10 team management skills for leading teams effectively
Summary
What sets a good manager apart from a bad one? It isn't the work you do or the workflows your team uses. Rather, good managers focus on their team. By prioritizing supporting your team members and helping them do their best work, you can successfully lead your team regardless of the industry you're in.
Effective team management helps you become a better team leader. Like any soft skill, team management skills take practice. In this article, we cover the benefits of team management and dive into 10 team management skills to start developing today.
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What is team management?
Team management is a manager's ability to organize and coordinate team members to achieve a common goal. When done effectively, it unlocks teamwork in the workplace, boosts productivity, and reduces burnout.
Team management is a soft skill composed of several other soft skills, including:
Empathy
Communication
Teamwork
Becoming a better team manager is all about investing in your soft skills to become a more supportive leader.
Team management vs. project management
Project management is the process of organizing, managing, and completing projects. Good project managers organize work details in one place, so their team has clarity into who's doing what by when. However, project managers aren't necessarily people managers.
Team management, on the other hand, is focused on supporting and coordinating your team. Even if you also lead projects, your focus as a team manager is to support your team members.
Aspect | Team management | Project management |
Primary focus | People and their development | Tasks and deliverables |
Main goal | Support and motivate team members | Complete projects on time and budget |
Timeframe | Ongoing | Project-specific |
Team management vs. team building
Team building fosters collaboration, camaraderie, and trust among team members. Effective team-building games give team members a chance to get to know one another and improve their teamwork skills in the long term.
Good team managers run team-building activities to facilitate teamwork within their teams. Depending on your organizational structure, you may have larger department-wide team-building opportunities, or you may encourage your team members to get to know cross-functional team members.
Why is team management important?
Good team management elevates your entire team and unlocks possibilities that wouldn't be possible otherwise.
When you have good team management skills, you:
Set the standard for effective communication in the workplace
Inspire team members
Boost team morale and engagement
Reduce burnout
Unlock teamwork
Build team synergy
10 skills to develop as a team manager
Whether you're a first-time manager or looking to hone your team management skills, try these 10 strategies to be a more effective team manager:
1. Be transparent
One of the best ways to support your team is to give them the context and information they need to succeed. By keeping your team informed in real time, you ensure everyone knows exactly who's doing what by when.
Do this by creating and maintaining a source of truth for all of your team's information. Naturally, we think Asana is a pretty good tool for that. Asana is a work management platform that organizes work, so your team knows what to do, why it matters, and how to get it done.
Not only can your entire team track their work in Asana, but you can also track and share priorities. This way, everyone can get their highest-impact work done efficiently and effectively.
To build an inclusive and digitally-accessible community, you need full transparency. With people in different time-zones and daily lives, we needed a tool to easily see what tasks to action and how projects were progressing. Asana has done just that.”
2. Establish good communication practices
The average knowledge worker spends 60% of their time on busywork, things like searching for information, chasing approvals, or compiling project status updates. This takes time away from skilled, meaningful work that drives impact for your team.
To reduce busywork, give your team clarity on where information lives and how they can access it. Create a shared source of truth for all project information and clarify which communication tools you're using for what.
Use a communication plan to outline when team members should use different tools. For example:
Slack: Real-time communication and quick questions
Asana: Asynchronous communication about work and task updates
We can get more done with a leaner, smaller team than we previously could with a larger team. We can spend more time on high-value input instead of just task management. And we love our life more as well—we are happier people thanks to Asana.”
3. Give and take feedback
Being able to effectively give and take feedback is a critical team management skill. As a manager, you'll need to get comfortable sharing constructive criticism with your team in order to help them grow and achieve their goals. At the same time, soliciting and receiving feedback is a great way for you to grow as a team manager.
Where possible, try to conduct feedback sessions face-to-face (or via video call) to reduce the risk of miscommunication. Even if you work on a remote team, there are great conflict resolution practices you can begin applying to support your team members.
4. Invest in collaboration
Collaboration is the grease that makes teams work. But teams aren't necessarily collaborative by default. A critical management skill is enabling team collaboration.
The best way to build a collaborative team is to value collaboration. Model the behavior you want to see in your team members by encouraging feedback, embracing teamwork, and inviting others to co-shape the work. Collaboration doesn't always mean perfect team synergy; in fact, disagreement is often a sign of a collaborative team because it means your team members are willing to speak their minds.
As an organization grows, communication starts to bottleneck. At Hope for Haiti, we’ve seen those inefficiencies hurt us: when we can’t run like a well-oiled machine, we’re not serving as many people as we could be—and it’s our responsibility to improve upon that.”
5. Lead by example
As a team manager, your actions and words have a significant impact on your team. To build trust, lead by example and model the behavior you want to see in your team. This includes getting involved with your team's work, jumping into the details if necessary, and being flexible based on team feedback.
To lead by example, show your team you trust them. There are a variety of ways to lead by example, but if you're just getting started, try:
Giving team members the opportunity to get involved in team decision making processes.
Checking in with team members about which skill sets they're interested in developing, then delegating tasks to help them do just that.
Clarifying time management expectations about when team members should, and shouldn't, be online and available, and then emulating those expectations yourself.
Modeling the communication and collaboration practices you want to see in your team.
6. Promote balance instead of burnout
Burnout is the feeling of emotional, physical, or mental exhaustion that results from overwork. According to DDI's Global Leadership Forecast 2025, 71% of leaders report being under increased stress, with 40% considering leaving their roles as a result. But as a team leader, you're empowered to support your team and prevent burnout.
Regardless of the type of work you do, burnout happens when team members take on too much for too long. To prevent this and promote balance, plan ahead with workload management:
Assess capacity: Use tools like t-shirt sizing to understand what's on everyone's plate
Plan resources: Create a resource management plan to clarify where each team member will spend their time
Redistribute when needed: If someone is overloaded, reassign tasks to prevent overwork
I don’t want people to burn out. I want them to be good to each other and enjoy their time at work. Asana helps us do that.”
7. Develop your team management style
There is no one way to manage. As you develop and mature as a team manager, you'll gravitate towards different preferences and practices. Even if you already have a good sense of what you want your team management style to be, it's important to name and recognize your management style in order to get the most out of it.
Read: Leadership vs. management: What’s the difference?8. Establish group norms
Group norms are the spoken and often unspoken rules that guide your work interactions. Every team has group norms, even if you've never defined or written them down.
As the team manager, it's critical that you don't just let group norms develop on their own. This could lead to negative team dynamics, where team members feel uncomfortable speaking up or taking time off.
Instead, purposefully craft group norms to model your organizational culture. To get started, read our article on how to create group norms for high-performing teams.
The standard of our creative team, for a while, was just to react to work. But we’ll never do the best work we possibly can without a clear process.”
9. Foster intrinsic motivation
As a team manager, the way you motivate your team is critical. There are two types of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic. Extrinsic motivation is focused on external rewards or punishments, whereas intrinsic motivation focuses on internal satisfaction, regardless of reward.
Part of developing your self-management skills is learning when to use intrinsic motivation vs. extrinsic motivation. Where possible, aim for intrinsic motivation; this type of motivation is harder to instill, but it emphasizes problem solving, creativity, and curiosity.
10. Connect work to team goals
Teams get their best work done when they understand why their work matters. But too often, our work is siloed and disconnected from larger goals.
As a team manager, a critical but often overlooked skill is connecting your team's daily work to the bigger picture. When team members understand how their work affects larger team or company goals, they can effectively prioritize their most important work. To get started, try using a goal tracking tool to connect daily work to company goals.
When work is decentralized and dependencies are unclear, everything feels like a top priority. It creates stress and anxiety.”
How to develop your team management skills
Building team management skills is an ongoing process that requires self-awareness, practice, and a commitment to growth. Here are practical steps to strengthen your abilities as a team leader:
Assess your current skills: Ask your team and peers for feedback to identify your strengths and areas for growth.
Seek out learning opportunities: Explore leadership workshops, online courses, or management books to stay current with best practices.
Practice active listening: Make a conscious effort to listen more than you speak in team interactions.
Find a mentor: Connect with experienced leaders who can offer guidance and feedback on your approach.
Reflect and adapt: Regularly evaluate what's working and adjust your approach based on team feedback.
Remember that developing these skills takes time. Focus on small, consistent improvements rather than trying to change everything at once.
Elevate team management skills with the right tools
It takes time and effort to develop your team management skills, but the investment you make will help you support and motivate your team members. The result is a better work environment for everyone.
To get a jump start on effective team management practices, try using project management software. By keeping work in a central source of truth, you immediately increase visibility, transparency, and collaboration. Plus, visual project management tools offer a variety of ways for your team to view information, from Gantt charts to Kanban boards.
Ready to get started? Get started with Asana for free today.
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