Improve your Communication (Manager Edition) - Career Challenge
Low effort MANAGER tasks that can make a key difference in your TEAM
Welcome to October. This month’s career log is inspired by last month’s communication log. This time around it has a specific focus on managing teams. Managing a team, and being a manager to a group of people effectively is not an easy task. The amount of time and intentional thought that it requires can also often be underestimated.
In this career challenge log, I share some of my own tips on what you can do to foster a positive team culture whilst being mindful of the individual needs.
If your team culture is positive, what happens is quite magical. Your team relies on each other, has a method to get through day to day stresses, and they become a highly functioning group of people. Ultimately, those people enjoy their lives and careers.
This all starts with the manager of the team leading and setting the standards of positive team culture, sharing values and principals and creating a team structure through communication.
Let’s check out this version of the Communication Challenge Log for Managers (below). Keep on reading to be taken on a short tour of the log.
The Log
These challenges can be completed in any period. You can take one week, month or year to achieve them. (Please ensure you read the disclaimer and the notice on the about page - completing these challenges is your choice!)
Log Overview
Now, let's run through briefly each of the mini-challenges with some additional information:
Understanding your TEAMs communication preference: If you did the first challenge you should know your own communication preference. As a manager, a critical point is to understand that communication preference is yours, and if you manage 10 people, those 10 people will have theirs. It is your role to understand those, know them and prioritize communicating on their preference. I mention it below, but as a leader, it is about putting your needs to the back and prioritizing others. You want your team to communicate to you, so make it easy for them to do that. Get creative, if most people prefer teams, make a group teams channel.
Map out your team’s end to end experiences: We have joined companies, left companies and regularly begin our week and end our week. What are those experiences like? They can be terribly lonely if you are working on remote teams - where you don’t even talk to your team until their mid-week 1:1. Consider what joining the team looks like and what leaving the team could be like so you can stay connected and focus on enhancing their career when they are in your team. Consider how you start the week - do you welcome the team? Give them a short update? Wish them a good week? These very small things make such a difference to team collaboration.
Lead first with questions: As a manager you can totally have bad days. You may also be aware of things going on at the leadership level. For your team’s one on ones or team sessions, remember this isn’t about you - your own 1:1 is for that. That can be tough to hear and the principal of being a manager is about leading first and putting your needs in the back whilst you take care of others. This is not easy, especially if your having a bad day - but as the custodian of many other people, do you not think they could also have bad days where you could offer some assistance? Simon’s book ‘Leaders Eat Last’ can help you get better at this.
Consider collaboration activities: It is easy to get stuck in a work work work cycle without actually having any work to do together as a team (the team meeting becomes more a venting session) and you don’t really ever get to know your team members or provide a space for your team members to get to know each other. Consider making the space and leading simple activities that help grow collaboration and team camaraderie every month to foster this growth.
Ask for feedback on ways to improve the team: Many managers think they should know it all. This means you could feel like you hold the entire team on the shoulders of the manager, when it should be a team effort. As a manager, you are not the only one who can come up with ideas and your team will be inspired by your leadership, so why not use it!? Ask them their own ideas on how they think the team can be improved.
The Final Project!
Final Project: The final project for this challenge is about drafting your communication plan for your TEAM. This plan is for you only so you can better craft collaboration routes for your team.
As mentioned in the previous post, communication plans are created for launches or key marketing events where they need a structure on what is being communicated, who to and identifying the audience, and being aware of what you want the person or people you are speaking to to do and how to act.
Consider drafting your communication plan for your actual team. Many of the tasks are around understanding where your team are at, how you want to lead the team and guide them to work together, enhance their skills and have a place to go when they have questions where people would help them.
Summary
That is a wrap for the Communication Career Challenge Log focused on manager and leadership roles. It aimed to introduce readers to how to begin and continue to improve their communication skills as a manager to foster positive team culture. Just like with the ‘general’ communication log, manager communication does not have a peak, and it is a crucial skill for everyone to be effective at leadership. Given this, it should be something managers intentionally work to improve it throughout our careers, especially as teams can change and evolve.