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An upcoming IMechE training course, Managing Team and Individual Performance, tackles both sides of the equation. Running next week (27-28 May), the course is aimed at leaders and managers who are responsible for the performance of others.
Leadership trainer and coach Andy Webber is one of its trainers. Here are his five tips to help you manage teams and individual performance.
Trust your team members
As a leader, you need to adjust the way you delegate based on the individual and their experience. The first time you tackle a task together, you might show them how to do it. That should evolve the second time you do it, and the third, and so on.
Managers sometimes don’t want to let go of tasks. Trust your team members and their ability to do a good job.
Focus on feedback
Feedback is a really important tool to support development, both when something has gone wrong and when it’s gone really well. A leader and manager needs to have that information, and to share it with team members to help them make adjustments and develop in their roles.
Be flexible
One of the most important parts of the workshop is where we look at how people learn. Different people obviously need different things, and it’s your job as a manager to work it out and give people what they need. What’s slightly less obvious is that the same person needs different things at different times. As a manager, you have to be quite directive with new tasks, telling team members what steps to take.
If you carry on with that approach, it quickly becomes micromanagement and they will get pretty annoyed. They will start to work it out for themselves, so what you need to do as a manager is back off and let them get on with it. It’s about flexibility – supporting development and recognising that needs evolve.
Treat the team like an organism
Leadership expert and author John Adair, famous for “action-centred leadership”, recognises the importance of balancing the effective functioning of the team with the needs of the individuals within it. The team can be treated as if it’s a living, breathing organism in its own right – it is made up of individuals, but what the team needs might be quite different to what individuals within the team need at any one moment. It’s about balancing those competing priorities, but also understanding what a team needs and how it evolves over time.
Similar to an individual learning something new, as a team gets more experienced and more knowledgeable, your job is to back off and let them get on with it, rather than micromanaging them.
Link individual objectives to the team’s success
If, as an individual, I have an objective and I don’t really understand how that connects to anything else, but I just come to work and do my stuff and then go home again, that’s not as motivating as a situation where I have my objectives but I am absolutely clear how they link to other people in the team.
When we put it together, it creates something bigger. It’s that sense of purpose that we are able to engender by connecting things.
IMechE's Managing Team and Individual Performance course runs in London from 27-28 May. Find out more and book now.
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Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.