Effective Team Management – 4 Tips to Raise Morale

Posted on | September 17, 2012

Effective team management is essential to your career acceleration and success.  Managing a diverse team of workers is likely to be one of the most difficult things you’ll ever do in your career.  As a manager, you must constantly work on developing your leadership qualities that will motivate your team members to

• Be the best that they can be,
• Take pride in their work
• Engage with each other in a meaningful way, one that improves the overall quality of their work.

In my experience, effective team management must involve keeping the team morale high.  This is especially true if you are mentoring young professionals.  Here are 4 tips on how to do it effectively:

1. Give feedback consistently—both the good and the bad.  What most people in management don’t understand is that monetary compensation only provides a tiny bit of motivation. After a certain point, employees are motivated by so much more. Feedback, which includes explaining in detail what each team member excels in, while also criticizing areas of improvement in a constructive manner, is perhaps the most motivating aspect of any job. Everyone wants to do well at work, and they want to be recognized for it when they do. Always praise a job well done, and make sure the praise is precise. Employees are not looking for gold stars.  They’re looking for sincere words that make them feel like they are valued contributors to the company.
2. Take a genuine interest in the personal and professional lives of your employees. Of course, the workplace is not necessarily the place to air personal problems. But always remember that your employees are human. They have lives outside of work. They have dreams. Care about these things, and show that you care. Encourage all team members to care about these things, too. Creating a pleasant, personable workplace for your team members goes a long way in keeping the team cohesive and morale high.
3. Help your team members understand how they contribute to the company as a whole. One thing that always gets people down is being too heavily focused on the minutiae of life without understanding the bigger picture, the meaning, the ultimate purpose. If it’s true of life generally, then it’s also true in the workplace. Doing the same tasks every day without understanding how their work helps the company as a whole can be very demoralizing. Once your team understands their higher purpose, as it were, they become motivated to complete even the most mundane tasks.
4. Mentor future leaders on your team.  A big part of leadership in management is to lift up those who desire and show promise as future leaders themselves. Of course, not everyone on your team will be leadership material. But by being tuned in with their personal and professional lives as noted in tip 2, you’ll be able to optimize each team member’s strengths by understanding their dreams and their talents.  Since you as their team leader is being a mentor who is showing that you care about their professional development, they’ll be more motivated than ever.

Of course, being able to achieve effective team management is difficult, because it means working well with individuals—each of whom is complicated in his/her own way—and molding a high-performing team out of these individuals.  But if you commit to maintaining team morale as your number one priority, then you’ll be successful.   Good luck!

Your comments: What are you doing to motivate your team to high performance? What is working and what is not? share your comments below

Guest Author: Maria Rainer is an education blogger who loves to explore the connections between the web and a college education. Her specialty include Online student advice columns on the latest trends in online education and professional development. 

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