faculty.mu.edu.sa

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

http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMM_28.htm