In It Together! – Supporting your Team

All people managers have the unenviable task of leading a group of people, there is no straight forward way to make this successful, mainly because every single person in your team is different, has different needs, is motivated by different things and has different interests, so how do you even start to support them?

The answer to this in all honesty, is to support and manage them in the way they need. Some people will need active guidance, some will be more proactive and just need to know you can be called upon when needed, so be prepared to adapt your style from team member to team member.

Sounds challenging right? And for someone who like myself is neurodivergent, not being able to apply the same way for all is confusing and potentially stressful, but it is possible to make it work and have your team all feel supported.

Here are my 6 top tips to ensure you can be the support everyone needs you to be:

1. Ask them how they like to be managed

It might sound blunt, but when bringing someone into the team, why beat around the bush and try and work out how they need to be supported? In one of your early discussions, phrase something like “How do I best support you?” or “what kind of leader do you prefer to be lead by?”. However you decide to phrase it, take note of their response and look into ways to ensure you stick to what they say. Some will openly say “I prefer to be told what you need me to do”, this is fine but there may also be an opportunity here to look at coaching them to become more proactive. If they say they don’t like direct communication, then you as a leader will need to work out a way to construct directions for them in a fluffier way.

2. Find out about them as people

Building rapport with your team members is crucial to a good relationship, this can start with learning about their personal life. Just knowing a little about their family life, where they live and their hobbies outside of work can really help you get to know them and also give you an icebreaker when chatting with them, “how are the kids?” or “how was the match at the weekend?”, crucially you don’t have to invest deeply in their interests, but you will soon find you learn a small amount which enables you to engage in conversation with them. Showing a genuine interest can really help them feel supported and part of the team.

3. Make Notes and Keep them Safe

If you have a big team or extended team, you are never going to remember these facts about everyone. So I find it useful to make basic notes/prompts for you. I use one-note and have a tab for each team members where I will make notes from our 1-1s and have a section at the top where I will highlight a few points about them and their family/life outside work.

A key point here though is to ensure you have got their permission to make the notes, not everyone will be OK with this, but work with them to understand a way that aids you to remember key points

4. Regular 1-1s where you allow them to talk

1-1s can quickly become a project status meeting or a way for you to cascade messages to your team member. Neither of these are what a 1-1 should really be used for, so do all you can to stop this now! 1-1 time is time to find out how they are doing, give them chance to talk about how they feel , what their workload is like, what challenges they are having and ask them how you can support them. This requires you to be focused (i.e, not reading emails or working on your laptop while they are talking), this may mean closing your laptop, or if the meeting is virtual, closing other apps and switching off notifications on comms channels.

5. Build Trust through delivering on Promises

The relationship between you and your team member is a 2-way interaction, and there will be a certain amount of effort on both sides. But especially while you are building a new manager-team member relationship, it’s crucial that you show your ability to be reliable. So it is important that you deliver on what you say you will do. This may be small things like providing an email address of someone they need to contact or sharing a document which they asked for. But being reliable regularly will enable trust to grow and once there is trust, the relationship can really blossom.

Openly commit to deliverables to the whole team and then follow through on them. This also enables them all to hold you accountable and will help them collectively build trust with you.

6. Praise How They Like Being Praised

Not everyone likes public praise, so ensure this is also something you ask them. We all want to celebrate successes, but some will prefer to be praised in a 1-1 and not in front of the whole team. So learning this will enable you to ensure you give them credit in the right way

These points are just the start of supporting them, but get these in place and you can really start to grow individual relationships. Then comes the bigger picture of leading the team collectively. This can sometimes mean finding a happy medium when it comes to style of communication/leadership when speaking or directing them as a group.

How do you ensure you support your team members?