Let’s start by talking about what your primary job is as a manager.
It’s actually pretty simple.
Your job as a manager is to help your people be more effective in their job and to grow and develop along the way. Essentially, your job is to get the best out of them.
Great people will flourish in an environment that liberates and amplifies their energy. Without this, even the brightest of people won’t meet their full potential.
So, the question becomes, how do you create the right environment for them?
Spoiler: it has nothing to do with perks, benefits or their physical location.
How to create the right environment for your team
Effective managers will create the right environment for their team by focusing on three things:
- Support
- Trust
- Respect
No manager will say that their team lacks these or that they don’t value them. But the problem is that they aren’t very tangible, which means that most managers won’t proactively focus on them.
Instead, we tend to focus on elements of an environment that are more tangible, such as benefits, perks and their office location.
If you want to be an effective manager and create an environment that enables your team to do their best work, here is how you can do that in a concrete way.
Support
Here are some very actionable steps that you can take to create a supportive environment for your team.
Give people the tools, information and training that they need to succeed
Your team will need a foundational level of support in order to do their jobs to a good level. Take the time to understand from them what this support looks like. This could include things such as:
- Software that makes their job easier or more efficient.
- Key elements that all briefs should include, allowing them to understand a task or project well.
- Online or offline courses or training that will be valuable for their development.
If you’re not sure what to offer in terms of support, simply ask your team if they have the tools, information and training they need to be successful and if not, ask what can be done to improve things.
Develop skills and experience
You can provide support on an individual level by making a continuous effort to develop the skills, knowledge and experience of your team members. Part of this will happen during the course of their work, but you need to proactively and deliberately work on things such as:
- Effective personal development plans that are kept up to date.
- Regular one-on-one meetings that catch (and fix) issues early.
- Look for opportunities to expose them to new and challenging situations.
Respect
Respect is a vital component of a good team environment, but isn’t usually thought about as something that can proactively be worked on and developed. Sure, it can sometimes take care of itself, but I’d rather not leave something like this to chance.
Understand the career goals of your team
A relatively easy way to demonstrate your respect for your team is to take a genuine interest in what drives and motivates them in their career. Everyone will be slightly different in this regard, so it’s important that you treat them all differently and don’t make the mistake of giving them generic personal development goals.
In addition to this, you should be sensitive to life changes that happen outside of work, but may still affect their career goals and focus. For example, if someone is having to support a partner financially during a difficult time, they may be more sensitive to pay reviews and promotions.
Connect personal goals to the wider company
Everyone wants to feel that the work they do actually matters and makes a difference. It’s pretty demoralising and demotivating to feel like if you left, no one would notice.
You can demonstrate respect to your team by very clearly connecting the work that they do to the wider mission and goals of the company. You can do this via cascading company goals which we’ve talked about previously:
The subtle and no-so-obvious benefit here is that it shows respect from the company to the individual. Connecting someone’s work to the company goals shows that their work matters which is a huge signal of respect.
Trust
Finally, probably the most obvious element that a team environment needs in order to thrive – trust. There are a number of ways to build trust with your team, let’s look at two of the most actionable ways that you can do it.
Give people freedom and autonomy
The ultimate way to tell someone that you trust them is to let them do their jobs in the way that they see best. Of course, they will need direction and support along the way, but you definitely want to avoid micromanagement at the very least which can destroy trust.
This also means giving them freedom to make decisions over the things that make the most sense for them to control. Again, this requires some guidance and support from you so that they know what falls into the remit for making decisions.
But if you can get this balance right, it’s a super effective way to build trust.
Believe the best in people
An important mindset to try and maintain as a manager is to believe the best in people. This not only helps prevent micromanagement, it can also help you retain a positive attitude towards your team when things go wrong. This is because when things go wrong, it can be easy for a blame culture to emerge, Whereas with a mindset of believing that people actually want to perform well and do their best, you tend to focus on how to fix a problem and support someone, as opposed to blaming them.
