It’s not always clear how to run a diverse set of individuals in the best way, after all, every person will respond to a leadership style differently. That being said, there are essential markers to look out for and prioritize.
Now, it’s easy to talk through all the leadership strategies one might use, especially in difficult circumstances like managing a reputational crisis. That said, none of those tips work without first addressing the grounding element – keeping your team on the same page.
Of course, simply assuming your team is together and bound as one unit isn’t good enough. It’s important to make certain, through continual verifiable action, that your team is correctly briefed, communicating, and working from the same set of standards.
How can you make certain this is the case? In this post, we’ll discuss that and more:
What Do Your Team Meetings Look Like?
It’s important to have ONE channel in which your team can look for updates or specific instructions made company-wide. This might be on your dashboard as part of a system suite you use, or it could be through particular app workspaces such as those offered by Notion. Either way, these should provide notifications, and even require verification upon delivery to make sure your employees have read the notice.
But what about team meetings? Well, how are they structured? If you can implement a remote work video conferencing norm so that even remote workers and outsourced personnel can attend the meeting, then that’s great. You can also make certain the points for each meeting are available ahead of time, so attendees know what to bring and how to prepare. Condensing final agreements and sending out notes taken during the meeting can also bring people up to speed. It’s about a healthy balance of documentation, centralization, and getting things down in writing that will enable you a healthier outcome.
Implementing Collaborative Project Management Tools
Collaborative management tools really will make a profound difference to your output, especially if they can have oversight by management. That might include using the Microsoft suite, or perhaps a CRM software in which your staff can correctly manage one another’s duties, assign tasks, and see what other members of the department are working from.
These project management tools should all be compatible with one another. The last thing you need is siloed information thanks to incompatible files. That’s why many businesses choose a few mainstay apps with integration features and stick with them, as opposed to using many different utilities. Streamlined communication is often good communication.
Curate Your Glossary & Centralisation Of Documents
“If a lion could speak, we couldn’t understand him.” This much-discussed aphorism by Wittgenstein suggested that even if an animal of that nature could talk in our language, his reference points would be so unfamiliar to us that we wouldn’t be able to understand what he meant. In business terms, this adage suggests that a team operating together, but not working from the same template, becomes a confused group of people.
Curating your glossary and centralizing the documents you use, then, is always a worthwhile use of your time. For example, this commercial contractor glossary can make sure your marketing team, outreach staff, customer support team, and even outsourced help know exactly how to discuss certain technical terms in your industry even if they’re not on the technical side of your business.
If you do employ that English-speaking Lion, that will let you enjoy those aforementioned reference points and communicate with one another. We can’t say animal rights advocacy groups will be too happy with you, though.
A Notion Of Goodwill
Even good friends can have misunderstandings. For this reason, it’s important to make sure your team knows to treat one another with professional goodwill, and if it seems like an insult has been given, to give that party the benefit of the doubt until it’s repeated.
This might be as simple as getting a name wrong with a light correction, making sure that your HR policies are there to help foster mutual cooperation and to escalate issues if they’re truly egregious, or to invest in team building to make sure disparate members of staff, even if they come from different backgrounds, can understand and respect one another more readily.
After all, it’s important to note that while we’re professionals first at work, we’re also human, and needless conflict or disagreements can be properly managed with some gentle intervention on your behalf. Over time, that could potentially improve the atmosphere of your workplace.
With this advice, we hope you can more easily bring your team on the same page, using many technical and social methods of achieving that.
Header Image Credit: Pixabay/ Pexels
