Managing People – How To Get The

Best From Your Team

Everybody’s different
Possibly the most important initial step in
successful people management is to
realise that people are, indeed, different.
Whilst all professionals generally share
some common motivations, desires and
attributes, you will get the best out of
people if you treat them as individuals.
Management techniques that work with
one professional may not work with
another, so take time to get to know your
team well, and you’ll soon pick up on
individual characteristics that can help
you manage them better.
Set the standard
Good management techniques are borne
out of mutual respect and appreciation
between all parties, so all management
should begin by the manager setting a
standard that he or she would expect
from others. Employees can quickly lose
respect for a manager who doesn’t
display the abilities or commitment to
undertake tasks that they themselves are
required to do. If you want people to
work long, focused hours and take pride
in their work, then ideally you should
demonstrate that you have these
capabilities too, and are leading from the
front.
Invest in good relations
It sounds obvious, but being a good
manager of people is not merely about
making successful demands of them.
There are a few tried and tested ways of
ensuring that your team performs well,
but arguably the best way of achieving
this is to invest in each personal
relationship, going out of your way to do
things purely for the benefit of the team
and its individuals. If you don’t manage
to do this, there is a danger that your
team will solely associate you with
requests for work, and this may create a
negative psychology in the very people
that you are trying to manage.
Careful critiques
Your evaluation and feedback of the
work produced by your colleagues is one
of the key areas by which you can either
greatly increase loyalty, performance and
respect, or greatly diminish it. Human
beings hate to be criticised, and will
generally go on the defensive when
placed in this position, so choose your
words carefully if you want to enthuse
rather than deflate.
A helping hand
Successful managers have a tendency to
be able to display empathy for a
colleague’s challenges, and in many
cases are in a position to offer proactive
help and support. This is an essential part
of management, as people generally
respond well to professional relationships
where the other party seems to be doing
things for them. Most employees will
gladly undertake tasks if they feel that
management is looking out for their own
personal interests.
Communication is king
Good communication is vital to good
management techniques, and it is
therefore essential that you establish a
line of regular communication that suits
both you and your team. Generally
speaking, you should aim to set aside
some dedicated time to communicating
management news to the team, and
allowing them to update you on their
projects at least once a week. Sessions
like this encourage team spirit, a feeling
of togetherness and can be a highly
effective way of identifying challenges
and celebrating successes in a timely
manner.
Get people to arrive at your
conclusions
Instead of being a domineering manager
who insists that things are done
exclusively your way, it can often be
helpful to use a little reverse psychology
when managing people. If your approach
is strictly to dictate, you may well
encounter resistance, although if you set
out your reasons for wanting something
done a particular way, and encourage the
buy in of your team, they will be much
more willing to engage. Better still,
create an open discussion where your
team proactively suggest the route that
you had initially intended. In this way,
you can praise staff for their initiative
whilst also getting things done the way
you want them.
Create your own rules
Managing people successfully is a
dynamic, evolving and highly personal
process, with a wide variety of methods
and styles that you could employ. A good
manager, who gets the best results, will
often be learning about their own skills in
tandem with their team, creating a
healthy and productive relationship all
round.

How to Get the Best Performance

From Team Members
by Carol Deeb, Demand Media
Placing a group of experienced
employees together does not guarantee
the success of a team. Each member must
perform at a high-enough level to ensure
that his contribution is an integral part of
completing the project. Team leaders or
supervisors have the task of motivating
members to work toward a common goal
and maintain positive outlooks about the
project and the company. If deadlines are
usually short, requiring high energy
levels from the team, your staff risks
burning out. To get the best performance
from team members, work to help
maintain momentum until all required
tasks are completed.
Step 1
Conduct a meeting with your team as
soon as it forms and explain the mission
of the company and why your
department or team is important to
realizing the goals. Tell the members
why they were chosen to fulfill the duties
of the project.
Step 2
Include your team in planning the
activities to meet deadlines. Allow each
member to determine their duties that
lead to the end result. Write down
performance plans and reassess regularly
to ensure compliance.
Related Reading: How to Build Team
Members Around You
Step 3
Encourage employees who do not
perform at a high level to take
responsibility for their work and help
keep the team moving forward. Let the
laggard members know that their tasks
are important and that other workers rely
on them. Remind them about the
characteristics they possess that led you
to choose them for the team.
Step 4
Organize brainstorming sessions with
your team to discover more efficient
avenues for task completion. This
exercise also shows that you respect your
team members' ideas and will listen when
approached about new solutions to output
delays.
Step 5
Allow team members to resolve conflict
among themselves, with you as a guide.
Ensure that each one respects the other
person's idea and position, but make it
clear that they must do what's best for the
group and the company. Teaching your
staff how to place their personal conflicts
aside to advance the goals of the team
helps them learn how to avoid behavior
that slows down progress so they can
perform at their best together.
Step 6
Reward employees for meeting interim
deadlines and completing portions of the
larger project. A pizza lunch in the
workplace or a half-day off with pay
serves to refresh and motivate the team.
If your budget allows, organize a morale
booster that includes a day of activities
and bonding away from the office to
encourage your team members to
perform efficiently as a team.
6 Ways to Get the Best Out of Your
Team
by Toni Ridgaway
Draw the best work out of your people
by leading yourself and building
relationships.
Steven Liparoto, in his leadership guide,
“How to Draw the Best Out of Your
People” offers the six leadership
practices that make the most of your
team members.
1. Lead Yourself. Self-discipline must
be “job one” if you are to draw out the
best in others. Know your natural talents,
your limits, your goals and values.
2. Know Your People. Discover what
each person is best at and capitalize on
those gifts, talents and abilities. Do not
attempt to “fix” their weaknesses but find
ways to manage around them.
3. Build Trust With Them. Building
trusting relationships with your team
members will encourage full
commitment from them. An absence of
trust leads to a fear of conflict, avoidance
of accountability and eventual inattention
to results.
4. Coach Them. Provide the resources,
encouragement, guidance and correction
needed so your people can excel and
achieve winning results. Address the
needs of the whole person: heart, body,
mind and spirit.
5. Release Them. Continual checking up
on your team members warns of a lack of
trust and damages your credibility. When
you permit your team members to
function autonomously with less over-
the-shoulder monitoring, they are
“released” to exercise their own
judgment about achieving results. This
freedom creates a sense of ownership,
accomplishment and responsibility.
Define your goals and results clearly,
then be approachable and recognize
positive contributions.
6. Have Fun With Them. Intentionally
create a satisfying, joy-filled workplace
by playing fair, encouraging friendships,
offering challenging work, and
reminding the team that the work is
worthwhile. When you give people the
opportunity to get together and laugh, it
creates a strong sense of camaraderie,
solidarity and team orientation

12 Simple Things A Leader Can Do

To Build A Phenomenal Team
1. Don’t Settle for Mediocre: It’s not
fun to fire people, so employers often
settle for the first so-so person they hire.
However, this practice can lead to
weaknesses within a team. Once you
realize a member of the team is
performing at a mediocre level, call him
out, but more importantly, support him to
do better. If there’s no improvement, it’s
time to find a new rock star for your
team.
2. Be a Thought Leader: Top talent is
too good to work for middling companies
with weak brands. The more you can
position yourself as an authority in your
industry, the more talent will naturally be
attracted to your business. I try to
contribute to at least two publications
each month to share my expertise with
others, and those articles show up when
potential hires research my company.
3. Trust is Crucial: A team member can
be highly intelligent and a hard worker,
but if you can’t trust that person, it’s time
to let him go. If you keep that person on,
you’ll have a bigger problem to deal with
when disaster strikes. Your daily
operations could take a big hit if you
retain employees you can’t trust.
4. Forget the Money… at First: Hire a
person whose main motivation is to build
a team, or someone who has a passion for
your business in general. Money is
extremely important, but when it’s the
main thing on someone’s mind, it can be
a distraction. It’s important for your
employees to care about the success of
your business, and if all they see are
dollar signs, their hearts may not be in it.
5. Personal Lives are Important:
Recognize that your team members have
personal lives. It’s easy to take small
steps to celebrate birthdays, weddings, or
other significant moments in their lives.
If you see an opportunity to help a team
member outside of work, it pays to take
it. It helps build loyalty with your
employees, and they tend to pay it
forward with other team members.
6. Maintain Systematic Processes:
Once you’ve achieved success in a
certain area, create a process that mimics
that success over and over. A great read
on this topic is “The Checklist
Manifesto.” In it, a hospital created
checklists to create a systematic process
for maintaining good health in the
building, and they decreased infections
by 66%. Checklists increase the
effectiveness – and success – of a team.
7. Diversity Brings Innovation: There’s
a reason diversity is a common topic
among employers. To build a great team,
you need diverse thinkers. A variety of
races, ages, and sexes can help a team
think outside the box and hit problems
from many different angles. Plus, it
makes your office a more interesting
place to work.
8. It’s Okay to Be Friends: In most
offices, you’ll spend more time with your
coworkers than you do with your family.
Being friends and getting along not only
increases performance, it also leads to a
great work environment. As long as you
keep a goal-oriented focus and hold
people accountable, you shouldn’t be
scared of a team that’s made up of your
friends.
9. Play to People’s Strengths: Find out
what your employees are great at, but
don’t forget about their weaknesses.
Each team member should be spending
time doing what he or she does best, but
you should recognize weaknesses and
help your employees improve. Don’t
miss out on creating an all-around rock
star employee just because he really
“kills it” at one thing.
10. Great Teams Read Together:
Leaders are readers, so if you’re going to
create leaders within the team, they
should consistently read. We’re always
sharing articles and books among our
team. It keeps us on top of recent trends
and helps stimulate strategic thoughts.
11. Invest in Your First Five Hires:
The more time you invest in training
your first five hires, the less time you
have to spend training the ones who join
the company later. Make it a point to set
aside time with each member to support
him or her so everyone is prepared to
show that same support to new
employees as your company grows.
12. Give Recognition: Recognize people
when they do something extraordinary. It
not only gives people a sense of
accomplishment, it inspires others to
make efforts to go above and beyond
their normal duties as well. We give a
Championship Belt to a team member
each week to recognize that person for
doing something incredible. Even small
efforts can make your employees feel
appreciated and inspire them to do even
more.
It takes time and effort to put together a
dream team, but using the above
strategies, I’ve managed to build an
amazing group of employees I wouldn’t
trade for anybody out there.
5 Unexpected Ideas to Get the Best
Out of Your Team
Go beyond the management basics and
implement these ideas to become a truly
great leader.
1. Take a leap of faith
The surest way to bring out the best in
your team is to believe the best of them.
That means starting with the assumption
that they're going to rock every
assignment, even if there's no evidence
yet to support that optimism.
It might be scary, but “giving teammates
license they haven't previously had or
giving them a task they haven't proven
they can do yet,” is essential according to
Ravilochan. “You want people who
punch above their weight class on your
team anyway. That means trusting them
with things you don't know they can do
yet, reserving judgment, and then giving
them honest feedback,” he explains.
2. Tap into everyone's knowledge
In a fair world, who we listen to would
be based on who had the most relevant
information. In the real world, it's often
the loudest person who dominates a
discussion, not the most knowledgable.
Needless to say this stifling of quieter
(but more expert) contributors can be
pretty discouraging for a team.
Recent research offers a suggestion to
help avoid this problem, bringing out the
best in your team no matter their comfort
level with shouting over loudmouths.
“Early in a task, team members should be
encouraged to discuss the relevant
knowledge each brings to the table. In a
series of lab experiments, groups that
underwent this intervention outperformed
other groups,” the study authors wrote on
the HBR blogs. More details on exactly
how to accomplish this in the post.
3. Separate idea generation and idea
evaluation
From the perspective of an individual
contributor, among the most deflating
experiences in the world is getting
yourself excited about a new idea only to
have it inexplicable ignored.
Management's perspective is more
complicated, however. You want to
empower your team to innovate, but on
the other hand, you also need to
rigorously evaluate new ideas. How do
you balance the need to encourage
creativity with the need to be picky about
which ideas you implement?
Writing on Lifehack, executive coach
Ricky Nowak offers some advice. “Don't
make the common mistake of mixing
idea generation and idea evaluation,” she
says. At the idea generation stage, there
are no bad ideas and quantity is more
important than quantity. Idea evaluation
“focuses on working with the pool of
generated ideas and evaluating their
positives and negatives, trying to figure
out if an idea is feasible.” Keep these
stages apart or risk sinking your team's
enthusiasm for innovation.
Another idea to accomplish the same
goal? Stanford GSB professor Jonathan
Bender suggests “a formal rubric, or
scoring system, where their ideas are
graded on various dimensions, such as
technical merit and market potential.”
This keeps things objective and
impersonal while offering actionable
feedback.
4. Work yourself out of a job
Nearly every expert agrees that to bring
out the best in your people, you need to
help them grow in their jobs and develop
new skills. Sometimes that's scary as it
means, essentially, training your team to
do parts of your own job, or alternately,
letting them learn to do things way
beyond your own abilities. Embrace this
reality even if it makes you nervous,
argues one article on the subject from
London Business School.
“One useful way of approaching a
management job is to imagine that the
role won't exist in, say, two years' time
and that your job is to train everyone so
that they can do your job as well as their
own. Doing that encourages you to hire
and promote the best people. It forces
you to question why you do certain
things at all, and it inspires you to
delegate many of your tasks to the people
working for you,” it explains.

5. Banish your biases

Think you're free of unconscious
preferences and irrational pet peeves?
Think again. Everyone has them and left
unexamined they can be highly de-
motivating for your team. The trick
according to Forbes contributor Bruce
Kasanoff is to take the time to understand
(and correct for) your own biases.
“Each of us has certain attitudes and
biases that prevent us from seeing the
truth. The better we understand them, the
better we can make adjustments. For
example, if you tend to be a planner, you
might think that an employee behaves
rashly because she invests little time in
planning; but the reality may be that she
is better than you at thinking or her feet,”
he writes.

How to Build a Winning Team

By Jack And Suzy Welch
FIRST, the leaders of winning teams
always—always—let their people
know where they stand.
We’re not talking about “Good job,
Sally,” or “Thanks for your hard work,
Tom.” Effective leaders let their people
know whether they are star performers
without whom the organization would
writhe in agony or whether they should
be thinking seriously about finding
another job.
Amazingly—to us, at least—the habit of
continuously evaluating each team
member is a rare and wondrous thing.
Sure, leaders evaluate their people all the
time—but they too seldom share those
observations with the team members
themselves. In the silence, stars become
disaffected and leave seeking more
appreciation, either in the soul or the
wallet, or both. Meanwhile, the solid
center wanders around in undirected
ignorance, and the real underperformers
drive their teammates crazy because
others must carry their load (and no one
upstairs ever seems to do anything about
it).
By contrast, on winning teams, leaders
spend the vast majority of their time
lavishing love on top performers. Yes,
love: rewarding them for every
contribution, building their self-
confidence so they have the guts to take
on even greater challenges, and holding
them up as a role model for others on the
team. Similarly, on winning teams,
leaders devote a lot of energy to middling
performers, relentlessly coaching. And as
for the do-nothings: leaders face into
these individuals with a sense of reality,
spending only the time to help them put
together a résumé and find a job where
they will be more successful.
Unfortunately, in most organizations,
managers spend an inordinate amount of
time working around their worst people,
counseling their aggrieved co-workers
and rearranging work to accommodate
their incompetence. They also spend a lot
of hours fretting over how they can
possibly break it to their underperformers
that they’re terrible at their jobs without
hurting their feelings. It’s all backward.
Rather than hurting their feelings, you’re
doing your underperformers a favor if
you let them know they need to go, and
the sooner the better, before they have to
look for work in a recession. After all,
who were the first employees to be cut in
2008 or 2009? You guessed it: mainly
those who should have been set out on
new paths years earlier.
SECOND, winning teams know the
game plan.
There’s never been a Super Bowl team
that charged the field thinking, We’ll
figure this out as it goes along and see
what happens. And there will never be a
winning business team that lacks a clear
sense of how the competition thinks and
fights—and how it’s going to think and
fight better. Nor has there ever been a
winning team that didn’t believe that
winning would make life much, much
better in very real ways.
Don’t get us wrong. We’re not huge fans
of strategic planning as it is commonly
taught in business school, nor as it is
practiced in too many companies.
Lengthy reports about strategy from
headquarters or consultants—in
particular, those that involve PowerPoint
slides—frankly scare us. They usually
claim to predict the future in a way that
no one can anymore, and they’re
ridiculously expensive to boot. No, in
today’s global market, strategy means
picking a general direction and executing
like hell. And that’s what winning teams
do.
Here’s the catch. Most leaders explain
the game plan in mushy, vague terms.
“We need to gain market share. That’s
going to mean beating Acme Widgets,”
they might say. “Everybody’s quota is
going to be doubled, and we’re
reorganizing so that everyone is reporting
to someone new. Change is hard, but it’s
necessary. Go get ’em.”
Ready, forward—what?
On winning teams, leaders infuse their
people with crazy-positive enthusiasm
about what winning will look like for the
company and, more important (as it’s
often forgotten), for them as individuals.
“Look, Acme’s killing us,” they might
say. “Their on-time delivering makes us
look like we’re driving horses and
buggies around here. But we can beat
them by coming up with a better idea for
efficiency every single day. And when
that happens, your life is going to change
and everything is going to get better. Our
company will start to grow again; you’ll
have more job security and a chance for
advancement. Even though we’re going
to enter into a long, hard slog of change
ahead, at the other end of it you’ll be
smarter, richer, and your life will be
more exciting.”
Clarity. Direction. Outcome.
Ready, forward, charge.
THIRD, winning teams are honest.
Or let us be more precise. On every
single winning team, you will discover
that the leader is candid; he rewards
everyone else who is candid, and outs the
people who aren’t candid. Oh, sure, there
are exceptions. But in time, they always
backfire. Because when people don’t say
what they mean, play politics, or
withhold their ideas, everything gets
screwed up. Resentments accumulate.
Cliques form. Good people leave. Work
slows down.
By contrast, the simple truth is that
candor breeds trust. And when a team is
infused with trust, people play to their
better angels. They share ideas freely.
They help their colleagues when they’re
stuck and need an insight. What they do
every day then becomes about the
group’s success, not their own. They’re
not worried about not getting the credit
for some big win; they know a teammate
will say something like, “Hey, don’t
thank me. Cary was the one with the
eureka moment that set the whole thing
in motion.” And Cary will say, “Thanks.
I may have had the idea, but you
executed.”
The candor-trust connection has another
benefit: it promotes an environment of
risk-taking. Who wants to try something
new if they sense they’ll get a stick in the
eye (or worse) should they fail? Leaders
of winning teams encourage their people
to take on huge challenges and let them
know that they’re safe no matter what
happens. And then they make good on
their word.
Only in such environments will people
be bold. And only bold teams win.
FOURTH, and finally, winning teams
celebrate.
No idea we talk about gives people hives
more than this one. Maybe it has
something to do with the recession—
“How can you party in times of
austerity?”—but people balked even
before the economy went south.
Most leaders don’t understand the tight
link between celebrating small successes
along the way and achieving the big one
at the end. But it’s irrefutable. Teams that
get pizza when they land a new client, or
go on trips when they hit a sales
milestone, or otherwise whoop it up
every time something good happens
create a delicious dynamic. They teach
people what it feels like to win, which is,
well, a very good feeling. It makes
people want to win more. In fact, they
never want the feeling to go away. So
they do everything to keep winning.
We would call it magic, except there’s
nothing mysterious about it. Like all four
of our maxims here, the only mystery
about winning teams, really, is why there
aren’t more of them.