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ENHANCING YOUR MANAGEMENT TEAM SKILLS

Any business survives and grows on a range of skills. If you want your business to grow it will reach a stage when these necessary skills need to be improved and extended. Getting the right mix of people to complement and reinforce your business is essential. Having an effective management team helps you to create a more efficient and capable business. You can never find a combination of skill set in a single director or manager hence you require people with the different skill set on your team to overcome any hurdle that you may face during a project. Each member of a management team can concentrate on their own area of expertise. The rapport within a team is very important and can add further value beyond the individual talents and skills of each employee. Teams whose members relate well to one another contribute significantly to the overall success of their businesses. A disjointed management team could well put off anyone involved with your business, e.g. employees, customers, clients or suppliers. This could ultimately lead to corporate failure. How to build a team?

• Review your business progress to date and decide what direction you want it to go in.
• Measure your performance in the market against your competitors. Analyse any strengths, weaknesses, opportunities,and threats - commonly known as a SWOT analysis - to identify what gaps there are between where the business is and where you would like it to go.
• Analyse what skills the business requires and consider what strengths and weaknesses you offer personally.
• Learn the skills, potential,and ambitions of your existing staff and consider less-defined skills such as leadership qualities.
• Analyse the fit of existing skills to business requirements and establish priorities for the acquisition of missing skills.
• Establish where staff development could fill skills needs and consider reallocation of responsibilities to create a genuine team, rather than a group of individual managers.
• Re-examine any skills gaps.
• Consider other options such as consultants, outsourcing, contract workers, with a cost/benefit analysis.
• Look to permanent staff recruitment - where possible it is best to plan ahead by recruiting for future positions and anticipating any prospective skills gaps.

• A potentially great team with strong individual contributors can quickly be undone by issues around trust, conflict, team accountability, and intergroup rivalries.
• In business, competition between groups can provide motivation, but if competition becomes too strong, it can inhibit cooperation and lead to dysfunction.
• The best teams are those that not only combine the skills of their members to fit the demands of their task but also energize team members through the bonding that comes with striving toward a common goal.
• Solutions can include changing team members, but an event to clear the air can help to relieve frustration and resolve the conflict.

• Team learning has value for organizations; learning in teams is seen as a key mechanism through which learning organizations become strategically and operationally adaptive and responsive.
• How the learning of individual work teams translates into organizational learning is not well understood.
• Organizations stand to benefit when ideas are cross-fertilized and diverse individuals learn to work together. "Outsiders" can introduce valuable ideas.
• Learning and execution are often at odds: Learning by its nature involves uncertainty, false starts, and occasional dead ends. Team learning in organizations must be recognized as a strategy for tolerating forays into the unknown.

1. Developing your team: Teams are made up of individuals who have different outlooks and abilities and are at different stages of their careers. Some may find that the tasks youve allocated to them are challenging, and they may need support. Others may be "old hands" at what theyre doing and may be looking for opportunities to stretch their skills. Either way, its your responsibility to develop all of your people.Your skills in this aspect of management will define your long-term success as a manager. If you can help team members to become better at what they do, youll be a manager who people aspire to work for, and youll make a great contribution to your organization, too.
2. Communicating with people in your team: As a team manager, youre likely to be chairing regular sessions as well as one-off meetings. Meeting of all kinds and regular ones,inparticular, are notorious for wasting peoples time, so its well worth mastering the skill of running effective meetings. Many meetings include brainstorming sessions. As a team manager, youll often have to facilitate these, so youll need to be comfortable with doing this. Theres more to this than simply coming up with creative ideas, as you do when youre just a regular participant in such a session.
3. Managing discipline: However much you hope that you wont have to do it, there comes a time in most managers careers when they have to discipline an employee. Discipline may be subtly different from basic feedback because it doesnt always relate specifically to the employees work. You can give feedback on their phone manner, for example, but handling problems with timekeeping or personal grooming can need a different approach.

• Thinking that you can rely on your existing job knowledge and technical skills to succeed as a manager. It is essential that you take the time to develop good management and people skills as well – these can be more important than your technical skills!
• Failing to consult regularly with your boss, in a misguided attempt to show that you can cope on your own.
• Approaching your boss without having thought a problem though, and without having considered how the problem could be solved.
• Embarrassing your boss, or letting her get a nasty surprise. Follow the "no surprises" rule.
• Doing anything that requires your boss to defend you from This can cause your boss to "lose face" with his peers and superiors, and it makes it look as if his team is out of control.
• Failing to talk to your customers (whether internal or external) about what they want from yourself and your team.
• Using your authority inappropriately – make sure that everything you ask people to do is in the interests of the organization.