The 4 Main Functions of a Manager

Function 3: Communication

What It Means: As a manager, you need to communicate in various ways with your team members (and balance the things they do NOT need to know as well). This will directly correlate to how much your employees trust you, and how willing they are to use you as a resource to help them solve work problems or issues.

To expand, there are a few different kinds of communication:

Individual level — Are you communicating clearly enough so people know what they’re responsible for and whether or not they’re doing a good job?

Team level — are you communicating with your team as a whole? Have you set team goals for them to work towards to encourage cooperation?

Company level — are you keeping people informed on the overall health of the company and why processes are being put in place? Do people feel like “they know what’s going on”?

Inter-employee level — are you building a good culture of communication, where employees feel they can ask you or each other questions without fear of retribution? Are people naturally covering each other’s work when the other is out on vacation?

You need to also figure out how to communicate with each of your employees and the team as a whole. Is everyone in an office together? Then verbal makes sense. If everyone is remote or on different schedules, you might consider email acceptable. However, in our age of digital communication, you will need to find a balance because a lot can get lost in between email lines, chat channels, and text messages.

Consider making some ground rules too about communication along the lines off how to call in sick, how to tell someone you are running late, etc., which can all cause communication issues.

How Do You Achieve It: With communication, one thing is for sure and that is you know when the team ISN’T communicating— balls are getting dropped, he said/she said is the regular, and tasks disappear into the great beyond without anyone knowing who should have done them. Similar to organizing your team, you will want to create a communication system, which could also involve the individual and team meetings at regular intervals we suggested above, as well as the clear outline of tasks.

But what about communicating tough issues like someone who is underperforming or someone who keeps breaking company rules like being tardy? This also falls upon you as the manager to nip the issue in the bud. You need to get over the awkwardness of having tough conversations with someone and speak up before what seems to be a small problem becomes a large issue.

Individual level — you’ll want to consider some sort of performance management and review system to make sure goals and individual accountability is crystal clear. You will also want to implement a one-on-one meeting structure to supplement these goals.

Team level — expand on your individual performance management concepts and apply them to the team as a whole, and communicate them to the team.

Company level —Take the pulse of your team to make sure they feel in the loop on things that they should know about by having regularly scheduled team meetings on what’s going on in the company. Knowing the “why” is a huge part of employee engagement, which is important to employee retention and happiness.

Inter-employee — this type of inter-employee communication is important to ensure a collaborative approach and to keep the lines of communications open (i.e. if a problem occurs with a client, your team will communicate to figure it out or tell you about it, versus hide it). You’ll want to make sure everyone on the team knows who is responsible for what, and where to go for common problems or next steps, as well as when to involve you.

Ideas to Try: In addition to our ideas from the organizing section, you’ll also want to consider:

Utilize a Human Resource Information System (HRIS) such as Zoho People to keep track of your communications with employees and their important forms.

Having an employee write up form in order to document those tough conversations (and to help guide you through them)

Implementing a performance review system, progressive discipline policy, or company handbook that has both (if one doesn’t exist already)

Ask your team about how they prefer to communicate- does a weekly email with company news make sense or would they rather talk about it in the meeting? Ask them where they feel “out of the loop” and try to close those gaps.

Function 4: Motivate Your Team

What It Means: As a manager, you need to be able to motivate your team to do the work that they are expected to do. Whether it’s making sandwiches at a sub place or creating a cool logo for a client at a graphic design firm, the work needs to get done correctly and in a timely manner. Motivated employees are key to this, and the manager is the driving factor behind their motivation in many cases.

How Do You Achieve It: So how do you motivate people? In brief, people are generally motivated by something from within (a desire to achieve), something outside (like recognition, money, or a promotion), or a combination of both. There are a number of theories on motivation, and SHRM recently pointed out how managers rarely know what motivates employees, be it recognition for the work versus making progress in their work (hint: it’s not recognition that won!).

Dan Pink also points out, in favor of internal motivation factors that:

Most of us believe that the best way to motivate ourselves and others is with external rewards like money—the carrot-and-stick approach. That’s a mistake… The secret to high performance and satisfaction—at work, at school, and at home—is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.

Your job as the manager is to tap into what motivates each of your team members, capitalize on it, and then set clear expectations or goals for each of them.

Ideas to Try: Up to this point, if you’ve done everything right, you will have laid the foundation for motivated employees. If you’re finding employees aren’t motivated, you should go back and make sure you’ve properly trained, set up a good communication system, and organized your team correctly (or ask them for feedback!).

To go above and beyond, you can also try these things to motivate your team:

Create a team competition of some kind that encourages cooperation; vary the reward each week to keep everyone engaged

Use traditional performance management techniques and set goals

Have a team “praise board” where you can write public kudos to team members who are doing a great job

Have a team mascot, like a big stuffed animal, that can serve as a passed award so that everyone knows who is doing a great job.

Try one of our 25 employee recognition ideas

Aside from motivating your team, you as a manager also need to train them to do their jobs.

Let’s dive deeper into how to be a good manager, starting with tips for new managers, and then moving into tips for existing ones.