an email or stopping by their desk every now and then to say ‘well done’. Particularly if they’ve just worked on a huge project or landed a particularly big client. For your team, it’s not always about gifts or monetized incentives (although these do help!), but it’s about having their efforts acknowledged.
Be a good teacher
The best managers aren’t those who bark orders or take over to correct the mistakes of their employees. They are the ones who support and teach their staff; who guide them to success. If you can see an individual is struggling with a task or a deadline, work with them to understand what the problem is and help them to overcome it.
Being a good teacher is also about leading by example. Behave how you would want your staff to behave. That doesn’t just have to mean professionalism and sticking by the rules. It means teaching them to support one another, to encourage their peers and assess problems in order to find the best solution.
Promote work-life balance
And last, but certainly not least, promoting good work-life balance is crucial for effective employee management. If your staff are overly keen to impress or falling behind on work, resulting in them putting in too much overtime, it’s vital that you explain that this is not the way.
Overworked staff will eventually burn out, which is bad news for both them and the business. It’s another case of leading by example. Encourage employees to leave work at a reasonable time each day and to not access emails or make work calls out of hours. This is the sign of a truly great manager.
Are you ready to adopt these important habits?
Understanding the skills you need to be a good leader is one thing, but turning these into habits you do almost instinctively is what makes for successful employee management.