How Do You Manage Your Time As a Team Leader?

Are you managing or supervising a number of people together with having to manage your own workload?

• How much time are you spending on managing your own workload?
• How much time do you manage your direct reports?

This article is to help you build awareness around your team, and how you are managing your people. I hope that you will be inspired to take a new small step to improving your leadership skills.

I have found that in different organizations and businesses, managers are very busy executing tasks – the daily grind. We are sometimes not conscious about how LITTLE we are managing our team or if we are investing in the RIGHT management activities like building relationships, mentoring, sharing information, giving performance feedback, hiring new staff.

Check-In:

Let me check in with you with a few questions:

Where are you in your company’s hierarchy?

How many people are you currently managing or supervising? How is that going?

What percentage of your role is supposed to be spent on managing your team?

How much time would you like to be spending on managing your team?

What is the gap between Actual time and Desired time?

How well are you spending your time? What activities could bring you extra value, or move your team from being good to great?

Knowing yourself:

What are your strengths as a leader?

What are your areas of improvement?

What core values drive you?

As a leader, we should know where we are strong and where we could use some help.

How well are you managing your own stuff? In order to manage our team well, a prerequisite is self-management. When we are not effective enough in our own tasks then it makes it that much harder to be able to give of ourselves and effectively manage a team.

Meetings:

Meetings have an important role in managing one’s team. It’s a time to get together and share information, challenges, receive team support, share success stories, and acknowledge great performance and results. Emails are not a replacement for meetings.

What is your preferred meeting style?

• Formal meetings – are there too many? No time to work? Or not enough meetings?
• Informal meetings – do you meet in the kitchen or corridor to have an update (Adhoc style, have meetings over lunch etc.)
• No meetings (not recommended).

What is working? What would you like to change? What balance of meetings do you believe you need?

Review your team:

Who are your team members? How well is each performing?

Does everyone know their strengths and areas of improvement?

Are each team member’s roles and responsibilities clear? (Clarity is a huge motivator)

Does each team member know what is expected of him/her?

Positive Feedback:

Giving feedback is an art. Not every organization has a culture where both positive feedback and areas of improvement are encouraged.

Employees crave positive feedback and encouragement. They crave this from their peers, direct managers, and even those much higher above them. Praise (well done, great job) is very different from positive encouragement. Positive feedback should be specific around a task, project, event, and the behavior that is being complimented. The ratio of positive feedback to negative feedback is recommended to be 5:1.

How are you at giving positive feedback that is specific? For example Sara – the report you delivered was excellent BECAUSE …

What would you like to change?

What management activities are you doing?

What would you like to be doing more of?

What would you like to do less of?

*for example if you have employees disturbing you regularly throughout the day then what can you put in place to improve the process so that you can get some work done?

How are you communicating with your team? Clarity? Method? Frequency?

How are you at acknowledging your team members?

How are you at giving feedback to your employee on how he/she can improve?

What ratio do you have of positive feedback to negative feedback (areas to improve)?

Summary

In summary, I have noticed that a small change that a manager or supervisor does can make a remarkable change on the employee and also the team.

What would be that something new that you didn’t do yesterday or the day before that you would like to implement as a leader? Make a decision to try something new, and see how that works for you and your team.