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Asana for team leads

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Leading a team effectively requires the right tools and strategies to keep everyone aligned, productive, and engaged. As a team lead, you're responsible for coordinating work, managing deadlines, and ensuring your team delivers results. Asana provides everything you need to excel in this role, from smart workflows to real-time insights.

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Getting started as a team lead in Asana

Setting up your team workspace

When you first start using Asana as a team lead, focus on creating a clear structure that your team can easily navigate:

  1. Create team-specific projects for ongoing work and major initiatives
  2. Set up consistent naming conventions for projects, tasks, and custom fields
  3. Establish clear project templates for recurring workflows
  4. Define team roles and permissions to ensure appropriate access levels

Essential team management setup

Start with these foundational elements:

  1. Team dashboard: Create a central hub where team members can see all active projects
  2. Status update cadence: Establish regular check-ins using Asana's status update features
  3. Communication channels: Define when to use Asana comments versus external tools like Slack
  4. Goal alignment: Connect team projects to broader organizational objectives using goals
  5. Create a team

Create a team

Teams are a group of people who work together on projects. For example, the IT department will have its own team where they will add IT-related projects and where they can send messages relevant to the IT department.

Once you’ve created the team, you can start creating your projects and templates within that team.

Create a new team

Add your team’s work to Asana

The second step you need to take is to transfer the projects and initiatives your team is working on to Asana. Projects keep all your tasks and messages in one place. This will allow you to delegate work to other team members and monitor progress.

Let’s say one of the projects your team is working on is a seasonal marketing campaign. You would start by creating the project, then creating tasks and assigning them to people on your team.

Templates for consistency

Develop project templates for your team's recurring workflows:

  • Weekly sprint planning: Include standard tasks, assignees, and due dates
  • Campaign launches: Create comprehensive checklists for marketing initiatives
  • Client onboarding: Standardize the process for bringing new clients into your workflow
  • Performance reviews: Ensure consistent evaluation processes across team members

Asana provides you with a template library you can use when creating a project, or you can start from scratch and create your own.

Note iconNote

Learn how to import CSV files in to Asana.

Project organization and visibility

As a team lead, maintaining visibility across all work is crucial. Asana offers several views to help you stay on top of everything:

  • List view provides a detailed breakdown of all tasks with assignees, due dates, and custom fields. Use this for comprehensive project planning and task management.
  • Board view works like a kanban board, perfect for visualizing workflow stages. Team leads often use this to track work progress from "To Do" to "In Progress" to "Complete."
  • Timeline view shows project schedules and dependencies, helping you identify potential bottlenecks and resource conflicts before they become problems.
  • Calendar view displays all team deadlines and milestones in one place, making it easy to spot scheduling conflicts and plan ahead.

Team communication and collaboration

Create one-to-one projects

One-to-one projects are a great way to get your team used to assigning tasks. If you’re a team lead, you likely have weekly meetings with team members to check on their progress and discuss projects or anything that might be of interest to them.

To create a one-to-one project, you would follow the same steps as when creating any other project. You and the other team members can add topics to this project you would like to discuss during your next meeting. Make sure the project is private so that only you and the appropriate teammates can access it, as sensitive information may be discussed during these meetings.

One-to-one projects

Here’s an example of what a one-to-one project can look like:

  1. Add different sections to organize tasks
  2. Set the project’s privacy to private

Create a weekly meeting agenda

If you have weekly meetings with your team, creating a project for the meeting’s agenda is another excellent way to incentivize your teammates to use Asana.

Use the meeting agenda to add discussion topics and make meetings more efficient. Everyone on your team can add a task to the agenda and assign it to themselves; that way, we all know who is responsible for what during the meeting.

Team weekly meeting

You can create recurring tasks for each team member and title it Remember to add discussion topics for the next meeting, so your teammates remember to add discussion topics before each meeting.

Reporting and visibility features

Dashboards and insights

Asana's dashboard features help team leads track performance and identify trends:

  • Project dashboards provide real-time insights into individual project health, showing completion rates, overdue tasks, and team workload distribution.
  • Portfolio dashboards give you a bird's-eye view of all your team's projects, making it easy to spot patterns and allocate resources effectively.

Workload management

Use workload to:

  1. Visualize team capacity across different time periods
  2. Identify overloaded team members before burnout occurs
  3. Redistribute tasks to balance workloads effectively
  4. Plan future projects based on realistic capacity estimates

Status updates

Keep stakeholders informed with status updates:

  • Weekly project updates: Share progress, highlight wins, and flag potential issues
  • Portfolio-level summaries: Provide executive-level visibility into team performance
  • Goal progress reports: Show how your team's work contributes to company objectives

Create portfolios to group projects together

Portfolios help you organize multiple projects in one place. You can monitor the progress of several projects at once and ensure that they don’t go off track. Learn how to create portfolios here.

Portfolio.png

This portfolio holds every project related to marketing lead generation campigns. Portfolio members can see a list of the projects that belong to the portfolio, the timeline for each project, a dashboard with relevant charts, status updates on the portfolio’s progress, the workload for each member of the different projects, and any message sent about the portfolio.

Establish conventions

Establishing conventions is essential as they will help your team keep tasks and projects clean and easy to understand. Read our Establish Asana conventions article to learn more about how to define your team’s conventions.

The fear of assigning tasks is real, and most users struggle with it when they first start using Asana. We recommend you communicate this task etiquette to your team to mitigate this and help them feel more comfortable when assigning tasks to others.

Additional resources

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Asana for Team Leads