Managing A Team Is Not Always Easy

There are several broad categories of management style:

1. Coercive - you tend to incentivize good behaviour and results and drive performance by repeatedly mentioning bonuses, commissions or promotion prospects.

2. Disciplinarian - you are a stickler for the rules and will not accept any challenge to your authority. If staff do not follow the rules, you are like to take disciplinary action immediately.

3. Democratic - you have frequent strategy meetings with your team and allow them to decide their own working practises and processes, even if you don't agree.

4. Go-Getter - you constantly drive your own performance and hope to lead by example. You frequently and publicly congratulate your staff on their good performance.

5. Friendly - you try to be a friend rather than a manager to your team, and drive performance by making your team want to help you.

6. The Coach - you see it as your mission to help your staff develop themselves. You frequently set stretch goals and offer your team the opportunity to take on some of your tasks.

The thing to remember is that is no right or wrong management style - although you will probably naturally prefer one style, you need to be able to adapt your style depending on the team structure, the needs of the overall business, and the individual situation.

For example, you might fall naturally into the Friendly style, and most of your team may respond to that in a great way. However, there might be one or two individuals who require a more disciplinarian approach in order for you to get their best performance out of them. And while a coaching approach might be best for the majority of your team, there may be other members who just want to do their job and not feel they are being pushed out of their comfort zone.

In order to know which style to use for the best results with each individual, you need to make sure you know your team. Make time to have a half-hour chat with each member of the team, to talk about their long-term goals and how you can help them achieve those goals. Ask them outright how they prefer to be approached - do they like being left along to get on with it, or would they prefer constant encouragement and checking up on?

Tempering your approach to the individual is one of the keys to success in getting the best performance out of your team.