Your team is only as good as its leadership. Unlocking the potential of your managers is key to realizing the potential of your entire team. The best way to achieve this is to create a hub for seamless communication and coordination. Slack is one of the best platforms to realize its vision thanks to its powerful integrations and rich communication features. One of those great integrations, CultureBot, is an invaluable tool in managing your managers. Let’s explore more about how you can leverage Slack and CultureBot for managerial success.

How to Create Manager Collaboration

Managers need to collaborate with one another to work toward business goals. The entire unit of your team will be far less productive if your stakeholders are divided and individually focused. The last thing you want is for managers to compete with one another and work against progress. There are a few key objectives to improving management in your company. Those themes are:

• Communication: staying in contact efficiently, responsibly, and effectively.
• Culture: cultivating positive behaviors and encouraging morale-boosting activities.
• Resource Sharing: making sure all managers have access to the same files, tasks, and progress tracking systems.
• Productivity: encouraging innovation to find ways to make jobs easier and more productive.

Let’s explore each of these themes to see how you can make a difference with the leadership team at your company.

Establishing Clear Channels of Communication

Slack makes it easy for you to organize your conversations with purpose-driven channels. When used correctly, this ensures that your managers are on the same page about everything that’s going on with the team. For example, if your team is running a social media page, you’ll want to make sure that the campaign planning channel is used strictly for discussing campaign design. You might have another channel dedicated to posting social image ideas. Make sure that your team knows what channels to use to discuss different topics so that there is no room for confusion.

Group text discussion isn’t always the best way to communicate. We do need to talk one on one every so often to have deeper conversations. Don’t forget to have those important discussions to keep things moving!

Mastering the Art of Effective Messaging in Slack

Managers play a critical role in engaging the rest of the team. They don’t just tell people what to do, they make their colleagues want to achieve the same goals that they do. When your managers communicate with the rest of the team with announcements to get everyone engaged and on task, here’s the formula that they should follow to make the biggest impact:

• Inspire: announcements to your team shouldn’t just be there to explain the tasks of the week. They should inspire the entire team to work together and be motivated to achieve the team’s goals.
• Inform: at the same time, don’t lose sight of the information. Be careful not to bog down your team in too many details. Make it easy to read and let your colleagues know what they need to know to get started without overwhelming them.
• Engage: use a positive tone and encourage response. Your managers and employees are part of the same team. That whole team has to work together to achieve the goals of the business. Instead of lecturing from a high pedestal, managers should encourage response and discussion.

Adopting this formula will make it easier for managers to build announcements and other messages to the rest of the team that bring everyone together to work toward the team’s objectives. It’s also wise for the leadership team to practice these same principles with one another to find the best ways to communicate.

Cultivating a Culture of Transparency and Trust

Caring for your team’s culture starts with trust. Encouraging open and honest communication among managers is a key component of this. With a transparent and trusting work culture for your leadership team, your entire organization can benefit from better decision-making, more effective problem-solving, and greater cohesion.

The best way to achieve this is to make it a habit. Setting up regular check-ins and feedback loops can provide more opportunities for leaders to share information with their colleagues. CultureBot’s recurring forms and surveys features can make it easier to build these habits automatically. For example, you could set up a regular survey or form in your management channel to encourage your team to briefly share what they’ve been up to over the course of the day or week.

Maintaining trust and transparency among your management team can boost your entire team’s morale and motivation, which leads to greater productivity and performance.

Try Adding a Suggestions Box

CultureBot can also give your team regular reminders to send in feedback with a suggestions box. This is an excellent opportunity to continuously engage your management team to get their ideas and thoughts about your business and Slack workspace.

Goal Setting and Progress Tracking in Slack

Another important communication and accessibility step is goal setting. By making progress tracking a group effort between your managers, you can ensure that the leadership team is all working toward the same objectives. You should be setting clear objectives and key results (OKRs) and identify important key performance metrics (KPIs) that allow you to measure how close you are to achieving those goals.

Along the way, make sure you are celebrating important milestones. You can use CultureBot’s shout out and celebration features to reward team members and managers for their contributions toward your team’s goals. These features can help you and your managers send personalized appreciation messages to your team. You can also award team members and managers with points with the shoutouts feature that can be used to redeem prizes decided upon by team leadership.

Facilitating Seamless File Sharing and Collaboration

Make sure that your leadership team has all the important documents, conversations, and resources that they need easily accessible. This will enable real-time collaboration that will keep your team from being slowed down by permissions issues and time lost by file sharing problems. This will be a continuous conversation between your managers, so it’s wise to encourage feedback about your file sharing process using CultureBot’s survey features.

A great way to keep information accessible is to pin important files and links in your leadership Slack channels. Instead of pinning specific files, you might pin a link to a cloud sharing folder managed by your organization dedicated to your leadership team where all the important files are kept for a certain topic. Make sure that you are staying up to date with who has access to what files. You may want to adopt role-based and folder-based permissions, which can be easier than trying to share specific documents with your managers individually. Making sure that certain folders have all the permissions that they need will streamline the process of giving your leadership team access to what they need.

Boosting Team Morale and Engagement

Your managers should be leading the charge in building a positive team culture. Instead of demanding high productivity all the time, your managers should be cultivating team bonding and prioritizing team wellness. Creating dedicated channels for water cooler discussion and fun will help build deeper relationships between your team members that can make them even more dedicated to achieving the business’s objectives. CultureBot’s water cooler conversation starting features and collaborative games can help move the needle with team culture and engagement.

You should also be recognizing the hard work of your managers with CultureBot’s customizable celebrations and shout outs features. These are the same features that your managers would use to celebrate their team members. Don’t forget to appreciate your managers for the amazing work that they do leading your team!

Best Practices for Manager Communication on Slack

Here are some best practices that you should keep in mind when working to improve your management team’s communications on Slack:

• Communication guidelines: talking online can make it more difficult to communicate with the tone we intend. Setting communication guidelines can make it easier for your management team to communicate effectively with not just each other, but with their teams too.
• Channels with purpose: make sure that channels have a distinct purpose and that your team uses them appropriately.
• Lead by example: your leadership team guide the way for the entire group. Make sure they are good examples of what the entire group should be striving to achieve.
• Cultivate conversations every day: your management team should be encouraging daily water cooler chats to build better relationships with each other.
• Encouraging feedback: make sure your management team is being encouraged to provide feedback on workplace processes with regular surveys automated by CultureBot.
• Appreciation: show appreciation for your managers with CultureBot’s shoutout features and encourage them to recognize their colleagues as well.

Manage Your Managers to Manage Your Success

CultureBot and Slack are powerful tools that can help you realize your vision of managerial success. So long as you focus on objectives like communication, culture, resource-accessibility, productivity, and transparency, you can unlock your leadership team’s potential. With CultureBot’s recurring forms, surveys, shoutouts, and celebrations, your management team can better communicate and cultivate a positive team culture that drives your team to achieve your business goals. Schedule a quick demo today to see how CultureBot can help your management team succeed.