Managing a Team

As an entrepreneur you might be familiar with the journey of building and managing a team.

When you started the company, it was just you, flying solo doing all the things but then you hit a wall because you’re doing too many things. After planning, searching and interviewing, you finally hire your first team member to take some tasks off your plate, which excites you!

As your business grows more and more, which is amazing, more things need to get done so you hire your 2nd and 3rd team members, and possibly more from there. But then you realize you’re too busy again so you ask yourself, “why is this happening when I have a team in place? Why can’t I seem to find free time?”

The answer is simply, managing a team can be a lot of work - even the most amazing team. Yes, even when you’ve got the right people, doing the right things with lots of skill and heart, someone still has to manage, delegate, review and approve their work.

So if managing a team feels a bit overwhelming, that’s because it is.

Here are just the Top 3 things that can eat up time and energy when it comes to managing your team…

1. Answering Questions No matter how well a task or project is laid out, your team will have questions. Questions are not a bad thing, in fact, questions provide clarity and guidance thus avoiding unnecessary mistakes and keeping projects on task and deadline. However, if the person with the answers isn’t available to give guidance, tasks and projects will stall out. Many deadlines and tasks have been dropped while a team member waits for a response.
   

2. Checking Work No one wants or intends to be a micromanager, and no one definitely wants to have someone looking over their shoulder all day every day. But the truth is that work needs to be reviewed and approved, which should be done by a manager. As much as we might like to, we cannot assume things are happening the way we expect them to. Great teams do their best work when they are working with a manager who is active and engaged in the process.
   

3. Operating from Systems Speaking of process… businesses cannot run on people alone. Some businesses have employees that stay long term but the truth is that team members will come and go. Even the most loyal. This is why documented Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) are SO important… mission critical in fact. A big part of managing a team is 1) making sure everyone has clear processes to follow and 2) ensuring everyone’s processes get documented, updated, and maintained.

Managing a team is not set it and forget it kind of thing. It is a big part of keeping your business running smoothly. And if you’re feeling like you don’t have time for all it entails, (searching, hiring, on-boarding, training, reviewing, etc), you don’t!

Once your team grows to more than one member, it makes sense that you as the business owner can have a hard time managing the team. When you’re busy managing the team, you are not busy doing the things only you can do for the business.

As a Certified Online Business Manager (OBM), People Management is one of the things I take care of for my clients. I can help you build a team(hiring to onboarding), assign tasks and projects, assist with performance reviews, manage performance issues, and much more! Leaving time for you to focus on being the CEO.

If you’re feeling like the bottleneck within your team, if projects aren’t moving along as quickly as they should, or if you know your business is reliant more on people than processes, I’d love to connect and learn more. Let’s chat!