Life Hacks for Inspiring the Team as a Project Manager
Employees follow managers, and if they decide to leave, they often leave managers, not their jobs. A team leader inspires and organizes individual contributors, and smart management is essential whether this is your own business or you are just responsible for making a certain department motivated and productive. Being a successful manager is not a nine to five job, it’s a way of life.
Start with managing yourself
Hiring smart people and organizing them is reasonable, however, it won’t work if you yourself are not competent enough, show up in the office later than your employees and consider micromanagement with watching over the shoulder a good idea. With a leader like this, even the best professionals quickly lose their initial enthusiasm. When you yourself set an example and are ready to guide and support others, your people show the best of them and learn from you daily. Here are a few tips for increasing your personal productivity:
1.Start every morning thinking about the experience you are going to live through today, about the appointments and the tasks you have. If you have any events, including family events and team meetings, plan them beforehand and set reminders. At the end of the day, remember what it was like, what impressed you, what were your achievements and the misfortunate events, and what are your next aspirations.
2.From time to time, come to work earlier to have the spare time when no one disturbs you and you can calmly deal with the tasks, check the progress of the employees and make assignments. Prepare daily, weekly and monthly plans and always start with the things that are your least favorite and most complex. After you’re done with them, all the rest will feel like a breeze.
3.Never stop learning and spur others to do the same. To gain the respect of your employees, you need to have a deep understanding of what everyone of them is responsible for, and be ready to guide them. Be the first one to unveil new technologies and if there is a budget for it, help your team to get additional training or education and to participate in industry events. Thus the employees will consider further development within the company the most attractive option. Create your personal career development plan and while sticking to it, make it flexible in order to improve it when your knowledge, skills and opportunities change.
“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” Stephen King
Create meaningful and goal-oriented communications
Making the working environment inspiring and comfortable is just as important as boosting productivity and organizing results-driven communication. Use the best communication and collaboration technologies to unite the team, make every member easily approachable and every document and every task easy to find. Modern teams use in-person communication, traditional emails and phone calls together with messengers, project managers and conferencing software. There are also solutions that unite a number of features for organizing the workflows of the team, like Slack, Skype, HipChat, Microsoft Teams, or VIPole.
Whichever tools you choose to connect your team, always stay involved. Feel the pulse of your team, when the people need inspiration, instructions, advice, fun, when someone needs a day off. Be a member of all chats, even if you don’t always have the time for reading them, and use every opportunity to talk to people personally. Developing superior communication skills would be useful for expressing your ideas in a convincing manner. Whether you hold a meeting, a videoconference, or you have a one-to-one conversation with an employee, make sure that you express your ideas clearly and the people understand what you want from them and why it is important. Your emotions will help the people to get the key ideas, and you will see the immediate feedback. If there is an important issue you need to discuss, meet personally, don’t make announcements in chats. Remember, that some of the best team members just turn off all notifications, and the flow of messages when the question is controversial will hardly lead to a reasoned solution.
If you need to make a call, schedule it first. This is a rule of etiquette in the time when everyone is always busy and constantly disturbed. This will allow your co-workers and partners to prepare a list of issues they need to discuss and to make the conversation more satisfying. After a call or a conference, send a short follow-up with the statements you’ve come to and make sure you understood each other clearly.
“Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.” Thomas A. Edison
Inspire, motivate and reward
Your employees should clearly understand where the company is going and how they are contributing to the overall success. Apart from the general vision, the people need to see their personal career development patterns. Given this, they will be motivated to collaborate and to constantly expand their competences and show the best of their talents.
Set clear goals, provide positive feedback and recognize achievements. Even if their daily responsibilities are mostly routine, your people need to see that their efforts lead to tangible results that matter for the success of the company. To increase the efficiency of the department or the whole team, offer merit-based rewards and promotions. Recognize exceptional achievements by speaking to the whole team about them and just thanking your employees for the job they have done. Use every opportunity to reward your people, and you will be rewarded with their loyalty and respect.
Remember, that money matter, but it is not all about money. Money are not the only reason that attracts people to work in your team. If they feel that they are making a change in your company, that they are constantly developing in a friendly and transparent atmosphere, then this job is more beneficial in the long run than a stressful business with a bossy manager, even with a higher salary. At the same time, make sure that all your employees get the money they deserve. “I did nothing today, still got paid” is not a principle your people might ever think about.
“Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work in hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus. “Alexander Graham Bell
Use effective delegation and collaboration
Handing off tasks and finding faults later is not management. Provide a thorough description of the result you want to see and guide them on the way, eliminating the shortcomings together. You can’t handle and control everything on your own, but you can explain the assignments and control the performance. To make delegation successful, first show how you do it, then do it together, then see how your team members do it. Gradually they’ll gain the necessary experience.
To be available for timely troubleshooting, make yourself visible and accessible, whether you are in the office or on the go. Stay calm, facilitate fast communications and direct the employees when they face any troubles. Always stand behind of them. Sometimes, people make wrong decisions, but the fault is not in them, together you can deal with any challenge. A good team manager is the one who is ready to share the success and lead to this success through the dark times.
Being a keen listener makes you a well-informed decision maker. Ask the employees what they think about the project and the problems you face and be ready to use their ideas. Ask open-ended questions to get more details. In this way, your people will feel that they are valued and they influence the way your company develops, they’re not just a gear with a minimum of functions in a large mechanism. «What do you think?» is a magic question that may change everything. It works in romantic relationships as well :)
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