How to manage your team: guidelines and tips for success

Leadership, communication and team cohesion are factors that bring us closer to excellence.

One of the greatest difficulties we encounter in our professional career (and also in our personal or sports career, or with some kind of project) is learning how to manage the talent of a team.

When we work in a team everything becomes more complex, but when you have to be the one who leads the team, manages its talents and has the main responsibility, everything becomes even more complicated. The great key to achieve it is to understand that this development does not depend on authority or magic rules... but on your own personal development and on key psychological skills.

How to manage a work team?

A team can be at work, in a business venture, in some kind of competition, or even in your family (a family is a form of team, since its members have or should have common goals). When we reach this situation we are faced with great doubts.because no one has taught us how to do it. We feel fear, insecurity, difficulty to communicate, to know how to say no, to motivate them, and we feel that each team member follows a free path and finally those common objectives are not fulfilled. What are the key skills that lead you to achieve it?

Professional development is really personal development. To grow as a professional (a fundamental motivation in life, since through work you do a service to the world in which you live) you need to grow as a person. The key personal skills that help you improve as a professional are emotion management (which influences every decision you make and your state of mind), your productivity (the way you motivate, motivate, manage time and resources), your communication (if it is assertive, transparent and empathetic enough) and above all personal relationships. This is where a key personal and psychological skill comes into play: authentic leadership.

In the last 10 years I have accompanied as a psychologist and coach professionals in their personal change processes to learn how to manage their teams at empoderamientohumano.com. To help you, the first step is to register for free in Empodérate (a program to develop key personal skills for professional development).

The most important key is trust

Leadership is often misunderstood as a position of guidance, command or power. Nothing could be further from the truth. Leadership is actually the ability to positively influence others. This is something necessary in a work team, in sports, in a project, as teachers, educators, and also as parents. A leader is a person who takes responsibility for the team, trusts the people in that team and knows how to accompany them in their growth. A leader, above all, creates other leaders (he does not keep his knowledge to himself).

The great key to manage your team, then, is trust.. When the team does not achieve the expected results or achieves them with too much effort and stress, it is because there is not enough cohesion and harmony among the members of that team. This is caused by a lack of trust with the person who must manage the talent of that team (overconfidence is also a form of distrust).

Cohesion, motivation and empathy

When people trust that person, it generates union, cohesion, consultation, and at the same time, that leader supervises and delegates them (but without hyper vigilance). Instead of building a formal authority, based on blind obedience, a moral authority is built, based on trust and confidence.. When you trust and they trust you (which implies a whole process of change), the relationship with the team becomes closer, they come to you, they look to you for advice or help, and that helps you to unite the team and achieve the proposed objectives.

Another essential skill is empathetic and assertive communication. The leader knows how to transmit what is necessary, with kindness, empathy, trust, closeness, genuine interest in others and their needs, but also establishing clear limits. This is actually an emotional process, where the way you manage your emotions (fear of the other's response, insecurity, mistrust, etc.) is at stake.

Finally: learning to manage your emotions. This process of change implies that you must learn to manage your emotions in a more functional way, so that they accompany you in this process through confidence, security and illusion instead of fear, stress, anxiety, anger or insecurity.

Helping others to grow is helping you to grow.. It is one of the most uplifting processes of change in both professional and personal life.