After reading our previous blog posts and advice, hopefully you have been able to take advantage of all our offerings and support for yourself. Now, it is time to focus on your administrative and artistic team. You noted your qualifications for each position, hired accordingly, and thus have done a stellar job at recruiting your ideal crew. So you are officially a manager! What does this mean exactly though? Without getting into too many technical terms, we have provided you with five golden rules to better understand your role and how to evolve your leadership skills.
Managing a team means you are in charge of directing and leading a group of collaborative individuals towards one, collective goal. Your crew will most likely have a variety of skills that could range from similar to completely different from your strengths. So your job is not to be an expert of each domain, but rather to act as a team leader who can personally guide each and every one of your members on their prospective paths.
1. Give Clear Objectives
The manager is responsible for reaching structural and project-oriented goals of the whole team. As team leader, you need to eliminate any mixed signals and confusion by formalizing a way to share common, clear objectives with your people. Your team’s objectives should be reasonable and SMART. They should be Specific, Measurable, Acceptable, Realistic and Time-bound. For example: land two meetings with broadcasters here by the end of the year.
2.Stay Confident
Having clearly defined your goals, then shared them with your crew, your next task is to accelerate the mission by delegating and not controlling others. While you can guide individuals by encouraging them, you cannot control the aspect of « how » it gets done. Your necessary steps are to first reassure that each person has the means needed to reach their individual goals. Secondly, as manager, meeting your role as a guide, you can identify concrete solutions that will help alleviate pressure on your team and further develop their skills. Exude confidence that you believe in their abilities. For example, organize a monthly meeting with your head of advertising and bring a list of constructive feedback from actions already taken and a list of solutions on how to proceed for the next wave. By doing this, you are creating a fail-safe plan by bringing solutions to the table before problems occur so your team is prepared
3. Reward Results
When goals are reached, it is so important to take the time and congratulate your team. However, don’t forget that it is equally important to analyze why you were successful. Analyzing the methods or the « recipe » to success can help you find your groove as a team. You can then re-use this recipe for future, bigger goals and transitioning from one goal to the next is ideal to shaping a smooth evolution of your team’s dynamic and track. You could even arrange a monthly get-together to share individual and group successes! During this informal gathering you can celebrate and support your crew which is just as much of a bonding exercise as your day-to-day work.
4. Take on the responsibility of the team’s mistakes
Just as successes are are reflection of the manager, your mistakes are too. Failures, miscommunication, unclear objectives or inability to reconcile are all valid and no matter how shameful these may seem at a given moment, they are yours to assume. While it can be easy to become fixated on all of the details and nit-picky complications that went wrong with certain members, just acknowledge that it happened, take responsibility and move on. Once you’ve realized your mistakes, you have the chance to try again and fix them! So do not beat yourself up too much, things happen, so get back into it and find a better way to succeed with the help of your crew.
5. Develop your Team
Let’s talk about developing talents. The execution and skills of your team allow you as a manager to balance different types of projects. So it is important to give each crew member as much information as possible, the keys to understanding certain issues and the ways to follow through with their projects in order to cultivate strong practices. Show them that you want to help them reach their potential by acts of appreciation and attention to detail.
