Top 10 Management Techniques to Effectively Supervise Your Team

The proper management strategy guarantees employee satisfaction and productivity. It also affects a business’s profit margin.

Managers have to employ unique methods to bring out the best in their teams since every person is different. Management at the personal level is often required to make a teamwork as a unit. This is where leadership quality is critical in terms of management techniques.

Traditional performance reviews are not sufficient to increase employee motivation. Gallup research found that only 14% of employees strongly agree that these reviews inspire them to improve.

As such, it’s crucial to use proven strategies that can keep your team motivated and ever-ready to give you their best. In this article, we have put together ten management techniques that will help you effectively supervise your team.

Why Should You Avoid Using Poor Management Strategies?

It’s common knowledge that every employee’s performance has a telling effect on their team’s productivity. This, in turn, goes on to hurt or help the company at large. After all, you’re as strong as your weakest link.

It shows that poor management techniques can slow down your company’s growth and sink you into the mud of debt or total closure. Moreover, since bad management breeds disillusioned workers, people will put in half-hearted efforts. Of course, that’s not good for your downline.

If you have a good product or service but keep suffering losses, you should take a closer look at your employees’ satisfaction. Your management techniques could be the problem. However, that doesn’t necessarily spell the end because you can still adjust your strategies.

Even if you implement the model to avoid micromanagement, you may face situations where employees are wasting time with a low level of initiative and involvement in the work process. This may result in wasting time on websites not related to work, low activity, and prolonged time frames for tasks.

By using time tracking and employee monitoring software like Traqq, you can ensure that employees are involved and effective.

Understanding Management Techniques

Before we dive right into it, let’s have a good understanding of what management techniques are. Let’s discuss the factors that determine management strategies and the various types of leadership associated with these techniques.

Managers employ management strategies to create a conducive and constructive team environment for achieving organizational goals. These techniques are also used to supervise and guide teams for enhanced performance.

Factors that determine management styles include:

1. Temperaments of team members
2. Employee strength
3. Employee expertise
4. The industry
5.  Aims of a particular project and production goals
6. The company’s culture

Different Styles of Management

Management styles vary from leader to leader. Each manager picks a method according to their personality and team makeup. Let’s cover the different styles one by one.

Democratic Team Leadership style

The Democratic Team Leadership style encourages team members to work more efficiently by emulating their supervisors. In addition, it fosters participation across the board. The team leader does not stand, watch, and bark out orders. They also join the team and get their hands dirty. What’s more, they involve the team in critical decision-making exercises.

The Authoritative Manager

Next is the authoritative leader. This kind of manager is firm in their approach to team members. When a team lacks direction, you need an authoritative leader to get everyone back on track. While they know when to use the stick approach, they can also leverage their charisma to get everyone firing on all cylinders again. 

The Coach

Managers can also take up roles as coaches when the need arises. As a coach, they are interested and invested in every team member’s career development. Employees supervised by such managers have a better outlook on their futures and are motivated to give their best as a result. This means better teamwork, less need for supervision, and a generally positive work atmosphere. 

The Affiliative Manager

The Affiliative style of management is also effective. They manage by unifying the employees. When everyone is in harmony, team performance increases.

Management vs Leadership

While management and leadership have overlapping functions, one shouldn’t be confused with the other. Managers are known for their organizational, planning, and logistics skills. On the other hand, leaders are those who can inspire and motivate others.

While these two terms differ, a manager can also be a leader. In fact, it’s a great advantage to have leadership qualities and managerial expertise.

10 Management Techniques for Better Team Supervision

Now, here are the best management strategies you can employ to get the best out of your team:

1. Team Building

Whether it’s mentioned too much or not, team building remains at the crux of management. Putting a group together determines how easy your job will be. You have to find square pegs for square holes and make sure each person is motivated enough to handle their role.

Team building starts from the interview table when you assess the prospective workers for your organization. You need to select candidates whose dreams and skills align with the aims and objectives of your business. 

From the candidates you employed, you should be able to build teams for specific tasks and purposes. 

2. Take the Time to Know and Understand Each Team Member

Now that you have hired those you believe are the right people, you need to know them enough to select the perfect team for a task as the need arises. Your employees are not just metrics on a timesheet or recruitment application. They’re human beings with dynamic emotions and flaws.

You need to know their strengths and weaknesses to incorporate them into teams to execute a specific project. In addition, this level of personal knowledge ensures you know how to handle your team members individually.

This is also critical to task delegation on the individual level.

Your employees cannot function well without having duties they can perform assigned to them. So, irresponsible task assignment leads to poor performance. 

It is not enough to assemble a team and randomly assign responsibilities. Respect and recognize the strength and skills of every individual and be sure that they get tasks that match their abilities.

3. Communicate 

Effective communication is one of the greatest hallmarks of management. You need this technique in the bag to supervise your team to perform better. To achieve this, you must know your team members and learn how to get across to them.

You must know what moves and motivates each individual and how to speak to them collectively.

Your means of communication is also essential. You can’t depend on just one channel. While text-based communication has its use, it often falls short when you need to convey tone, mood, and even body posture.

Don’t be over-dependent on emails and slack chats in a work atmosphere. Instead, make an effort to organize face-to-face meetings as much as you can.

4. Be an Exemplary Leader

No matter what you teach your workers by word of mouth, you can’t get the best from them if you don’t lead by example. Actions they say are louder and more effective than words. Whatever you do at the top has a way of traveling to the bottom.

Transformational leadership is a huge part of management science. When your employees admire your work ethic and expertise, they dream of being like you. This kind of respect shows in how they carry out their assigned duties. 

You set high standards for your employees every time you achieve a desirable result by doing the right thing. They are watching and learning. So, never scold them for coming to work late when you are locked in the cage of perpetual lateness.

5. Provide Additional Educational/Training Prospects

Employees reach a career cul-de-sac when they no longer build on their knowledge and expertise. Unfortunately, fields of expertise don’t remain at a spot for a long time. Change happens every time. You can help sharpen their skill set through educational/training opportunities. 

Send your people out for training. Invite industry leaders to your company for lectures. Sending staff to participate in conferences and courses is also a great way to expand their exposure and gain more insights. 

That said, providing additional educational opportunities does not need to be a money-gulping venture. For example, to minimize cost, you may assign mentorship roles to the high flyers in your organization. Make them teach the ones who are still trying to find their feet.

Consistent workforce training will increase your organizational productivity and promote a better relationship between you and your workers. 

6. Celebrate Victories

It is not enough to achieve a milestone. You have to celebrate your workers’ every accomplishment, big or small, to show you care. When they know you are interested and happy about their growth, they’ll be motivated to impress you more and more. 

Now, don’t just celebrate your workers’ achievement as a team or group alone – also honor people individually. 

Badgeville, a behavior management platform, discovered that 70% of employees are more inspired by recognition than they can ever be by monetary incentives. Another survey by Reward Gateway reported similar results. It found 70% of employees would be more motivated if managers noticed good work and said thank you more often.

In addition, credit for a job well done creates an emotional attachment between a worker and his job. So, make sure you don’t miss the chance to pat a team member at the back in recognition of good work.

7. Never Micromanage

Resist the urge to micromanage your employees. To work efficiently, we all need a measure of freedom. Nobody likes the feeling of having a boss constantly breathing down their neck. Every employee appreciates worker autonomy. 

Be the leader who gives his subordinates enough space to breathe, work, and explore their own creativity. Of course, you can step in occasionally. However, you should do that to offer your support and assistance, providing a sense of direction.  

8. Organize Recreational Events

The work environment can become toxic, probably due to workplace competition, envy, and other interpersonal issues. As a leader, the responsibility is on you to ease the tension and encourage peace and unity among your workers. 

To achieve that, you can organize collaborative events which can either take place within or outside the office. 

Your workers don’t have to be best friends. They only need to be free with one another enough to work together on important projects. You bring to life their collaborative spirit when you introduce team-enhancing events.

You may leverage holiday seasons like Christmas and New Year’s to get them to have fun together. You can even be more deliberate about it by making it a set of mandatory activities unique to your company.

Have a Friday night out where you play games and gift the overall winning group some money or grant them a wish works. You can even ask them to come up with and organize fun activities for the team. 

It’s such an encouraging thing to look forward to going to work. It means work is fun. This makes people work better at executing tasks together. 

9. Be a Time Manager

Time management is a critical factor in people management.

It is easy for your employees to get distracted by the deluge of social media baits, calls, emails, and meeting after meeting. This is where you come in as a leader and time manager, constantly helping your employees focus on things that matter. 

Keeping your employees’ priorities in check and not being overbearing or nosy can be a bit challenging. You also don’t have to go about it in a way that suggests you are their slave master. You need to find ways to make sure they honor deadlines.

You can schedule daily non-invasive check-ins and progress report meetings. These will help them remember they’re on the clock.

You should also use a time management app like Traqq. This tool can help them track the apps they spend most of their time on. It will help them identify what to curtail.

10. Set Achievable Long and Short-Term Goals

You need to set achievable goals your team can accomplish within a stipulated period. Every employee needs to know what they are to achieve daily. Your team will miss a lot of deadlines if you don’t set realistic short and long-term goals.

Engage them in several brainstorming sessions. While at it, determine what they should do at a particular time. This way, every team member can have a clear understanding of what the goals are. 

Conclusion

As a manager, you cannot escape planning, coordinating, organizing, and directing the activities of your team members.  However, with the right techniques, you’ll be reducing your workload and overseeing a high-functioning group of individuals. We hope you found our list helpful.