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Unit 1: An Introduction to Event Management

Communicating With People in Your Team: As a team manager, you’re likely to be chairing Notes
regular sessions as well as one-off meetings. Meeting of all kinds, and regular ones in
particular, are notorious for their capacity to waste people’s time, so it’s well worth
mastering the skill of running effective meetings.
Many meetings include brainstorming sessions, and as team manager, you’ll often have to
facilitate these, so you’ll need to be comfortable with how to do this. There’s more to it than
simply coming up with creative ideas, as you do when you’re just a regular participant in such
a session. Make sure that you understand where they can go wrong, and what you can do to
avoid this.
Active listening is another important skill for managers – and others – to master. When you’re
in charge, it can be easy to think that you know what others are going to say, or that listening is
less important because you’ve thought of a solution anyway.

Don’t fall into this trap. Most good managers are active listeners: it helps them detect problems
early (while they’re still easy to deal with), avoid costly misunderstandings, and build trust
within their teams.

Communicating with People Outside your Team: Your boss is probably the most important
person you need to communicate with. Take time to understand fully what your boss
wants from you and your team – if you know exactly what she likes, and how she prefers
it to be delivered, you’ll be better able to meet with her approval.
Don’t be afraid to ask your boss to coach or mentor you: you can usually learn a lot from him,
but he may not be proactive about offering this. If you’re approaching your boss for advice,
make sure you’ve thought things through as far as you can. Introduce the subject with a summary
of your thinking, and then say where you need help.
Also, as a manager, part of your job is to look after your team and protect it from unreasonable
pressure. Learn skills like assertiveness and win-win negotiation so that you can either turn
work away, or negotiate additional resources.
Another part of your job is to manage the way your team interacts with other groups. Use
stakeholder analysis to identify the groups you need to deal with. Then talk to these people to
find out what they want from you and what they can do to help you.

1.7.3 Managing Discipline

However much you hope you won’t ever have to do it, and however much feedback you give,
there comes a time in most managers’ careers when they have to discipline an employee.
Discipline may be subtly different from basic feedback because it doesn’t always relate specifically
to the employee’s work. You can give feedback on their phone manner, for example, but handling
problems with timekeeping or personal grooming can need a different approach.
Obvious breaches of the law or of company policy are easy to identify and deal with. But what
of other situations? On one hand you don’t want to feel or seem petty. On the other hand, you
can’t let things go that should be dealt with.

Use these rules-of-thumb to help you decide whether you need to take action. If the answer to
any is yes, then you need to arrange a time to speak to the employee in private.
1. Does the issue affect the quality of the employee’s deliverable to the client (internal or
external)? A graphic designer regularly only gets in to work late, although he stays late to
make up for this. Customers are sometimes frustrated by not being able to get through to
him at the start of the day, particularly when he’s working on rush jobs.

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