Staff Management: How To Get The Best Out Of Your Staff

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As any staff manager knows, sometimes it can be tough to strike the right balance between managing well, and having a great rapport with your team. There always needs to be a line which isn’t crossed to ensure your staff respect you, and yet it’s often tempting to become friends with the people you spend time with every day.

Most people who work in a corporate environment spend more time with their team than they do with their families on a daily basis, and this close-knit community can make it difficult to know how best to manage your relationships at work, when staff aren’t performing as well as you would hope.

People get motivation in a number of different ways and that makes staff management difficult.  Some staff respond well to the thrill of tight deadlines and a measure of stress to bring out their best attributes. Others fall to pieces at the first sign of a looming milestone, and need to be edged along gently to make sure they are reassured throughout the process. Others still will blossom with praise, while others need criticism.

Given that in any team you probably have one of each type of person, how do you ensure your staff management skills are honed to bring out the best in each?

Here are the two strongest staff management techniques for optimising performance…

Staff Management Skill #1: Play to people’s strengths

It’s no good, no matter how tempting it may be, to identify weaknesses in your staff and attempt to remedy them. Giving a task to someone who isn’t keen to carry it out will result in a poor outcome, and a dissatisfied staff member. It makes much more sense both from a time and productivity perspective to work with your team on an individual level to establish what they do best, and try to accommodate this ability within the allocation of work for your team.

People who are good at tasks enjoy carrying them out, meaning you have a team of people eager to demonstrate their prowess and comfortable with their roles. Too many managers attempt staff development exercises in a bid to get their team to be good all-rounders, but the truth is some people will never be good at certain tasks. The sooner you accept this, the sooner your team will be working at optimum.

Staff Management Skill #2: Praise often

All human beings thrive within a supportive environment, and positive praise reinforces great work and encourages your team to continue working at optimum performance. While we often want to berate our team when they underperform, this doesn’t yield positive results. Praising for achievements is more effective than criticising for failure.

In a stressful situation, we often overlook the need to thank our team for what they have done. When you offer thanks, identify the specific achievements which each person has made, to show that you noticed the extra effort which has gone in to the task. In this way, you develop a team of confident, productive people who actively want to do a great job.

These two basic tenets of management may seem simple, and yet we naturally lapse in to habits that mean we overlook them in the passion of delivering a high-stress, low-time project. Praise and playing to staff strengths will result in a high-performance team with strong morale.

How do you get the best from your staff?

Please share your views in the comments below.

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