As a company grows, team management becomes a crucial part of the business. After all, the more tasks there are, the more people you need to do them. When there are more people, everything from time management to money is vitally important to track. But you are only one person, so making sure that you can manage your teams is important. A collaborative environment can help your journal succeed, so effective team management can be a fast path to success.

Should you be using team management software? Is it better to develop a team management strategy? Which of the team management techniques is the most effective? All of these (and more) are valuable questions to ask. But which ones actually matter to you might be harder to uncover.

Here, we’re going to cover some important advice for managing a team of employees, as well as some useful tools.

The basics of team management

One of the first problems you might run into is that advice for “how to manage a team” might simply not work for your team. Oftentimes, advice might be very generic. This means that you’ll spend a lot of time reading the same advice on different websites. That’s why it’s important to understand that the “basics” for team management are not things like emotional intelligence or communication with your team. These are, of course, important, but they aren’t the basics. The basics are understanding what your team is trying to accomplish.

This is why team development matters. Having a plan for how you’re going to assemble your team and what they need to get done is critical to success. Team development, here, is an ongoing process by which you can improve a teams efficiency. At the end of the day, a team has a goal, and building key skills and systems to support a team in accomplishing that goal is important. Management styles can vary significantly, but there isn’t always a “one size fits all” approach. But when you, your team, and your team’s leader(s) understand the goals, then management styles can be adjusted in service to these goals.

Still, there are quite a lot of skills that can be useful to helping you establish an effective team. You can use a basic problem solving approach when putting together a team to help you make sure you’re being effective.

Teams and problem solving

Start with defining what the purpose of the team is. Teams need to have goals, but sometimes those goals need to change over time. With an academic journal, for example, this might be something like “our peer review stage is not efficient”. So, let’s look at how you could approach this problem using the following steps:

1. Identify the problem: Like noted above, here we’re identifying the issue as the peer review stage not being efficient. The first step in solving an issue is identifying the issue.
2. Brainstorm ideas: Identifying an issue means you can figure out why the issue is occurring. Perhaps, the peer review issue is being caused by confusion in your team because everyone tracks the peer review process stages differently. Some people might be using an Excel spreadsheet while others might be using pen-and-paper methods. Possible answers here might be to create a standard spreadsheet and require everyone use it or switching over to a team management software that you can use for tracking.
3. Evaluate and iterate: Just because an idea sounds good, that doesn’t mean it will work. There are lots of great ideas that simply don’t work when applied (and there can be any number of reasons why this happens). Small-scale tests of different methods is one way to gain valuable insight from your team. If an idea is good, but a small part of it isn’t working, change it (but don’t discard the entire idea).
4. Implementation: Once you’ve got a system that works, you need to implement it. But part of implementation is also supporting that implementation. Help your team by making sure that they have the resources needed to succeed.

So, with the aforementioned problem, we know that our team needs to be able to accomplish these goals. We can identify candidates that can support the peer-review team and who might be able to support them.

A major part of effective team management is being able to support a team throughout problems and effectively guide them to success.

Skills for team management

So, what are the skills you need to manage a team? Making sure that you (and your team leaders) have some of these skills can be vital. After all, running a journal is a complicated thing. While each team will be dealing with different things, people remain people and there are various skills that are universally applicable. Let’s take a look at a few different examples of valuable team management skills:

1. Clear communication skills
2. Good listening skills
3. Organizational skills
4. Problem solving skills

There are other skills that can benefit team management, but these four are what we might consider “core” leadership skills. They can be applied in almost any team, regardless of what that team does.

Clear communication skills

Having the ability to communicate clearly is important. Whether you are providing guidance to new employees, speaking with stakeholders, or just making sure that everyone understands a difficult concept, communication is king. When managing a team, ensuring that everyone understands the goals they’re working towards can have a major impact on project performance (not to mention team happiness). It really doesn’t matter if you’re running marketing team of a hundred employees or a small English editing department. People are people. Teams always work better when guidance and goals are clear and easy to understand.

Sometimes, even something as straightforward as explaining why something matters can keep a team highly motivated and goal focused.

Good listening skills

Listening skills are crucial to your team’s long-term success. Coaching others requires understanding, and listening to what your team is actually saying is important. For example, ignoring your team when they are pointing out problems in your journal’s publishing pipeline could lead to massive delays (or damage to your reputation). Focusing on developing active listening skills can help to nip issues in the bud before they become problems.

Active listening differs from passive listening in that there is interaction. Passive listening is what we do with music or audiobooks, for example. It has a different set of goals than active listening. When dealing with teams, developing these active listening skills helps to build trust in your team and make your team feel valued and heard. Active listening is conscious. It requires you to engage with the speaker and to ensure that you understand what they’re saying.

Organizational skills

Keeping track of things is part of a team manager’s role. The number of things to keep track of can change over time, and sometimes they can be challenging to remember. Deadlines, birthdays, processes, names, and more, are all things that need to be kept track of. And knowing which ones are the most important ones to keep track of can be a daunting challenge.

As noted above, developing the right sets of skills is crucial, but sometimes you also need the right tools. Many companies use team-tracking tools, but other options exist. For example, if you’re able to manage your team’s workload using a journal management system, that’s one way to give everyone less to worry about. These systems are commonly in use by many companies in the industry, but there are many options. They aren’t always one-size-fits-all tools (but sometimes many of these tools are able to grow with you and support you throughout your entire growth journey). They might not be able to track vacation days for you, but they can give you time to focus on vacation days.

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Problem solving skills

Projects rarely go from conception to completion without issues. These can be anything from critical team members being knocked out due to an illness to funding being insufficient for a project. In any case, managers need to be able to roll with the punches and solve problems. Generally, we can break down problems into two broad categories: foreseeable and unforeseeable.

Foreseeable problems can often be mitigated by careful planning. Many companies that publish journals use journal management systems in order to avoid preventable issues (what kind of databases you need to prepare, how to train employees, and so on). Unforeseeable problems are more complicated. As their name implies, you can’t plan for them.

In these cases, knowing when to take action, when to delegate tasks, and when to see help is important.

Managing different teams

While there are many different kinds of management styles, they aren’t one-size-fits-all. Not all teams are the same. Some are small and some are large. Some teams need careful supervision, while other teams might not need much supervision at all. Knowing what kind of team you have, and how best to manage it will make your job easier. In this article, we’re going to briefly talk about two different kinds of teams: in-house teams and remote teams.

In-house teams

Unlike remote teams, in-house teams tend to be in the same space as the managers. This means that the team can be more efficient. Partly because of the proximity and partly because of the genera lack of delays, in-house teams can often work smoothly together on complicated projects. In addition, managers can address problems and help more effectively.

Where this can be problematic however is that managers may become prone to micromanagement. Micromanagement can be very bad for team morale and employee happiness. It demonstrates a lack of trust in the employee and can severely impact team cohesion.

Making sure that your employees are supported is critical, but so is trusting that you have the right people working on your team.

Remote teams

In this day and age, there are many tools that have allowed the decentralization of the workplace. Beyond the obvious changes to workplaces in the last couple of years, there are other reasons to consider remote work. For example, moving away from physical office locations can have a major impact on a company’s bottom line. Not needing to have physical offices/satellite locations can save tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of dollars. While not every business can operate remotely, many elements of those businesses can.

When running a remote team, there has to be a change in perspective for a manager. Managing a team over the internet is not the same as sitting in the same room as them. First of all, it requires a greater degree of trust in your employees. Second, you will also need a secure method of communication. Finally, a very clear understanding of expectations must exist.

In a traditional workplace, you can see the other employees and largely know what they’re doing. But in a remote-based system, you need to change your priorities. Developing a system of achievable goals and metrics is a much better system for a remote team.

Make sure that you determine what metrics and targets you want to make sure your team hits.