7 Practical Tips for Managing Teams in 2025

Leading a team in 2025 feels different from even a few years ago. Hybrid work means you’re not always face-to-face, constant messages can blur priorities, and employees expect flexibility alongside clear direction when plans change.

It’s important to get this balance right. Well-managed teams understand their goals, are more motivated, and are less likely to look for opportunities elsewhere. Despite this, in 2024, only 21% of employees reported feeling engaged, with managers experiencing the biggest decline.

This article shares seven practical tips for managing teams today, including how to build trust, lead with empathy, and use digital tools to support your work.

Team management is the skill of helping a group of people work well together to reach a shared goal. For managers, this means sharing the plan clearly, motivating the team, resolving conflicts, and tracking performance. It's different to project management, which focuses solely on delivering tasks on time and on budget.

Great team management also means recognising and nurturing people’s strengths, encouraging collaboration, balancing workloads, and adapting your leadership style to match what the team needs.

Good team management directly affects productivity, engagement, and retention. Gallup research found that highly engaged businesses have employees who take 78% less time off and deliver 14% higher productivity. When staff are engaged, they are also more likely to stay, with turnover dropping by 21% at traditionally high-turnover organisations.

For businesses, these are the top three benefits you can expect from great managers:

• Retention: Good managers keep people longer, which saves time and money on hiring and training.
• Resilience: Well-managed teams cope with change more easily and bounce back faster.
• Results: Engaged staff get more done, share useful ideas, and give customers a better experience.

The best leaders combine classic approaches with modern traits like coaching, data-driven decision-making, and creating space for innovation.

Here are some common management styles, their use cases, and their risks.

Some skills are timeless, like communication and empathy. Others are newer, shaped by hybrid work and digital tools. Together, the following skills help managers keep teams productive and motivated.

• Communication: Setting clear expectations, giving constructive feedback, and keeping the team on the same page.
• Empathy: Understanding what your team is dealing with and building trust, especially in hybrid or flexible settings.
• Delegation: Matching tasks to people’s strengths so workloads are balanced and you can focus on leadership.

• AI literacy: Knowing how to use AI tools to speed up admin, generate insights, or summarise information.
• Adaptability: The ability to adapt quickly when priorities shift, markets change, or unexpected challenges come up.
• Inclusivity: Creating space for different voices and making sure remote and in-office staff feel equally valued.
• Data-driven leadership: Reading dashboards and reports to guide decisions, while still considering the human side.

You don’t need to master every skill on this list, but the more you build, the stronger your management will be.

Technology may shape how we work, but the best managers are still focused on their team's well-being. These seven tips will help you create a culture where your teams thrive.

1. Lead with trust, not timecards
2. Communicate with empathy in hybrid teams
3. Make AI a team tool, not a secret weapon
4. Upskill your team in tech literacy
5. Balance technology with human leadership skills
6. Create space for play and experimentation
7. Lead by learning out loud

Teams do their best work when they feel trusted and supported. Measuring people by hours spent in front of a screen undermines trust and adds pressure that doesn’t lead to better results.

Instead of tracking time, try to focus on outcomes. Look at what’s been achieved, the quality of work, and how it supports the wider team's goals. With Salesforce CRM, managers can track progress and outcomes directly against business goals, giving teams that freedom while focusing on tangible outcomes.

Trusting your team with autonomy shows that you believe in their ability to deliver, which builds loyalty and respect. It also frees people to work in the way that suits them best, whether that’s starting early, finishing later, or taking a break in the middle of the day.

Teams rely on clear and thoughtful communication, especially in hybrid workplaces. Without it, people working remotely can feel excluded or uncertain about where they stand. Regular check-ins give people the chance to share updates and raise challenges.

Leading with empathy involves listening carefully, asking questions to understand people’s challenges, and recognising the effort they are putting in. This helps people feel valued and included, whether they are sitting in the office or joining from home. When people know their manager understands and cares about their life, they are more motivated, engaged, and willing to speak up with their best ideas.

Using Slack helps hybrid teams stay up to date in real time. In Slack, conversations are organised into channels, which are dedicated spaces for each project, team, or client. Instead of updates getting buried in email threads or people being excluded, everyone can go to the right channel and instantly see the latest decisions, files, and conversations.

AI works best when it’s used transparently. If some people hide their use, or if it’s only used casually by a few, the whole team misses chances to learn and improve together. Our research found that 20% of workers already use AI frequently and keep it secret from their colleagues.

Encouraging open use of AI removes the fear of new tools and instead builds technical confidence. It also helps people see AI as a tool for everyone, not a shortcut only some people have access to.

Agentforce makes this even easier by putting AI directly into everyday workflows. This normalises AI as a shared tool, helps people learn from each other, and builds trust instead of secrecy.

Confidence with the technology people use day to day makes their work easier and less stressful. As AI becomes more of a part of everyday tasks, people need the chance to build their skills and try out new ways of working in a safe environment.

Training sessions, live demos, and buddy systems can all help people learn in ways that feel supportive rather than singling out their weaknesses. The goal is not to turn everyone into an AI expert; instead, it’s to make sure no one feels left behind.

When people see technology as empowering instead of intimidating, they are more willing to experiment and use it to improve their work.

Technology is good at handling data, automating routine work, and keeping projects organised. What it can’t do is show judgment, empathy, or creativity. Those strengths come from people, and they are what make teams thrive.

Managers should use tools to take care of repetitive tasks so they have more time for one-on-one conversations, problem-solving, and culture building. When technology takes the admin off your plate, you can focus on the work only humans can do.

Creativity thrives in environments where people feel safe, supported, and open to new ways of thinking. When teams face constant pressure, or are constantly busy, they often default to familiar ways of doing things instead of taking risks. Fear of failure can also hold people back, especially if they worry about being judged for mistakes.

One way to open up creativity is to ask everyone to share one out-there idea, no matter how unrealistic it seems. Most of the ideas won’t be used, and that’s fine; the point is to spark new thinking and show that people can put ideas forward without them being shut down.

Another idea is to ensure your team has time and space to be creative, rather than constantly moving from one task to the next. Encourage mid-day walks, or a dedicated weekly brainstorming session, and ensure that nothing encroaches on this important time.

In most offices, people worry about looking like they don’t know enough. As a manager, you can undo that fear by showing your own learning in real time. If you pick up a faster way to use a tool, share it in the next meeting. If you make a mistake, explain what you learned from it and how you’ll do it differently next time.

When people see their manager trying new things and talking openly about the process, they feel more comfortable doing the same. This takes the pressure off people who think they need to have all the answers and makes it easier for everyone to share their ideas freely without worrying about scrutiny.

Every manager knows the job comes with challenges, but in 2025, the challenges may look different to 10 years ago. Here are six of the biggest challenges facing people who manage teams and ways to overcome them.

Managing teams in 2025 still comes down to trust, empathy, and clear communication, but the way managers can deliver this has shifted. Digital tools now handle updates, reporting, and file sharing, freeing managers up to focus on supporting their people and building a culture where everyone feels valued.

Salesforce CRM keeps teams' goals tied directly to business outcomes, while Slack makes communication visible and transparent across projects. Used together, they create the structure for managers to spend less time on tasks and more time leading people well.

If you’d like to experience first-hand how Salesforce CRM can support your management, try it free for 30 days.