The 10 pillars of Team Management

1. Choose the right players

Every single team member should first align with your business culture. Having the most skilled people in your team doesn’t matter if your team doesn’t align properly to your mission. So in order to find the right people it is a matter of finding in each other’s shared values and  interests. 

It all starts right from the job opportunity post. You have to write it very carefully as a compelling message coded to be identified and understood by real peers, someone who can find it timely and wants so bad to get in your team so that he/she stands out from the crowd. 

As an employer you want some kindle fire, someone who reads you between the lines, and you can relate to his/her reactions to each of your messages and emotions. Employers building a team are not only looking for coworkers with the required set of skills, they're looking to build a family or a community within their workspace. Business founders trust their team and should know they’re going to look after his project as their own.   

Finding and selecting your team members is a lot about communication through different means before meeting each other in person. Two months ago, reading an article regarding job interviews, the journalist stated that a job interview was two liars facing each other, one trying to sell himself as the best element to join the enterprise, and the recruiter as the head hunter for the top choice appealing enterprise. 

At Planless, we rather stay natural and straightforward. We believe skills and knowledge can be acquired in time and cultivated with patience and vocation. We value people’s motivation and disposition. Creativity and joy of living life is our motto. Someone focused on negativity and difficult times can’t be well received for the long term. Complicated opinions, negative or opposite systematic positioning, to criticize rather than construct is a drag. If someone doesn’t add a positive attitude he’s going to subtract positive momentum and energy. So be careful picking your colleagues, leaders, and subalterns. 

The most pragmatic practice spread through the labor world is the trial period of ninety days contract to see if you want to further engage with a particular employee. For technically demanding positions, a testing period might be interesting and the best way to go. But make sure to make the most out of it by properly onboarding and training people in these first days. This period is not only for the employer but also for the employee. Each other will discover if there is a fit or not. 

People like referencing teammates when they feel their collaboration was productive. A great leader will always seek options to mentored coworkers and will understand that life circumstances might take them away. They should be thankful and glad to see them go, staying positive and happy to inject “new blood on their team” if required. 

Everybody appreciates a positive evaluation, a referral, or any given recognition for that matter; we all like to please and belong to greater structures, we’re social animals. And we like to think of ourselves as a productive part of the system. So don’t be afraid to ask for mentoring and referrals, take every observation as an opportunity to change your glasses and see things from another perspective and enriching point of view.

Personality tests are human asset assessments quite well developed, that we are very glad they exist. We are happy to unveil our secret and share a website we believe if every individual on the planet takes, a lot of issues and conflicts in the world could be avoided. 

A powerful tool not to take lightly crystalknows.com. Is a personality assessment that can be used to better understand an interlocutor in order to build a team, sell a given product, or test for recruitment.   

2. Collaboration is key

Collaboration is key. So having the right tools to collaborate, having a great culture of feedback, transparency, and alignment is key for a good teams’ collaboration.

People need the right tools to perform a good job but to thrive in a company they need to be aligned on the culture and most importantly in the values the company he or she works for. 

Feedback, transparency, and alignment are the keys to success in every team. 

Make sure to have a clear communication and collaboration process in place so that everybody uses the same channels and information doesn’t get lost.

The commitment to the enterprise depends on the latest, the alignment to his/her values, and the motivation is more related to the workplace environment and vibe… 

Transparency, constructive criticism, and positive attitude are the cherished words to pass honest and compelling messages through the enterprise staff so they can replicate the language elements and cultural traits creating a compelling real, and ever-evolving brand personality reflecting their deepest beliefs about life and work applied philosophy.

Make sure everybody is aligned and working towards the same goals will ensure you path the road to success.



3. People are people so… 

Onboarding any team member passes through a very intensive period of communication first and the main objective of the communication is to raise awareness and engagement. If the latter objective is not attained your fresh new team member will unengage immediately. 

Make sure to have open communication with every team member. When communication is broken, things fall apart. Make sure that transparent communication is in place at any time and don’t take it for granted. We often see managers thinking people are straightforward with them as it’s not the case.

Relationships get nurtured through dialog, conversations lead to closeness and alignment. You understand people a word at a time, you get to better read the intentions behind each phrase your teammates pronounce, and little you understand each other’s priorities and values. This way you get to understand each other’s triggers and motivations behind their work and project outcomes. Make sure to acknowledge good work. We often forget about it and are most frequently pointing out things that are wrong and not praising good work.

Also, be sure to delegate work. Trust others to do a good job instead of keeping everything on your shoulders just because it would be done better and faster. Delegation is the first step of education that is often overseen.

Lastly, it’s crucial to manage conflicts. Conflicts arise when expectations don’t attain the objectives, either personal, professional, and collaborative. One or a mix of the expectations in any or a combination of the different levels last mentioned will likely compromise the commitment of the particular team member. 

4. Spread work wisely

Any enterprise has a limited capacity to perform any project. Managers have to carefully allocate the resources and make adjustments to better adapt to any given situation. 

Meetings are the traditional means to make people understand the scarcity and real potential of their capacity. A strategic allocation of these limited resources has to produce the best possible outcome of any productive project. 

Lessons have to be taken from good and bad experiences so the knowledge compendium gets richer every day. 

Sharing knowledge, open dialog, and open communication about the condition in which we’re looking to thrive is the key to sharing what you felt and what you learned to form any given experience to call for the necessary adjustments. 

Do we need better tools? Are we not exploding all the capacities of an already paid tool? Share tips, blinks, and any silly idea might be the seed of something greater to achieve in a focus group or collaborative teamwork.   

There are tools today that will help you better manage people’s workload on autopilot (or almost). Make sure to check out Planless.io for that.

5. Be a Chief of Happiness Officer

A company’s culture is based on the values it defines as its core priority of existence.. 

WHY we care to add value and contribute to society offering a determined product and service around this product. 

HOW you offer this service is more eloquent as the interpretation of these values, when aligned in a business context all coworkers have a clear understanding to evaluate decisions and take action without overthinking their decisions.

Performing some climate measuring shows that you care about the happiness and commitment your team members are feeling towards the company.

Company workers need to be extra committed, get rid of distractions, and program themselves to concentrate on their tasks.

Everyone needs to find their IKIGAI values, skills, and life. Finding purpose is at the center of it.

Promote an ever-evolving culture satisfying every curiosity and learning needs, staying more than three years in the same work post leads to stagnation. You need to develop every person’s skills in order to push forward their growth and the company’s performance.

Also, make sure that you not only work towards professional goals to manage your team’s happiness. Their personal goals are often more important and you can also help them achieve them by giving them the right working conditions. 

6. Identification vs. Commitment 

Top vs. poor performers is a matter of motivation and commitment. Make sure to have them well-identified and help top performers stay motivated while helping poor performers growing to the upper tier. 

A crucial part of your company should be a culture of respect. Respect for others, their personality, their time, and their ways of being and doing things. Without respect, it’s the beginning of the end. Lacking some basic education rules can turn out in a complicated, unhappy working environment.

Bureaucracy is a point to watch for. It leads to overthinking and slows down processes nowadays. It was useful to keep a paper trace of every single aspect within a project. Now we’ve become much more flexible and have less patience to wait for the “tampon” to keep structures as lean as possible and processes as transparent as they might be. 

Make sure also to reward people as it motivates individuals to outperform their projects and seek better performance at every opportunity. Be clear on what initiatives can be praised and permitted to change moving towards value addition. This means, you may like to reward your communication team if the campaign performance reaches beyond expectations and under budgeting; but ( and there should always be BUTs ) the campaign most always aligns with the company’s culture and set of values, otherwise it won’t be coherent and the astonishing results are derivative.   

Set goals and expectations, both on a personal and team level. This would push you to go further on your particular performance and the groups’ teamwork outcome. 

Involve also people in the decision making processes, dare to make propositions even if some times are off your scope and level of understanding, none appreciates a follower, we search for leaders in every single position.

Follow up, and hold people to their word. None appreciates a handsome speaker who cannot deliver their promise. 

7. Cultivate Transparency 

Not an easy task, but giving everybody full access to everything and being totally open and transparent within the company has huge benefits.

Sharing information would only lead to better decision-making. Two heads think better than one. Company knowledge should be preached like gospel so everyone can learn from past experiences and communication should be open and respectful. If everyone feels comfortable expressing their state of mind things would run smoothly. 

Objective-driven and Key-results evaluations are fundamental to let people see how they are performing. These specific measures have to be well stated and understood for use to track goal achievements. And will be precious indicators for decision making.

Once more on decision making. It is crucial to involve all people that can be impacted by a decision in taking it. If not possible, let them at least express their opinions so you can make the best decision at then end. And more importantly, be transparent on the reasons for decisions. If people understand why, questioning won’t challenge internal mood. 

8. Skills, skills, skills

Each individual arrives in a working position packed with a set of skills and it is our duty to discover which are the soft ones and the knowledge acquired along with experience, education, and hard skills practice. 

There are some psychometric tools to test not only personality but also come behavioral traits.

It is important to constantly motivate the team members to develop in their domain in order to acquire new skills that can be placed into practice or shared with other team members, hard skills, new skills, and training must be a natural unfolding of each team member’s personality.

Give room for people to explore and enlarge their knowledge and responsibilities. Be attentive to see the way each one better understands the issues, some of us are more visual, others, are more auditive and happy few are kinestic.  

Skill assessments are another way to test the capacity and possible abilities of each individual and the areas he can mentor new arrivals on the team. Do them regularly and keep track of evolution.

9. Unfolding everyone’s expertise

Progress can, and should continuously be measured to keep people motivated and on track to develop their own skills following their vocation. 

The assessments can be auto-applied or by the supervisor. In my case, the supervision assessment represents less importance because my pointer in life is no validation. People seeking recognition or social accreditation might value the opinion of others higher than I do. Personality plays an important role, of course, and psychology has moved leaps forward in lightening this subject matter. I wish every business had an organizational psychology value budget on their business plan.

Keep training people. Training is great when the employee can forecast some of his/her’s limitations to develop his/her’s working position. If someone feels sealed or restrained, it means he/she should move on to another position where they have no domain of the task and situation. 

Taking people out of their comfort zone is not to make them miserable, it is to motivate them to acquire a new set of skills and keep them curious about how they can make things better a task at the time.

Mentoring is a great way to discover the secret talents and vocation of your coworkers and even can work in a two-way sense, meaning everyone has something to teach each other.    

But overall, make sure to measure progress. Have processes in place to make sure that you can easily acknowledge if someone made progress, how, and why.

10. Training / personal development 

Everyone has needs, goals, and expectations that are going to be faced and confronted in the company’s culture. You have to acquire in a very careful way the values of the enterprise, the business, and those of your own collaborations because soon you will start monetizing each other’s behaviors and this will lead to a certain ever-evolving organizational climate… the feeling of the life, ambiance and vibe within the working space.

We should always wear our empathetic shoes so we can observe from our interlocutor’s point of view, try to see life through his eyes and prism so you can understand all the colors ( i.e. emotions ) he reflects on the gaze. Yup, the shine of the eyes is more eloquent than the muscle of the tongue, you will soon be able to learn and quickly assess when someone is talking BS or real stuff!

The learning continuum should be nurtured and shared for everybody to anyone interested in pitching in.... So, be kind, rewind and reread the things you thought were the most interesting in this article, and comment below or send us a short message to hello@planless.io we would be very pleased to read you, understand, and nurture both our curiosities.

Maintain a learning culture and make sure to have each individual learning with their preferred ways of learning. We all learn in different ways, so you don’t necessarily need to have the same type of training for everyone.

Encourage self-learning and make sure to have everybody in the company onboard and teaching their skills to others. 

Learning from example and from others is often the fastest way forward. 

CONCLUSION

People management is about the game of the identification process, if you truly understand and care about the company and its culture, half the way to a great career path, and personal development is present. 

Mission statements and company’s vision are no HR BS, is the heart and soul of the business founder’s dream and if you don't believe it is possible to achieve his/her goals and truly align to his/her values, you either challenge those or let the chief be and walk out. You’re going to be a drag… so be a Queen elsewhere.

Read and write very carefully any job description. Don't prepare much for your interviews, all those HR tips for job-seeking believe me total crap, don't buy it, just be your most natural self possible during the interview. 

And yes, fake it until you make it, but be true to your values and beliefs, you’re going to be tested for your skills and even personality. Most of the time, in my experience, people are searching for someone to work with and spend a lot of time with. Skills can be developed, the personality of an adult is rather difficult to change.  

And remember, your business is nothing without people. So care about them and they will care about your business.