Relating To Your Team: 12 Management Tips For Your IT Team

Employees are getting pickier about the people they work for. Many people would rather quit their jobs than work with a manager that doesn’t appreciate them.

If you don’t know much about IT, you might be worried that you won’t be able to manage the IT employees in your team. Being an IT manager can be stressful until you get comfortable with your leadership abilities.

Continue reading this article to learn important management tips that will allow you to be effective in your position.

Must-Know Management Tips to Be Successful with Your Team

As you’re looking at information technology careers, you may see that being an IT manager is a position that pays well. If you’re worried that you won’t be able to hack it, the following tips will help set your mind at ease.

1. Explain Your Decisions

Explaining your decisions is especially important when the people you’re managing have more technical knowledge than you do. They may think they know better than you do but if you can explain to them why you made a certain decision, they’re more likely to get behind what you’re telling them to do.

Make sure you know what you’re saying when you explain your decisions. Don’t be afraid to let them know the areas that you’re not proficient in but explain how you were able to get to the decision without that specific knowledge.

2. Act Confidently

If the employees you manage see you aren’t confident, they aren’t going to trust your decisions. Act confidently and don’t let questions shake you.

If you don’t know the answer to a question, just tell them that you’ll need to look into it and get back to them on it. Your employees don’t expect you to know everything and they are looking to you for guidance.

3. Be Precise About What Really Matters to You

If there are certain things that are important to you in the workplace, be precise about these things. You can’t get upset with people for doing or not doing something if you didn’t tell them you wanted them to do something or to avoid doing something.

4. Increase Your Technical Knowledge

While you might not have the same degrees as the people you’re managing, it is important that you show an interest in increasing your technical knowledge. Even learning some basic things can make a big difference in the way the employees you are managing see you.

When you work around them for years and still don’t have any clue about what they do or how they do it, it looks like you’re not interested in what they do. The more you learn, the more valuable you’ll be to your company as well.

5. Provide Necessary Tools

Depending on what your team is working on, there are tools that will make the job easier. If you don’t know what those tools are, ask the team what would make the job easier.

When you try to make their work-life easier, they are going to be grateful and you’ll start to gain some traction in as you’re working to lead the team.

6. Encourage Creativity

Most of the people that you’re managing are there to solve problems and to be creative. Think about ways that you can encourage creativity and collaboration.

You might set up a room where people can get together and work on projects together. The decor of the office is another element that encourages creativity so think of ways you can make the office a place where people love to create.

7. Offer Helpful Feedback

If you notice something that could help one of your employees, you should find a way to give them feedback without being rude. Try to offer feedback without being critical but instead being helpful.

The attitude in which you bring feedback to the people in your team makes a major difference in how well they receive the feedback you give them.

8. Don’t Be Afraid to Delegate

Even if you don’t have the knowledge that your team has, that doesn’t mean that you can’t manage them. That means that you have to get good at realizing where you can’t do something and who could do it for you.

Understanding what who can do what in your team will allow you to work on your effectiveness as a good manager. You could even speak with your team and ask them to let you know what areas they enjoy working in. You may have multiple people with the same skills but you can place people in areas where they enjoy doing the work.

9. Communicate Important Goals

Communication is often lacking in business and life in general. If you don’t communicate important goals and keep them in front of your team, they aren’t going to remember.

When people know what they’re working toward, it much more likely they are going to accomplish the goals. Just being in the day-to-day operations doesn’t necessarily mean they are going to produce results.

Without a clear goal and without knowing its importance, employees often underperform.

Even if you feel like you are overwhelmed and overworked, you need to take the time to remind your employees what you’re working toward. Once they get it ingrained in their minds what the goals of the company are, their actions are going to reflect those goals.

10. Streamline the Workflow

Many work days are filled with unnecessary tasks. These tasks can eat up time when employees could be focused on tasks that will move the needle on the company’s top goals.

Look at your processes and see if anyone is performing the same work twice. You may not know that you have two different roles covering reporting on a specific metric. You may also find that people are reporting on things that are not important to your current goals.

Whatever you find, be ready to set up a different workflow that works for today. Using outdated workflows can cost your team a lot of time and the company a lot of money.

When you reduce the number of steps employees have to take to get a job done, you’ll allow them to be and feel more effective. The more people get done in a given day, the better they feel about themselves and their ability to achieve their goals.

You should look at reports, status updates, memos, and other processes within your own team as well as for your superiors and ensure they are really needed. If you can cut some of them out, you, your team and the company will benefit.

11. Hold Necessary Meetings

While you don’t want to bog yourself or your team down with meetings, you should have regular meetings that are necessary for the team to work together effectively.

When you get together for these meetings, this is the perfect time to share the vision of the company. Continue to remind them about the goals of the company both short-term and long-term.

These meetings are also a great place for them to bring any concerns to your attention. You can offer for people to meet with you after the meeting if there is something private or sensitive they would like to discuss.

Don’t fall into the trap of having too many meetings. Many times teams get together too regularly and there is no need for the meetings.

You may even want to decrease the number of people that come to the meetings in some cases. If they aren’t on a specific project, they may not need to be involved. Be careful when you split up meeting though since it can cause division in the team.

12. Don’t Micromanage

It can be tempting to want to have your fingers in everything that is going on. You want to be involved in the processes where you’re necessary but there is no need to stretch yourself thin by micromanaging.

As long as you did a good job hiring your team, you shouldn’t need to micromanage. Your team should be able to work on their own and still get work done.

If you notice that productivity is decreasing, you can deal with it as needed. What you’ll most likely find is that people are able to get more done without having to report every few minutes.

Increase Your HR Knowledge

Now that you know these important management tips, why stop there?

We have many other articles that can help you advance in your career.Bookmark your favorite sections of our site and come back later for more great reads.

© New To HR