As a manager, you wear many hats. In fact, you wear ten hats if you ask Henry Mintzberg. However, this blog post talks about you and your team in terms of how you manage them. It’s a humongous topic! So, I’ve tried my best to condense it down to just five tips that should help you or one of your managers to become a better manager starting from today. Let’s get started.

1. Focus on your relationships

Your relationships with your team are so important! They work for you and everything they do is for you. If you have a great working relationship with your team, they are likely to work harder for you and help you achieve better results. Do you agree? If you have poor working relationships with them, well, as you can imagine, they’ll work less, and the quality of work may be poor. So, if you’re looking to build your relationships with your team, I’ve listed a few tips below:

1. Listen to everyone in your team – they have a voice.
2. Recognise their emotions and respond accordingly – continue to work on your Emotional Intelligence.
3. Praise them for work your pleased with and talk with them quietly when it’s not done the way you wanted to give them another chance.
4. Be their leader.

These should help you get started building better working relationships with your team. Let me know if these are what you currently do or will start doing in the comments below.

2. Empower your team to solve problems

Most people like to solve problems. A good manager will train their team to solve problems; they give them freedom and responsibility. A bad manager will often own their team’s problems because their team is unable to solve it. But, now, you, the manager must solve it. If all your team’s problems come to your attention, you should ask yourself 'can my team solve them?'. And if the answer is “yes”, then start training them to solve problems as a team.

3. Understand what motivates your team

Everyone is motivated differently, and everyone can be motivated. But, you need to find out exactly what motivates each individual in your team. Once you’ve found that, you’ll have a motivated team working towards your goals. For example, the staff at Social Enterprise Kent are primarily part-time because they're parents or in education, simple being flexible with their hours, more or less in certain weeks during half-term and summer holidays, maintains and improves their motivation. What motivates your team?

4. Learn to delegate

The “Super You” needs support from time to time. Your team is there to support you. Learning to delegate will prevent you from stress and work overload. If you think about it, you’ll be able to churn out more finished work as your team is helping you. Your team will develop their knowledge and skills, which is good, right?

5. Learn, learn, learn, and never stop learning

As a training provider, we, of course, believe in continuous learning. We always recommended that any new manager or manager with no training attends leadership and management training because they'll gain a vast range of knowledge in such a short space of time that usually takes years' to learn in practice. But, it's not just this type of learning I'm referring to. Read management books, blogs like this, learn from feedback and criticism, and from everything around you. And you'll be well on your way to becoming a better manager.

This blog post was originally published by Nick Holmes (Marketing Officer) on sektraining.org.uk. Some adaptations were made this version.