Building of trust
For communication between manager and team to take place trouble-free, it must be based on mutual trust between the manager and individual employees. According to Training Zone, no manager should underestimate the importance of informal tete-a-tete talks with team members as these help build trust and understanding.
Setting up mutual expectations
For an employee to be able to give a good performance and fulfil expectations, they must first know what the expectations are. In order to prevent misunderstandings, it is necessary that the manager and team members make it mutually clear what it is they expect and what they want from one another.
Feedback from the employee
Many managers make the mistake of relying only on the yearly evaluation meeting with employees to obtain feedback from them. But the manager should try to get continuous feedback and set up such an atmosphere and communication systems that team members know they can always immediately give feedback to the manager.
Prevention of negative behaviour
Meetings of the manager with employees should also work as a means of preventing negative, ineffective or inappropriate behaviour on both sides. Every team contains someone whose behaviour can potentially have a negative influence on the team; such situations should be dealt with by the manager as soon as possible before they explode.
Ideas and visions for the future
Last but not least, it is necessary for the manager to talk to individual team members about ideas and visions for the future. As with aims set by the whole company, a similar policy should also be set by the manager with individual members of the team.
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