Thinking of making your career business management?  Or maybe you’re taking over a manager position?

I would have to say business management is the most rewarding, fun, dynamic and exhilarating job imaginable. I often find myself missing the “team” aspect of having a staff, deadlines and of course the thrill of developing others to be great leaders!  Which is why I do what I do now.  But I miss the pressure and fun you have when you are managing a large team.

We offer career and business management online classes to teach you about management styles and give you the supervisor skills you will need to become an effective supervisor.

Management Styles

There are several career business management styles you can adopt.  You might have the choice to choose what works best for you and your company, or you might have to follow the management style set forth by the company you work for.

• Participatory – giving each team member a specific task to complete

• Directing – telling employees what must be done, when and how

• Teamwork Style – knowledge is pooled and tasks completed as one group

• Authoritative – decisions are made by the manager alone, or within the senior management group

• Democratic – decision making is influenced by the input of the employees, too.

Supervisor duties are many and varied, but good supervisors should always be willing to do the very thing they’re asking their employee to do.  Leading by example goes a long way towards becoming an effective supervisor.

Development Ideas

On the job training is only as effective as those training you.  You might learn good skills, but if you have a bad supervisor yourself, you’re apt to learn bad skills.

However you can learn a lot of great things from a bad supervisor.  I always said I learned the most from the managers that I had the greatest challenges with and it’s true.  It depends on what you do to gain the upper hand.

There are several things you can do to improve:

• Journals are a great tool to grow as a manager, they help you understand when and how you have been mismanaged and work through more constructive ways to handle it.

• There are many great books as well, too many for me to list here.  It also depends on what your growth opportunities are.

• A support group or a career coach can be a great tool to help you grow.

You need someone that will help you find your internal compass to navigate trying situations and help you develop clear action steps for the journey ahead.

Business management classes are important but they aren’t a cure all.  Some people have certain drives and knack’s for doing things that transcend schooling.  A lot depends on your learning style and your personality type.  There are many great personality assessments that can help you determine whether school is a good fit or maybe you are a “fly by the seat of your pants” type person and can’t stand school.

Find Your Strengths

Know what kind of person you are and what motivates you. I would recommend school to anyone that is at a point they can do it. It gives you so much discipline and ability to follow up with projects and deadlines that may catapult your career. Even if you don’t know your specialty it’s best to go ahead and get a basic degree, it’s a lot harder to go back than to finish in the first place.

Great Books Can Help

You can read books and grow if you are self motivated and have a learning style that enables you to read and take action.  A powerful combination is a combination of books and coaching.  It is so much easier to create actions and you retain so much more from what you read when you have the opportunity to discuss it with someone else.

Some great books that are easy reads are:
Strengths Finder 2.0 by Tom Rath. This book, if you buy it new, also comes with an assessment you take online. It’s a great tool.

Some of his research done with the Gallup organization is staggering.  Here are some numbers:

• They found that out of a 1000 people who feel strongly that they don’t get to do “what I do best”, EVERY person was disengaged from their job.

• Those that have the opportunity to focus on their strengths are 6 times as likely to be engaged in their job and more than 3 times as likely to report having “an excellent quality of life in general”.

• If your manager primarily ignores you the chances of you being actively disengaged are 40%.

• If your manager focuses primarily on your weaknesses the chances of you being actively disengaged are 22%.

• If your manager primarily focuses on your strengths the chances of you being actively disengaged fall to 1%.

The power of a supervisor’s role on their staff can not be underestimeated.  And also of parents and teachers, the book goes on to talk about how their research shows that 77% of parents believe the lowest grade deserves the most attention and time instead of investing more time in the areas where the child has the greatest potential.

Emotional Intelligence

The Emotional Intelligence Quick Book by Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves is excellent. This book also comes with a free assessment as long as the book is new and someone hasn’t used it. Emotional Intelligence, also referred to as EQ, has been a fairly new component of understanding work place environments and productivity.

The book describes the difference of IQ from EQ.

Your IQ never changes and stays the same. They have done studies and found that two people with the same IQ can have completely different levels of success.  Also your IQ is your ability to learn and it does not change over time.

On the other hand EQ can be developed even if you are not born with it.  Your senses enter your brain through your spinal cord and must travel through the limbic system before you can think rationally about your experience. Emotional intelligence requires smooth communication between the rational and emotional centers of the brain.  When you practice emotional intelligence, the traffic flows smoothly in both directions.

By the way, with EQ, women and men are basically even, so the idea that women have more EQ is wrong.

• Women scores higher in Social Awareness and Relationship Management
• Men scored higher in Self-Management
• The sexes were almost tied for Self-Awareness but men had a slight edge.

The four emotional skills they identify is: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management.  Understanding how they work and how they interact is important at gaining EQ.

Leadership in a Nutshell

Leadership and the One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard, Patricia Zigmarmi and Drea Zigmarmi.  All the One Minute Manager series are excellent but this one help new managers understand how they need to manage people differently.  This book would work for experienced managers as well.  “Different strokes for different folks” as the authors described it.

The book is simplistic but very easy to understand and gives great examples of how leadership styles effect your ability to get things done and how your staff reacts to you.

Another book that is a compelling true story, an easy read and is aligned with many larger corporations way of thinking is, It’s Your Ship by Captain D. Michael Abrashoff.  This book has some great stories and real life examples of how, even in the military, accepting how something is done just because “that’s the way it’s done” is a narrow way of looking at things.  There are ways to do things better.

Business Management Classes

Post-secondary education in business management is widely available. And management training companies are abundant, as are online business management classes through colleges such as the University of Phoenix.

Careers in business management can be gained with a bachelor’s degree, or even an associate’s degree, but an MBA (Masters Business Association) will open up even more doors since the focus of an MBA degree is the science of management.  I have never seen a MBA graduate manage better than any other manager so this depends on what you want to do with it.

Business management classes will cover such topics as time management in the workplace, managing difficult employees, managing change in the workplace, managing conflict at work, managing ethics in the workplace, and managing workplace stress.

Management is not the only career business management colleges will prepare you for. After taking business management classes, you might feel less suited towards managing people directly, and more suited towards human resources, retail services, benefits administration or communication, to name a few.