Managing Your Team

Creating a well-functioning team requires supportive leadership. The following guidelines will help you create a successful team:

• Clearly define roles and responsibilities.

• Provide actionable feedback.

• Tailor your leadership style.

Clearly Define Roles and Responsibilities

An important job for team leaders is to make sure that everyone knows their job. Proper delegation ensures efficiency by avoiding work duplication and by creating accountability.

Even groups without a designated leader will struggle if someone doesn’t discuss the need to delegate jobs. For a team of writers, common roles might include:

• Researcher (responsible for locating data)

• Writer (responsible for the initial draft)

• Graphic Designer (responsible for graphics or photos)

• Proofreader (reviews grammar, style, and/or structure)

• Final editor (provides final reviews before publishing)

You might combine some roles listed above, or complex projects may require content delegation by chapter or subject. Some teams might assign someone the role of researcher/writer for one chapter/section, and proofreader for another chapter/section.

During a graduate course at Northern Arizona University that explored technical documentation, I assigned different responsibilities for different parts of the project. So, for one article, a student served as a writer creating an initial draft, and for another, they served as a proofreader or editor.

Changing roles develops your writing team in multiple areas, and it keeps your team members from getting bored.

Of course, you also must balance your team members’ strengths with your project’s requirements. And if you find that a team member is performing poorly in one role, you might help them by assigning them a different role—at least until you can turn whatever their weakness is into a strength!

How can you turn a weakness into a strength? Through actionable feedback!

Provide Actionable Feedback

In a journal article titled Actionable feedback: Unlocking the power of learning and performance improvement, authors Mark Cannon and Robert Witherspoon wrote, “Most managers hate giving critical feedback, and most employees detest receiving it.”

No one likes to be told that they are performing poorly. Yet everyone wants to perform well. Telling someone that they are performing poorly is a type of feedback, but it is often of little use to the recipient.

The following image, from Cannon and Witherspoon’s article, shows data from McKinsey & Company’s The War for Talent, an article that explores the role of effective management in retaining top talent. Please review the image below, and then I’ll summarize its key points.

The image above lists different management functions and shows employees’ ratings of how well the company does them versus how important they are to employee development.

The image shows that employees place high value on building skills that boost their career prospects (#2), great senior role models (#12), and candid, insightful feedback (#9).

It also shows that providing candid, insightful feedback (#9) is an area where many companies perform poorly. The reason they perform poorly may be that their feedback is not actionable.

If I tell you that your company is doing a poor job of developing employees, my statement is of limited use. It is not actionable because it doesn’t give you specific guidance on what you need to improve. You might decide that providing more traditional classroom training—which the image shows is something that companies do poorly, and employees place little value in—will solve your problem.

But if I tell you that you need to provide managerial training on the importance of actionable feedback—feedback that provides specific actions that can produce measurable improvements, then I’ve been much more helpful.

Actionable feedback is your most effective tool for building quality team members. But if you want your team to be receptive to your feedback, you must tailor how you deliver that feedback.

Tailor Your Leadership Style

Individuals form teams, and those individuals have different backgrounds, different experiences, and different capabilities.

In a Harvard Business Review article titled The Leader as Coach, authors Herminia Ibarra and Anne Scoular discussed how leadership helps team members grow.

The following image from Ibarra and Scoular’s article categorizes leadership strategies based on the expertise added by the manager in relation to the team members’ output:

The image (above) shows:

• A directive style of leadership entails the leader telling team members what to do and how to do it. It yields limited innovation but can produce growth—Ibarra and Scoular place mentorship within the directive style of leadership.

• A nondirective style is a passive form of leadership that poses questions that can prompt team members to solve problems themselves.

• A Laissez-faire style involves limited leadership action and produces no change in behavior or productivity. This approach works well when you don’t need to make changes.

• Situational leadership, which Ibarra and Scoular describe as “the sweet spot” in their framework, involves balancing directive and nondirective styles “according to the specific needs of the moment.”

Leadership styles aren’t just based on the requirements of team members. They are also determined by project requirements. Sometimes, you might have time to employ a nondirective leadership style and let your team surprise you with their innovation. Other times, deadlines might loom, and you may need to focus on providing strict direction.

For my technical documentation course, I balanced the need to meet deadlines with the need to help my team grow through situational leadership. I was directive in setting deadlines and assigning roles for each stage of our project, but I was nondirective in how my team carried out their responsibilities.

To be successful, you’ll need to think carefully about what leadership style will work best based on the roles, responsibilities, and capabilities of your team, as well as how they respond to feedback and what your project’s requirements are.

This blog entry focused on team management. Please follow the links below to check out my other blog entries, Managing Your Project and Communication Strategy, to learn more.