People Management has to do with Branding, because if there is one thing Brands need to do today, it is to not only acquire talent that can identify with the company’s values and identity, but to retain the ones they have.

People management: why is team management a strategic element of Branding?

Each of us has encountered in our lives bad managers who are incapable of valuing resources, but also excellent managers who are capable of inspiring and accompanying employees on the path to growth.

You will find it written several times on this blog that there is no universal manual that applies to everyone involved in human resource management. When we are dealing with people, it gets more complicated, because everyone has their own value system, so the human resources manager must be able to marry those values with corporate values.

People management first.

The market has transformed profoundly. While enterprises used to focus on the organization, today they must focus on talent acquisition and team resources.

Brand has to do with values and the people who share those values. It’s called Employer branding and it is that strategy that positions the company not by the product or service it sells, but by the business climate and its reputation. To make sure that the brand is perceived positively externally, it is necessary to work on the management of internal processes and the people who are part of the enterprise. And this is the starting point of any Branding work with clients.

5 strategies for team management.

We stated it earlier, there is no one-size-fits-all manual. The 5 strategies you are about to read are part of our experience, gained within a Network that has more than 100 people, some of them scattered in locations in parts of Italy.Let us tell you about the 5 strategies we have identified for proper people management.

1) Create one-on-one moments with team members.

Building the team and managing it is an activity that requires patience, foresight, and empathy. When Larry Agency was born, we invested so much time in one-to-one meetings. These meetings are not for the purpose of activity reporting but have 3 deeper goals:

• Establish a relationship of trust (which must be mutual) with each team member;
• send signals about one’s emotional state with respect to the work environment (especially if the resource places trust in the team manager);
• Grow professionally.

2) Encourages professional growth with new and different goals

Each of us has our own abilities. To talk about professional growth with your team is to say that everyone can become the best version of themselves. If we continue to inhabit our comfort zone, there can be no professional growth.

Therefore, it is important for the team leader to set different goals and assign tasks that have little to do with the vertical skills of the group. When we step out of our comfort zone to solve problems or face unthinkable challenges, the brain is in a position to acquire new information and thus creates new frames with new skill sets.

3) Deepen the human relationship

We have always believed that honesty is the only way forward when dealing with people management. Truth is not easy; it is often costly. However, it is the only way to establish yourself as a (good) leader.

With the same truth, we empower the team to open up with us and cultivate relationships. It will be easier in the long run to keep the helm. For example, the question “How are you?” while simple is most powerful when you care about the people with whom you collaborate, and it is enough to put the team in a position to open up.

4) Analyze the dynamics of the team.

Especially when you are starting a company, but even afterwards in reality, team consolidation matters even more than achieving the budget. Building a healthy environment, understanding team dynamics by offering support and help, allows for a satisfied and performing human capital. In addition, people will feel the company as their own and become main testimonials of the company. If this is not Branding, rather Employer Branding!

5) Document everything

It might seem like a superfluous activity, yet documenting meetings is important. There are basically two reasons for this: you have a kind of memorandum of the topics discussed at the meetings; the documents we produce help us not to waste time at the next meeting.

What are the two main mistakes in the people management process?

The first mistake is not cadencing the meetings. The second is to think that people can self-manage without guidance and clear task assignments, especially at an early stage. Only then does the team find its way to better organize the work.

Finally, weekly reviews and shadowing are extraordinarily useful and functional elements of professional growth as we dive into new experiences.What would you add to these 5 strategies? See you in the comments, or on our page LinkedIn .