Effectively Managing Technical Teams

Many technical experts find themselves managing a team, not because of their advanced leadership skills but due to their technical expertise. Mastery of management skills and inspirational people leadership is required to get a group of people to become a high-performing team, delivering outstanding business results. This course will give you tips and techniques to help you manage both onsite and hybrid teams.

In this course, you will learn to:

• Set a vision for your team with buy-in and commitment to the goals
• Define and evaluate measures and targets that matter
• Execute well through well-designed operational controls, reporting, and ground-rules
• Balance team controls and team autonomy to foster innovation and growth
• Understand the dynamics of setting up and running teams
• Adapt your leadership style through the team development stages
• Understand the role of motivation in creating high-performance teams
• Radically improve time management by focussing on priority issues
• Learn to deal with interruptions and crisis management
• Get the most out of team meetings
• Develop and grow your team’s leadership skills

This course will benefit anyone whose work output is dependent on other people:

• Newly appointed managers or team leaders directing technical professionals.
• Experienced managers, who are looking for ways to be more effective and efficient.
• Engineers and other technical professionals aspiring to management and leadership positions.

This course is part of the Technical Leadership Certificate. Course may be taken individually as well.

Introduction to Managing and Leading technical teams

• Understand the role of a team leader
• Discern a leadership mindset and how to develop it in team members
• Combine the right balance between the best of traditional management techniques and the new paradigm of inverted pyramid leadership of knowledge workers

Operational Processes

• Setting meaningful goals in a dynamic and innovative environment
• Discover the power of sharing ‘the why’
• Define and evaluate measures and targets that matter
• Understand the importance of distinguishing between joint ownership and shared ownership
• Creating a team plan with meaningful objectives and measures

Establishing teams and the transition to empowerment 

• Discovering the real meaning of a team
• Dealing with virtual and remote teams
• Understand the dynamics of setting up a new team
• Dealing with changes in team composition

Motivating teams for high performance

• Understanding what drives technical people and team dynamics to get the best out of them
• Handling top performers
• Dealing with poor performers
• Staff retention

Operational Efficiency

• Getting things done
• Getting the team organized for success
• Running meetings effectively using the PPPP method
• Specifying meaningful, efficient, and necessary reporting methods
• Radical time-management demonstrated with real-world inbox exercise

How to communicate effectively with your team

• Understanding ourselves to understand the root cause of miscommunication
• Avoiding the pitfalls of poor communication using email
• Helping your team improve communication skills

Career development of a team leader

• Understanding what skills to develop as a team leader
• Career development tips

"Great use of real world experiences… Would highly recommend."
—Robert Kolar, DuPage County, Illinois DOT

"The best management course I’ve attended. Materials and examples were excellent."
—Martin Beranek, MSA Professional Services, Inc.

Trevor Manning

Trevor Manning specialises in real-world training and development of technical people who have transitioned into management. His mission is helping Smart People transition to Inspiring Leaders.

During a 30-year career in the IT and telecommunications sectors, Trevor worked his way up from specialist design engineer to board level. This journey from expert to middle manager, and then on to the C-suite, has provided Trevor with the breadth and depth of knowledge of how companies really operate.

His experience working in South Africa, UK-Europe, America and Australia in a range of companies from a giant electric utility to a small start-up software company has given him insights to help people in a variety of real-world situations.

Trevor has experience in managing and leading people in mature, stable environments with fixed structures and processes, and also in the chaotic startup phase of a fast-growing new business. These environments exposed him to the challenges of recruiting and developing teams to meet the companies’ growth plans in addition to downsizing during lean years. 

Trevor runs training programs around the world, including at Oxford University (UK) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA) as part of their Continuing Education programs for engineers.

Trevor authored the classic best-seller ‘Microwave Radio Transmission Design Guide’ published by Artech House (second revision 2009), and more recently he has self-published ‘Microwave Radio Handy Reference Guide.’ (2019) He has also authored three management books ‘’Help! What’s the secret to leading engineers?’ (2017), ‘Help! I need to master critical conversations’ (2018), and 'Help! They made me the Manager' (2021) available from Amazon.  Look out for Trevor's latest leadership book on Managing Up available in late 2023.