Managing a team, whether a small group or a larger department, is not easy. It takes a lot of work, leadership skills, and someone who can effectively look at and understand the perspectives of everyone on the team. It requires a lot of work, and it’s easy to make some mistakes. Continue reading to learn about some of the common mistakes that every manager makes.
Focusing on Results and Not People
A common mistake that most managers or team leaders make is focusing too much on the project results and not spending enough time recognizing the employees as people. One important factor for a team’s success is that everyone feels understood and recognized. If all the people on your team feel like cogs in a machine, they won’t give it their 100 percent and won’t feel valued.
To manage a successful team, you must focus on team cohesion, and one of the best ways to do this is to always pay attention to your team members. That means ensuring clear communication channels, listening to team members, reaching out to them, providing feedback, and asking for feedback in return.
Not Focusing on Safety
When you’re a manager, it’s easy to set your sights on the project’s goal and fail to recognize the smaller day-to-day events and roadblocks. It’s admirable to stay focused on the project from a large-scale perspective, but many managers miss out on the steps that get them there and the considerations they must take along the way. One variable that many fail to notice is safety. When your sights are only on the goal, you want to cut corners, and those cut corners come at the cost of safety.
For example, if you’re working on a construction site or somewhere similar, you want to complete your project as quickly and efficiently as possible. You divert all of your resources toward this goal and fail to focus on smaller things that add up, such as safety compliance. You need to get custom safety apparel for your workers so that the project can run smoothly and ensure everyone is safe. Compromising on this will result in more accidents and other roadblocks that put the project’s completion behind schedule.
No Direction
When you’re a manager, it’s easy for you to understand the project’s goals and what you need to achieve them, but you must illustrate that to the team members. They don’t have all the same information as you, and it’s easy for them to feel lost or fail to grasp how their work contributes to the larger project at hand. By explaining everything early and providing routine project updates, they can understand the project’s direction and how they’re contributing to that.
Almost every manager makes some of these common mistakes, but that doesn’t mean it has to be the end of their role. You can recognize these mistakes and go out of your way to ensure that you don’t make them. Yes, mistakes aren’t great, but the effort and willingness to work hard and improve from those same mistakes make a great manager.
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