.png){kind=small}
“The gardener cannot actually ‘grow’ tomatoes, squash, or beans — they can only foster an environment in which the plants do so.” - General Stanley McChrystal.
Having a strong digital team is essential for any businesses. But what does it take to manage a digital team effectively?
- First and foremost, you need to be a good communicator. You need to be able to clearly articulate tasks and expectations to your team, and you need to be available to answer any questions they may have.
- You also need to be organised. This means creating clear and concise project plans, and then tracking the progress of your team against those plants.
- Finally, you need to be flexible. Things will inevitably go wrong at some point, so you need to be able to adapt on the fly and make changes as needed.
When you lead a digital team, you will likely have several employees handling a variety of tasks. For example, your organisation may have a developer team, QA team, design team, marketing team, etc. Depending on the number of clients and projects you are working on, managing all these teams can be quite hectic.
Managing a digital team is essential to business success and growth. So it’s important to manage them effectively to avoid bad decisions or mistakes. This article provides some tips to help you manage your digital team more effectively and increase productivity and happiness.
Serve Your Teams
As a team manager, it is important to act as a servant leader in order to best empower your team and help them reach their full potential. This includes being available to explain the mission and reasoning behind company decisions, removing any obstacles or roadblocks the team may encounter, and providing support for the team’s decisions, methods, and outputs.
Scheduling regular check-ins with your team is important to make sure you’re always aware of what they need from you in order to be successful. Asking them directly what you can do to help them will go a long way in building a strong relationship of trust and mutual respect.
Setup Clear Processes
Explicit procedures allow teams to work more efficiently and cohesively. By taking the time to create a set of logs that clearly describes the role of everyone involved, you can help define authoring and approval processes to accelerate content production.
When team members know their jobs and what is expected of them, they can work more efficiently without wasting time figuring out the next step. Plus, when newteam members join the digital team, they can catch up much faster because everything is organised.
Having a set clear process in place makes it easier for team members to collaborate because everyone knows their responsibilities. Involving the whole team in creating the process helps to ensure that the procedures make sense and fit everyone's needs. After all, they are the ones who have to follow the procedures, so they should have a say in how they're created.
Promote Collaboration and Open Communication
Honesty, transparency, and collaboration are key values to uphold in any team -especially a digital one. As their leader, it's important to set the tone and always be transparent with your team. This will demonstrates how you work together and how teamwork can improve productivity.
When it comes to digital communications, it's important to ask your team how they prefer to communicate. Some teams may prefer to use collaboration software like Apollo or Google Docs, while others may have their own well-defined project tool that they prefer. No matter what, the important thing is that everyone is on the same page and knows how to communicate effectively.
Encourage your team to take action based on the results they see. If everyone on the team is only focused on their individual performance, it's going to be hard to see progress being made towards the company's bottom line. If your team currently has a system where designers hand off Photoshop files to developers without much communication, you may need to build more collaboration into your process. Try incorporating some aspects of design thinking into your digital projects. This means starting with the solution in mind and letting everyone imagine the end result instead of just focusing on their own work until delivery.
Furthermore, it's important to give praise when your team hits their targets and makes you proud of their progress - this will make them feel appreciated for their hard work. If something does happen to go wrong with the project, don't just lay the blame on them. Instead, have an open discussion with your team about what might have caused the problem and how to avoid it in future so that everyone is on the same page.
Focus on Learning and Improvement
The digital world is always changing, so it's important to stay on top of the latest trends and technologies. You and your team need to be constantly learning and adapting to the changes in order to stay ahead of the competition. That's why it's important to attend courses, seminars, and industry conferences. Not only will you gain new knowledge, but you'll also get new ideas that could change your whole strategy.
Experimentation is key - a digital team that only sticks to what they know won't get very far. And it's okay for some experiments to fail - that's how we learn and become better. By beta testing new environments and being careful with segmentation, testing, and iteration, we can reduce the risk of failure.
But we shouldn't only focus on improving team members - sometimes the problem lies in outdated strategies. Make sure everyone knows that the strategy is flexible and can be adapted to new insights. The same goes for internal processes - as the team grows and changes, so should the process.
Delegate Tasks and Encourage Others To Do The Same
As a team manager, it's important to know everyone's strengths and weaknesses in order to be able to delegate tasks more effectively. By assigning projects that employees are more likely to excel at based on their individual strengths, not only will projects be completed more efficiently but employees will also be happier with the work they are doing. Delegating projects in this way will result in increased productivity and satisfaction among your team members.
Furthermore, it's important to teach others how to delegate tasks properly. Your manager likely already has knowledge about each team member's individual strengths and weaknesses - so make sure this information is being utilised to its full potential. If you don't delegate, you'll be left feeling bogged down with unnecessary tasks that could have easily been completed by someone else. There's no need for you to waste your time on something mundane and simple when there are other people who are getting paid to do it.
Conclusion
Leading a digital team can be difficult if you lack the fundamental knowledge and tools. However, the software can only do so much. An understanding of human nature is essential to make everything work smoothly.
To be most effective, digital teams need autonomy to self-organise, self-manage, and self-execute. Trust the people who are closest to the job and empower them to make the right decisions. This way, you'll create an effective team that is able to work cohesively and efficiently.
Lastly, we mustn't forget that communication and collaboration are key, especially when we want to see results and keep learning. It's important to remember that in order for things to run smoothly, we have to lead by example.
Contact us now for info on how managing your digital team effectively.