Having spent the last 10 years managing teams of Techies, PRs, Paid and Natural Search experts, Social Media and Influence marketers, the broad spectrum of personalities, talent and preferred working styles between them is vast.
Introverted vs extraverted, pre-planner vs pressure prompted, thinkers vs feelers
How do you create space for the thinkers, collaboration for the extraverts and make sure you’re hitting target?
Managing your multi-discipline team is an operational art form not to be under estimated, to get the best out of the team, the work they’re delivering, elevating your business to achieve your goals.
In this post I am going to explore some of the methods you should be using to get the very best out of your team.
Shared goals
Unify your team, set collaborative goals and clear lines of ownership. Having shared goals and KPIs so all individuals are working collectively to the same goal. Steering the ship in the same direction and driving towards your core business objective.
Centralised, prioritised planning
One team, one plan, real time updates. Your strategy should be prioritised, with fixed timelines aligned to achieving your common goals and KPI. With clear weekly deliverables and owners responsible for those tasks. This will highlight any areas of dependency between team members work to ensure smooth roll out, help you identify areas of opportunity across disciplines and get more out of the work you are doing.
Communication has to be real-time, so at any given time you have full access to exactly where you are against targets and activity. Shared online documents, such as Google Drive, are a great place to start in the absence of CRM / project management system.
All important weekly team meeting
Adopt an agile approach to your meetings, keep them short sweet and on track using a simple agenda:
- What did you do last week
- What have you got planned for this week
- How are we doing against target
- Any blockers or impediment
Having the whole team present is vital, ensuring everyone is aware of each other’s activity, all brains together to try and overcome any blockers to achieving your goals. Also a great opportunity at the start of the week to galvanise your team and motivate people to action. See how and where each team member can add value to the work others are doing or squeeze a little extra reach, return, engagement from all activity.
Online weekly team meetings notes to be stored centrally with clear owners and deadlines, keeping everyone to time, task and priority focus.
121s
Given the broad spectrum your multi-discipline team will no doubt span, having 121 meetings with individuals will be essential to success. Not everyone will be as confident or comfortable speaking up in a team situation. Take the time to understand each member of the team, their individual workload, priorities and challenges one on one.
Shared and centralised reporting
Shared goals, shared plan, shared reporting – this will help you identify the halo effect of activity, understand how your channels work together and therefore how your teams skills and work complement each other to mine for opportunity. Also prevent any duplicate attribution.
Knowledge sharing
Digital moves at lightning speed, sharing successes, failures, new features and trends across your team, will uncover untapped potential, cross discipline collaboration and new opportunities to engage your audience.
Overall the above will help you to minimise waste, maximise efficiency and create a unified team to deliver against your business objectives.
At Digital Team on Demand we’re here to help you with this operational art! We support all members of our digital team whilst they are working with you, including weekly check-ins to ensure work is delivered to a high standard, the team is working well together and targets are being hit.