How To Understand Your Team

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Effective team management begins with understanding your team. If you take this for granted, you put yourself at high risk for failure. People have diverse sets of values, needs, and habits, all of which will affect the results of your team. When you understand how to manage these diverse factors you can channel them to achieving your team’s goals.

It is not an easy process, but it is one worth investing in if you value the long-term success and welfare of your team. Both collectively, and as individuals, you all deserve it.

Key Takeaways:

• Understand your team by first understanding yourself, them understanding the objective facts of your situation.

• Ask questions, use surveys, and engage in science-based strategies to understand your team.

• Be patient, curious, open-minded, and professional as you try to learn more about your team.

• Promote accountability to promote trust in your team.

How To Understand Your Team

It is a continuing process to understand your team. You will always be faced with new circumstances that will require adjustments. That being said, there are several steps you can take to understand your team better.

1. Know yourself, your needs, your style. Before you understand your team, you need to understand yourself. If you don’t, then you are essentially flying blind, because your attempts will be weakened by your ignorance.

   If you know what your communication, leadership, and work styles are, you strengthen your ability to function alongside your team. As a leader, you need to be able to communicate your needs to your team, as well as understand their needs. If you understand your leadership style, you will find it easier to navigate challenges, especially in situations that conflict with your style.

   Knowing yourself as a person will also help you tackle your biases or other traits that can hurt your team.

2. Know the facts. When you get to know your team, start with objectivity. Know the exact number of people on your team and their responsibilities. Know how long they have worked under you and know their work history. Using these facts, you then want to branch out and fill them with the diverse information that makes each one of your team members unique.

3. Ask questions. To understand your team members, you need to learn about them, and to learn about them, you need to ask questions. Begin with professional questions related to their work style, communication preferences, and goals. Ask them questions about what they value and what they desire. At all times, ask questions that bring meaning to both of you. One of the best questions you can always ask is, “help me understand…” when approaching any topic. In this way, your team will show you their thought process.

4. Use surveys to get feedback. Sometimes questions are not enough. People may be unwilling or uncomfortable speaking on certain subjects. Use feedback mechanisms such as surveys to gather information about your team. Make it clear that you are invested in their success by desiring feedback to improve your understanding. These surveys can be anonymous if necessary.

5. Use science-based strategies. The field of workplace psychology is filled with information and techniques to understand employees. Use science-based methods that help you learn more about people’s personalities and strategies on how to engage them.

6. Observe and listen. At all times, observe your team and listen to them. This is true in both direct and indirect encounters. The actions and words of your team are always there to help you gauge their behavior. Don’t take your team for granted. Keep a lookout for situations that tell you more about their personalities.

Tips To Understanding Your Team

When you learn more about your team, you want to have a diverse approach. Consider the following tips to help you in your process:

• Be patient. Never overwhelm your team in your pursuit to understand them. It takes time. Learning about people can take many different forms, so don’t expect one strategy to work. Some people may not want to engage, which will take even more time.

• Be professional.Whatever method you use to learn about your team, keep it professional. It is your job to focus the team on its professional objectives, and that includes how you learn about them.

• Prioritize.You will not learn everything about everyone all at once, so choose what is most important to you. Consider your professional needs and goals as guiding factors in prioritization.

• Be flexible and open-minded. Change is inevitable, so always be ready to go outside your comfort zone. You need to set an example as a leader and promote inclusivity and diversity by willingly engaging in new ideas.

• Have a growth mindset. People are not bound by who they are, people can change. You need to be willing to change and to see the potential in others to change. A growth mindset will help you re-frame challenges as opportunities. This mindset values growth, which is also highly valued in most workplaces.

• Be curious. Similar to keeping an open mind ready for growth, curiosity will help you productively approach new situations. Whether you are analyzing others or yourself, be curious about what you find, including the thoughts and feelings that occur in the process. Curiosity will also help you ask better, more meaningful questions, which in turn will help you learn more about your team.

• Use active listening. Make sure to listen fully to your team. Hear what they have to say and confirm with them that you heard correctly. People who feel like they aren’t listened to may shut down and stop your process of learning together.

• Promote accountability. Let your team know you have their best interests in mind by holding everyone, including yourself, accountable. You want to set the expectations and goals of your team in a manner that aligns with your values, the values of the company, and, hopefully, the values of the team. The only way to make sure these expectations are met fairly is to keep everyone accountable in their pursuit.

• Keep learning. Don’t ever feel like you know someone completely. Keep learning about them because they always have the capacity to change and surprise you.

Team Management Skills

Learning about your team is one key step to being an effective team manager. Along with other skills such as:

• Leadership. You are the one responsible for the success of your team. This responsibility requires the acceptance of being a leader.

• Analysis. When you manage your team, you should analyze every situation and try to optimize the best outcomes.

• Communication. Team management requires effective communication rooted in trust. An effective leader can accommodate different communication styles while still achieving and fulfilling their needs.

• Delegation. A leader cannot do everything on their own. The effective management of a team requires the ability to delegate tasks appropriately.

• Problem solving. Teams are bound to run into problems, so a team leader needs to be ready to help solve them.

• Empathy. Empathy provides a connection with others. Empathy helps a team leader consider the emotional needs of the team which helps lead to more informed decisions.

Every team management skill builds off one another. Use these skills as you learn to understand your team.

Author

Bernadette Eichner

Bernadette Eichner has had a successful career in hospitality sales, real estate, and recruitment. In 1999, she founded HRM Resolutions, a strategic human resource consultancy, and later became a founding recruiter and investor at RecruitLoop.