Management Skills
Managing Discipline and Dealing with Conflict
Sometimes, despite your best efforts, there are problems with individual performance. As a
manager, you have to deal with these promptly. If you don't discipline, you risk negative
impacts on the rest of the team as well as your customers, as poor performance typically
impacts customer service, and it hurts the team and everything that the team has
accomplished. It's very demotivating to work beside someone who consistently fails to meet
expectations, so if you tolerate it, the rest of the team will likely suffer. In our article on team
management skills, we explore this issue in further detail and give you some examples.
Team performance will also suffer when differences between individual team members turn
into outright conflict, and it's your job as team manager to facilitate a resolution. Read our
article on Resolving Team Conflict for a three-step process for doing this. However, conflict can
be positive when it highlights underlying structural problems – make sure that you recognize
conflict and deal with its causes, rather than just suppressing its symptoms or avoiding it.
Key Points
You need to develop and improve your managerial skills on an ongoing basis as your career
develops and as you meet new managerial challenges.
Whether you manage a department or a project team, it's important to know how to get the
work done right. When you're asked to achieve something with the help of others, it's complex
– and you spend much of your time managing relationships instead of doing the actual work.
So, you must develop not only your technical skills, but your management skills as well.
Delegating, motivating, communicating, and understanding team dynamics are some of the key
skills needed. With those skills, along with patience and a strong sense of balance, you can
become a very effective manager
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