Line managers have various responsibilities toward employees and organizations. It’s not easy being a line manager when you’re expected to have diverse skills. Line managers should be cross-trained to keep up with changing industry demands.
There are some qualities line managers should have that stand out more than others. The same goes for the techniques line managers should follow to help their teams excel.
But what are they? Here are the five techniques that you can use to become an incredible line manager.
- Keep the Learning Process Going
The best tip that line managers can follow is to keep the learning process going. This process shouldn’t stop throughout their careers. As a line manager, you can never have too much knowledge or too many skills. You can learn from various parties you work with as a line manager.
Senior management and your team members are just some of the parties you can learn from. You could also learn from clients and suppliers that you come into contact with. But, learning from these sources can take up a significant amount of time.
This kind of learning comes with experience and isn’t available on-demand. If you’d want quicker learning, you can opt for a line manager course. Such a course would help you learn the nuances of what line management is all about. You can learn about various aspects of working with your team if you sign up for these courses.
Also, remember that the industry you’re working in isn’t the same today as it was years ago. You would need to stay abreast of the best leadership techniques to keep up with your industry.
Learning the right skills would also help you steer your team members in the right direction. It would show you how to understand the needs of your team and how to fulfill them. It would also leave you better equipped to deal with more experienced staff as time goes by.
- Practice Empathy
This may not be conventional advice but a line manager should practice empathy every day with their team members. Empathizing with your team members will make it easier for you to work with them in the long run. After all, no one wants to work with a manager that’s too hard on them.
But, this is often easier said than done in most organizations. As a line manager, you’ll likely be facing pressure from senior management to deliver results. To achieve these results, it’s only natural that you’ll want your team members to do their best.
When they fall short of these expectations, it’s easy to point fingers and hold them accountable. But, this isn’t always the right approach for many reasons. One, your team members might grow to resent you if you blame them for every little mistake. This will make them less inclined towards following your instructions in the future.
Two, it’ll create a work environment with distrust between you and your team members. And three, it may add to the pressures employees are already facing in the workplace. This in turn may further hamper their performance at work.
Practicing empathy will let your team members know you care about them. This may spur them on to do better at their jobs. It’ll also create a better working relationship between you that will endure the test of time.
- Efficiently Delegate Tasks
It doesn’t matter if you have devised the best strategies for your organization if you can’t achieve them. After all, implementation is as important as planning for a line manager. You could argue that a line manager’s job can be more challenging than that of senior management.
It’s often easier to make plans than it is to carry them out to the tee. So, it’s important to delegate tasks to your team to see them get done quicker. Delegating tasks will also help your team to improve their skills.
It would give them more autonomy over working on their projects. In the long run, this will help them to shoulder greater responsibilities.
- Improve Time Management
You can never overestimate the importance of good time management for a line manager. If you want your team to produce results, you have to first work on managing your time better. After all, you can’t keep your projects on track if you can’t manage your time properly first.
You can practice good time management by breaking up tasks into smaller segments. This would allow you to focus better on each task at hand before moving on to the next. It would also allow you to see each task to its completion and prevent errors.
Your team members might work on their time management skills seeing your example. There’s no better way to lead than by example and you should follow the same as a line manager.
- Manage Resources Better
You should know how to manage your resources well to tackle the workload in your department. Simply delegating tasks to team members and hoping they get done is far from enough. You should take out the time needed to divide the right resources for each project.
In this way, your team members will know exactly what they’re working with to get work done. This will help avoid misunderstandings and inefficiency in the long run. You should consult senior management to understand which tasks need to be prioritized.
This will help you use your resources the right way to get the most important tasks done first. It will also teach you how to make the best use of the resources that are available to you.
Effective management of resources is likely to help your department improve organizational efficiency. So, it makes sense to spend time allocating resources before the start of any project.
Conclusion
Managing a team shouldn’t be as challenging as it seems with the help of these tips. You need to remember that you should be working as one unit to meet the goals of your organization. No one is above the strategic goals of any company, and line managers should bear this in mind.
This will help them grow more understanding and attentive to the needs of their team members. It’ll also help them grow more empathetic towards themselves when the need arises. As a line manager, you should know how to strike the balance between firmness and empathy.
You should know how to get work done without driving employees up the way. You should also know how to meet the directives of senior management. Fortunately, you’ll be able to do all this and more with the help of our tips.