Working in a team is hard, there are a lot of brilliant minds that work together to achieve a common goal. Simply adding more members to a team will not magically increase the team’s productivity. In fact, it can even decrease the team’s productivity, why? This is because everyone is different, they have different skillsets and personalities. To handle the problems that may arise in a team, People Management skill is needed.

What is People Management?

“People management is the process of training, motivating, and directing employees to optimize workplace productivity and promote professional growth. Workplace leaders, such as team leads, managers and department heads use people management to oversee workflow and boost employee performance every day” — indeed.com

To keep things simple, People Management is a skill that is needed to manage and maintain people in a team. This skill is important as it creates a healthy relationship between each member in a working environment and increases productivity.

Key People Management Skills

Empowering Employees

We have to empower our employees/members to help them to learn new skills, deepen their current skills which will make them more productive. Empowering and training new employees/members is really important as it can boost their skills and confidence, giving them appropriate resources and knowledge will help them to be an employee/member that is independent and well-performing. Furthermore, we have to offer constructive feedback and support on challenging tasks as it will create a good relationship between us and the employees/member

Active Listening

We have to be able to not just listen but to understand the perspective, question, or concern of the speaker before responding. We have to properly listen to what the speaker says and make ourselves look engaged and interested in what the speaker is saying so that the speaker feels respected and in return, we will be respected too.

Conflict-Resolution

We need to have good Conflict-Resolution skills. Conflict always happens when we are working as a team, people have different personalities and ideas, and sometimes they can clash and cause conflicts. We have to be able to understand and analyze what the conflict is, try to understand why it happens and find a compromise so that both parties are satisfied. Then we have to make sure that the conflict is fully resolved and prevent it from happening again in the future.

Flexibility

We have to know when we have to be flexible and firm. Don’t force our way of doing things on others as everyone has their own set of preferences and we have to adapt to their preferences. One of the examples is when we are helping someone else try to understand their workflow and we adapt ourselves to their workflow.

Patience

Patience is one of the most important skills to have in general. Everyone has different capabilities and they learn/solve problems at their own pace. Respect that and try to help them in the best way possible, try a different way of helping them if one does not work. This ensures a healthy relationship and people would be happy to ask us for guidance which will increase the quality of work.

Clear Communication

We have to be able to communicate clearly as communication is really important when we are working as a team especially when it comes to solving problems, pitching ideas, and adapting to changes. Not only we have to be able to convey our thoughts clearly, but we also have to listen and understand the others to prevent any miss communication

Trust

We have to trust and believe other people especially when it comes to their own work and abilities. Give advice or assistance only if they need it, don’t try to “help” every time because it will hurt their confidence. A leader has to trust the team in completing tasks well and on time and the team must be able to trust their leader in managing the project.

Organization

We must be able to organize things to keep track of what’s going on in the project. It is a good manner to respond to messages and emails as quickly as possible, have a meeting to discuss the progress of a project, and assign appropriate tasks to each member.

That is all from me! Thank you for reading and I hope you had a great time!

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