Team Management
The 4 Things Every Team Manager Should Know
And they’re not “be nice.”
Over the past 6 or 7 months at The Knowledge Society, I’ve had the chance to be the project manager or PM on three different projects, ranging from one focusing on recognizing stem cell exhaustion to another on increasing women’s digital employment in Senegal through e-commerce.
It’s fair to say that along the way I’ve learned a thing or two and I’m going to share them with you today.
1. You Need to Keep Morale High. Here’s How.
When working on a hard, real-world problem for weeks on end, morale’s bound to take a hit. It’s your job to hype the team up. An unmotivated team produces crappy content. You can change that.
But that’s easier said than done especially since you’re part of the team too and can get tired. How do you keep the team on their best attitude without exhausting yourself too?
Well, I’ve tried out a few different methods and I’m here to tell you about the ones that worked best.
Fun Facts Galore
This was a fairly recent idea I had when working on the women's employment project in Senegal. I was on a team with 3 awesome people but since we had such a huge task in front of us and so little time (around 4 weeks), I wanted to try something different.
We were working on a problem that was geographically so far away from us, so I thought finding and sending fun facts about Senegal everyday would result in three favourable outcomes…
- Higher morale since not everything is work-related.
- A deeper team bond since we’d discuss topics outside of work.
- A deeper understanding of the culture as we begin to see pieces of a puzzle come together and give us a fuller view of the country and people.
And I’m proud to say that it achieved the three things above! You might think that this isn’t applicable to all situations. Your team may not be working on a problem in a place you don’t know much about.
There are many ways to adapt the idea though. Let’s say your team is working on increasing the sale of iPhones. You could send daily fun facts on the history of Apple and their products. Easy peasy!
Side note: To be completely honest, I didn’t send fun facts throughout the entire project because it became tiring for me. So I suggest taking the time to preplan your facts early on in the project when you’re still full of energy.
Positive Messages and Wacky Gifs Go a Long Way
Whether you say gifs or jifs (which, by the way, is wrong according to me), there’s no doubt that they cheer people up.
It might be cheesy but Giphy is your friend; people like being rewarded for their work and from what I could tell, this at least made us take ourselves a little less seriously!
Positive messages are a great idea too. During my second time as a PM, I got some great advice to cheer the team up by reminding us of the impact our solution could have.
We were working on increasing the adoption rate of contact tracing apps in Minnesota and by simply quantifying the impact we could have, I was able to motivate the team!
The last tip within this category is giving specific encouragement to each team member. Avoid cliche phrases like “good job!”, even though it’s undoubtedly the easiest way of providing motivation. They’re great in moderation but they’re simply impersonal.
If someone on your team has been killing it with their graphic design skills, just give them a shoutout and it’ll be much more effective than a general “good work!”
2. Be As Specific As Humanly Possible
This is by far the most underrated tip when it comes to leading or managing a team. You need to be specific in two areas if you want to get anything done…
- Deadlines (even for menial tasks)
- The task itself (make sure to specify what it entails)
Let’s break these two down.
Make it Specific: Deadlines
Your absolute worst enemy when you have a ton of stuff to get done is a vague deadline like “get this task done.” When??
Everyone, including both you and I, have a tendency to leave things to the last minute. But what happens when there is no last minute?
It just doesn’t get done at all. So what should you do next time?
Get x done by 9pm tomorrow.
But I’ve been in this position and know that you might feel awkward or bossy doing this. First off, it’s important to set a culture where it’s okay for the PM to enforce these things. It’s for the better of the whole team.
To add on, make sure to explain to your team why you’re doing this. Even show them a paper or two to really help them understand that this method works.
Another tip is to include your own tasks in the messages you share with your team. Don’t just assign tasks; show that you’re assigning work to yourself too.
Make it Specific: Tasks
This next one is just as important as specific as deadlines, but it’s probably talked about less.
As I said before, we all have a tendency to do the bare minimum. So if your instructions are “research gene editing” you’ll likely end up with the very first result from Wikipedia. How do you avoid that? With something like…
Read through 3 scientific papers and take notes on them
There’s no way to get a one-sentence answer and say you complied with the above instructions unless you admit that you completely ignored them!
But what if the task isn’t countable? Well, turns out most things are like “finish 10 slides” and “contact 20 people”. But if it isn’t, use time constraints: “do this for 1 hour”.
Let’s bring the two ideas of specific deadlines and tasks together now in an example.
3. Make Your Expectations Clear + Easy to Find
Have you ever led a meeting, said what tasks everyone should have done, then ended without sending a reminder of the tasks?
If you have, then ❌. That’s a big red buzzer for you. If your expectations/instructions aren’t super easy to find and follow, then guess what? They won’t get followed.
This isn’t me being cynical, it’s just the way most of us humans work. Now onto how to combat this.
Summarize The Meeting
I just mentioned this but make sure to summarize the meeting. What important things did you get done and what does each individual person need to get done before the next meeting?
This is great both for someone who might have forgotten as well as someone who missed the meeting.
It might take an extra 10 minutes but believe me, you won’t regret it.
Make Your Messages Engaging + Have a Way of Confirmation
I’ll bet you $100 you didn’t read more than a sentence of the above example. Why? Because it was so long and the absolute opposite of engaging! After several projects worth of trial and error, I think I know what can really make or break a good message. One that people will actually read.
- The (appropriate) use of emojis
- The use of bolding and italics
- The use of bulleted and numbered lists + line breaks
Take a look at this example now. Oh, it’s so much nicer to look at! The important points jump out immediately with the use of bolding and italics, telling the reader what they should be paying attention to.
The use of a few emojis makes everything come alive and gives the reader an idea of what the writing might be about.
The line breaks give the reader some room to breathe and let them take everything in.
What’s one element I haven’t mentioned yet? The last line:
Thumbs up this message to let me know you’ve read it!
There’s nothing more frustrating than feeling like your team isn’t reading what you’re sending. But why wonder when you can easily get confirmation?
By asking for some sort of reaction (if you’re on Slack/Discord) or a simple reply, you’re setting an expectation for the team to read your messages and you can know for sure that they’re received what you’ve sent.
4. Play to People’s Strengths
Pardon my language but one of the absolute dumbest things you can do as a PM is to split up the work completely evenly without considering everyone’s skills and weaknesses.
Getting a really legit project done isn’t about everyone doing the same work. Does everyone at Google or Apple split up everything that needs to get done evenly? No, that’s ridiculous!
If your end product is going to be a slide deck and you’re starting your research from scratch, then the team member who’s really good at graphic design might not do the bulk of their work until closer to the end. And that’s okay.
Keep in mind that this doesn’t mean people shouldn’t try new things. But if there’s one person who’s exceptional at math and financial analysis then don’t put someone else on that task. Do what makes sense.
TL;DR
Like every good post-meeting message, every good article also has a TL;DR!
- Use concepts like daily fun facts, personalized positive messages, and goofy gifs to keep morale high
- Make both deadlines and tasks incredibly specific to avoid minimum-effort work
- Always create summaries of your meetings and make your messages engaging through bolding/italics + emojis
- Play to every team member’s strengths
👀 Curious to see the projects that helped me learn all of this as a PM? Here they are.
Hey there 👋 Parmin here; I’m a 15 y/o student studying stem cells at The Knowledge Society 🧪 Everyday, I aspire to uncover the secrets of biology and learn something new! Make sure to follow me on Medium to hear about every new article I post, connect with me on LinkedIn, or contact me at parminsedigh@gmail.com! Also subscribe to my monthly newsletter to learn about every cool, new thing I’m working on ✍️
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