Project managers are the important pillars of any organisation and their thinking, attitude towards team, work methodologies directly affect the organisation’s performance and growth rate. New managers are often unsure about how they should proceed to lead team towards their goals. I will try to cover few principal that may be helpful to the new managers.

• Understand your duties and authorities:

This is very important to start in management to understand your duties and authorities in your daily routine and follow that honestly. If there is any doubt or conflict related to any duty, clarify that with your senor manager or human resource department. You may invite trouble for yourself if you ignore this and try to go with flow causing a bad KRA point for not following few duties.

• Understand your team strengths and weaknesses:

Team is a source of output for managers and first step in team interaction should be, understanding each of your team members and their strength points (These can be utilized) and weak points (Area where you need to concentrate). This will help you to manage resource and assign the project to most appropriate team members and it will also help you to get best output.

• Work with the team and guide them is the best way to lead:

Supervisory is a old term that was successful with less educated work force.  In modern era of educated work force, it is wise to work with them and guide them in their problems. By this kind of involvement, you will get to know more about the drawbacks of team and where to behave like a leader otherwise your team will be de-moralized as you don’t try to understand their issues.

• Understand when to react like a leader:

Work with the team and solve their problem is the best quality of a manager but you need to click the moment when you need to show who is the leader here and how the team should behave to get full corporations of manager. You should not behave like a supervisor instead of giving a positive message in the team that if members work hard manager is with you and if members ignore something, manager are the first to point out your mistake.

• Your team members may be more skilled than you:

Accept the fact that we all are humans and any of your team member may be more skilled and talented than you despite of your years of experience. You should never see him/her as a threat to your position instead you can use his/her skills in better way to get best output of the team.  This is the professional way to deal as a manager. You can also give him/her an important responsibility to better utilization of resource and to give him/her a message that manager understand his/her importance in the team.

• Give every smallest skill to the team:

As a project manager, you should train all your team members with every skill that you know. It will help to team perform at their best and it is the most professional way to have team confidence and earn a respect that you deserve. To Train anybody does not mean anyone will be threat for your position in the future and everybody has multiple way to learn those things without you but it will be a good message if you do this for the team.

• Please your team and they will please clients:

Support the team and always take the honest side in any conflict with client. Client is important but client may also be wrong and you should have honest stand on that if the problem from client side or a mistake of team member. Always being with client is a bad idea and will demoralize the team for future projects. Conflict are the situations where team members see if the managers are professional or just reflecting blames towards team to save their positions.

• Don’t Change your point view unless you are wrong in any decision:

Organisation processes are dynamic in nature and new rules keep coming and old ones goes obsolete. If you are not agree with the decision of higher management then you should keep your point and stick to that personally but professionally you should follow whatever is decided finally by higher management. Being disagreement with a decision does not mean you will not follow that rule. Being a professional you should follow what is decided but you can put your point whenever you are asked.

• Find better environment if things are becoming worst:

Organisations work with different positions, few are below your position and few are above your position. The best way is be supportive throughout all positions and follow the messages flows in entire position chain. But if any of your senior member is not as capable or not a professional and trying hard with dirty tricks to survive in position instead of honest efforts with the duties he/she assigned then it is a bell of danger. You should leave instantly if things don’t get better in few days.

These were the few things I noticed in my short project manager career and I hope it will help others to do best as a project manager. If anybody have any queries, advises, additions in the above list then please do post a comment and I will try to integrate every relevant point to the list.