Managing a team can be very challenging, especially if you’ve never done it before. If you’re running a journal, and this is your first foray into journal management, this can be especially challenging. Having a journal management system can help to keep you organized. But it’s important to know what you have a clear sense of what you need from your managers.
There are many different people with different managerial styles. Some people want nothing to do with managing day-to-day elements of a journal. Other people excel in that environment.
In this article we’ll be going over two different kinds of teams and the ways in which they need to be handled differently.
Team management basics
The skills needed to run a team can vary, team by team. While there are quite a few different types of skills that people will often point to, here we’ll be looking at three specific skills:
- Clear communication skills
- Organizational skills
- Problem solving skills
Now, running a journal effectively requires more than just these three skills, but they are important. Let’s go into how these skills can help when managing a team. While having powerful tools like a journal management system can help make life easier for you and your employees, skill are still valuable.
Clear communication skills
From training to requesting employees to help, managing a team requires clear communication skills. Generally, a manager’s primary goals tend to be to help members of their team accomplish their tasks. These tasks are often delegated or determined by the manager to achieve goals for the company. Helping team members to understand what they need to do is critical. In addition, helping a team to also understand why goals need to be accomplished can help them to self-motivate.
When managing a team, making sure that everyone understands the goals they’re working towards can have a major impact on project performance and on team happiness.
Organizational skills
Perhaps one of the most important parts of managing a team is making sure that nothing falls through the cracks. Sometimes there are simply too many projects and not enough time. Knowing which projects need to be prioritized and which can be put on the back burner is important.
Keeping track of many different things is part of a manager’s job. This can extend from deadlines and pain points for any given project, to remembering people’s birthdays and the names of kids. With so many details and so much information to keep track of, the importance of very good organizational skills cannot be overstated. Part of being well organized is knowing who is good at what on your team. Letting talented employees work, and trusting their judgement is part of being a good team manager. Even thought being organized is important, creating opportunities to streamline processes and make things more efficient can help your team to accomplish large goals.
Problem solving skills
Projects rarely go from conception to completion without issues. These can be anything from critical team members being knocked out due to an illness to funding being insufficient for a project. In any case, managers need to be able to roll with the punches and solve problems. Generally, we can break down problems into two broad categories: foreseeable and unforeseeable.
Foreseeable problems can often be mitigated by careful planning. Many companies that publish journals use journal management systems in order to avoid preventable issues (what kind of databases you need to prepare, how to train employees, and so on). Unforeseeable problems are more complicated. As their name implies, you can’t plan for them.
In these cases, knowing when to take action, when to delegate tasks, and when to see help is important.
Managing different teams
Not all teams are the same. Some are small and some are large. Some teams need careful supervision, while other teams might not need much supervision at all. Knowing what kind of team you have, and how best to manage it will make your job easier. In this article, we’re going to briefly talk about two different kinds of teams: in-house teams and remote teams.
In-house teams
Unlike remote teams, in-house teams tend to be in the same space as the managers. This means that the team can be more efficient. Partly because of the proximity and partly because of the genera lack of delays, in-house teams can often work smoothly together on complicated projects. In addition, managers can address problems and help more effectively.
Where this can be problematic however is that managers may become prone to micromanagement. Micromanagement can be very bad for team morale and employee happiness. It demonstrates a lack of trust in the employee and can severely impact team cohesion.
Making sure that your employees are supported is critical, but so is trusting that you have the right people working on your team.
Remote teams
In this day and age, there are many tools that have allowed the decentralization of the workplace. Beyond the obvious changes to workplaces in the last couple of years, there are other reasons to consider remote work. For example, moving away from physical office locations can have a major impact on a company’s bottom line. Not needing to have physical offices/satellite locations can save tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of dollars. While not every business can operate remotely, many elements of those businesses can.
When running a remote team, there has to be a change in perspective for a manager. Managing a team over the internet is not the same as sitting in the same room as them. First of all, it requires a greater degree of trust in your employees. Second, you will also need a secure method of communication. Finally, a very clear understanding of expectations must exist.
In a traditional workplace, you can see the other employees and largely know what they’re doing. But in a remote-based system, you need to change your priorities. Developing a system of achievable goals and metrics is a much better system for a remote team.
Make sure that you determine what metrics and targets you want to make sure your team hits.
Journal management systems and other tools
When you’re running any team, one of the best things that you can do as a manager is to make sure that tasks are easily accomplished. Wasting dozens (or hundreds) of hours on projects that can easily and cheaply be outsourced is something that you may have a direct influence over.
Using journal management systems can help your team to avoid spending significant resources on basic tasks like updating databases and cross referencing information in spreadsheets. Also, using management tools allows you to have a system that all your team members can tap into. This can help to avoid people overlapping on tasks, or even sending out emails to clients or reviewers too many times. Because there are so many different kinds of tools that can help you to achieve your goals and keep your team running smoothly, we’ll go into greater detail in another article. In that article, we’ll talk about the problems and success strategies associated with tools for managers.
From communication tools to management tools, knowing what can help you and your team to be successful can make all the difference in the world. To learn more about the different ways that a journal management system can help you and your team, click here to book a demo today.