Information Management Team Leader
- Sagit Salmon
- Oct 1, 2007
- 4 min read
We have written much about information management, its role, advantages, and importance for organizations where service is at the heart of their activities. A comprehensive and in-depth review appeared in a previous issue published in September 2007. We all know that this well-oiled machine is driven by a professional and skilled team of workers. Typically, employees have grown within the organization and see this as a career progression role, which they even view as a promotion. At the head of each such team stands a manager who is, first and foremost, a team leader – leading a professional team of veteran employees with varying degrees of familiarity with the organization. As such, the manager must possess team management skills and preferably experience. However, since we are not discussing the role of team manager in general, but rather the role of information management team leader, we will now focus on the professional skills and capabilities that can serve as tools for the manager's success in fulfilling their role.
First, the manager must have a broad organizational perspective, whether they came from within the organization and are familiar with its power dynamics or have experience with a similar organization. A broad perspective will allow the manager to be aware of organizational processes that impact customer service and translate them in advance into necessary changes and preparations within the information management department. Moreover, since the department serves most service-providing units, identical processes may be conducted differently in different units and must be translated differently into field language. A manager with a broad perspective will contribute to adapting information to all target populations.
Second, the manager must have a high level of service consciousness. As the person responsible for a technological tool and a team serving internal organizational customers whose job is to serve external customers, the manager must set a high service standard that they commit to providing to their customers. This is expressed through providing optimal responses to needs arising from various organizational entities and by taking responsibility for meeting deadlines (handling feedback and uploading information on time while maintaining high quality). As a central junction for transferring messages, the management department is sometimes perceived as a decision-making and policy-setting body and a technological tool meant to serve the entire organization. Even when dealing with false inquiries, the team leader can wisely use these opportunities to gather ideas and create connections that may be useful in the future.
As a result of the two points mentioned so far, the manager needs to be able to work with interface entities. The management department maintains daily contact with dozens of people and bodies in the organization. These serve both as customers and service providers. Information management departments often suffer from a lack of resonance or various organizational factors, such as not understanding their importance and not using them to transfer information to the field. The ability to create and maintain connections and "public relations" work can only help in the long run and instill a feeling in the organization that "information not existing in the management department might as well not exist at all."
The manager also needs a high ability for task prioritization. This ability is required from any manager, but we find it appropriate to mention it at this stage. The team deals with many varied tasks, from ongoing tasks such as publishing information on time, responding to feedback according to predefined schedules, and controlling processes and meetings with users to long-term tasks such as programmatic and technological improvements to the management system. Due to the team's affiliation with a dynamic organization, where decisions are made and changed in short timeframes, the manager needs to know which tasks each employee handles. This is so they have control over operations and can continuously reprioritize (even if dealing with the same tasks). All this is to accomplish the central mission: publishing information in a quality, simple, concise manner and on time.
In another aspect, the manager should have content editing abilities such as simple and clear formulations, text summarization, separating essential from secondary information, and proper language skills. This is because the manager is responsible for the content in the management system and, as such, must perform quality control on the content updated in it (unclear information in the system may be incorrectly conveyed to the customer).
Finally, a basic understanding of technology – the information management team leader doesn't need extensive technology knowledge. Still, they must be very familiar with the tool they are responsible for to request improvements and understand, explain, and translate field needs into technological requirements. In certain cases, when requesting new application development in the management system or improvement of an existing tool, the manager is tasked with specification, and they should have experience or basic knowledge in this area. Even when the specification is performed by a professional entity, the manager is the customer, in this case, the one who decides whether the specification addresses all defined needs and is responsible for approving the final product's functionality.
In conclusion, we have reviewed several capabilities and skills required of an information management team leader. We didn't specify which things are more important and which are less important, and it's understood that not every manager excels in all of them. The organizational affiliation of the management department varies from organization to organization, as does the organizational culture and the department's positioning within the organization. Therefore, the requirements from the team leader may vary from organization to organization – we have given you several points to consider.
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