Five Smart Strategies for Project Managers to Make Teams Successful

business managers

Whether you are a CEO, a project manager, or a department head, you have to cope with many challenges while handling the team. You can see multiple opportunities for improving the lives of employees and clients, but at the end of the day, what matters the most is how you can grab these opportunities while overcoming challenges. Thankfully, you can achieve this objective simply by relating well with colleagues and leading them to success.

Let’s go through some of the smart supervision or leadership strategies at the workplace that can help you every day to lead people toward goals. Though there is no shortcut to success, these five tips can assist you to make your teams successful over the period. Let’s start with the most obvious strategy for achieving all objectives- Time Management.

Top Five Strategies for Ensuring Success in Every Project

1. Time Management and Estimation

Wastage of productive time at the workplace is one of the biggest hurdles for supervisors or project managers. Though optimal productivity and proper time scheduling are ideal situations, they remain unachievable in most cases. Therefore, it is necessary to prioritize work or tasks using a task management tool. With this, effective time management and proper time estimation can also help.

As a project manager, you should also learn the art of time planning and estimation. In most cases, we either overestimate the time or underestimate the time we need to accomplish various tasks. But, at the workplace, it is imperative to get rid of this planning fallacy. You can do so by actively taking part in the scheduling. It is better to take the opinions of your team members about the best-case and worst-case time estimates so that your team can remain in between while keeping the stress or workload at bay.

Another way of getting rid of the planning fallacy is to break tasks into smaller, manageable tasks. As a superior officer, you have more insights than your other team members and you can relieve their pressure by giving them achievable targets.

2. Set Clear Goals

Another important aspect is you need to set goals clearly along with realistic expectations and timelines. One of the biggest hurdles in the way of meeting the deadlines is most of the time employees beating around the bush if objectives, planning, and timelines are not clear. It is fairly possible that your team members remain in a reactive mode instead of a proactive mode in absence of realistic expectations.

Here some points are important- give your team members the freedom of saying ‘no’ whenever is necessary, nurture a culture of ‘work hard, party harder’ without being bossy, listen to every team member, and use advanced task management tool. All these points will not only help you set clear goals and expectations but also save your colleagues from stress and burnout-like situations at the workplace.

Another important thing is to save your team from distractions like social media, unnecessary calls, and even unproductive chats. However, here it is fair to mention that at times when fatigue catches your employees, they may start wasting time on social media and easily get distracted. Therefore, it is necessary to take care of this factor. 

3. Audit Time Regularly

A time audit is not a fancy word or jargon in the corporate world. In today’s competitive scenario, where every team strives for accomplishing the project on time, time audit has become a necessity. Time audit enables employees to find out how much time they spend on time-wasters like reading emails, attending insignificant meetings, and gossips at the workplace. Many companies opt for monthly time audits just to help employees get rid of such time-wasters.

Another major benefit of a time audit is it assists your team members to adhere to the agreed-upon schedules. Every employee can write a breakdown of their workday along with their inputs regarding time spending and beliefs related to work. As a project manager, you can talk to them one by one and figure out the reasons for their divergence. Whether tasks take more time than expected or more tasks are allocated- this can be found out effectively after a time audit.

4. Promote Learning Environment

A healthy workplace can be defined as a place where workers can have learning opportunities while working. The work environment that motivates employees for innovative thinking and promotes self-directed learning is the best thing you can do at the workplace. As a supervisor, team lead, or project manager, you can be one of the mentors of your team members. You can check the task management tool to know the skills of employees and create a learning program for them accordingly. When you keep their expertise at the core, it would be easy to make them learn new stuff.

You can also put inexperienced employees or new joiners in a situation or event that will force them to learn and utilize specific skills. Finally, it is necessary to review the performance of an employee regularly. Whether it is about learning or working, performance should be reviewed properly to make the plan.

5. Delegate Tasks Efficiently

Task delegation is an art, and if you want to be a great supervisor or a project manager, you need to excel in this art. It starts with picking the best candidate for the task based on skills and capabilities. You need to delegate tasks early to give your team members a chance to discuss if necessary. When you give more time to a person for planning and preparing for specific tasks, you reduce their burden and chances of error. Also, give all responsibility to one person to make them accountable. The last but important point is you need to explain the goals and expectations for every delegated task clearly to your team members. Apart from providing active support and guidance, real-time communication is necessary to remove any ambiguities and mistakes in project completion.

Concluding Lines

What is necessary to be a great supervisor or a project manager? Well, these five smart strategies can always assist you to achieve this position. You can keep the focus on assisting your team members for their personal and professional goals as a guiding light for your juniors. 

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