Archive for Career Development
A Career in Business Management
Posted by: | CommentsThinking 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.
Effective Communication
Posted by: | CommentsPoor workplace communication from employees to customers results in hard feelings, frustration between each other, 
and even losing customers if they have another place they can go to get the items or service you offer.
You’ve experienced this if you’ve called for technical support to nearly any major company in the past few years. With so much outsourcing to other countries, it can be a huge struggle for both parties to understand each others’ accents. In this case, the poor communication is due to language barriers, but that doesn’t negate the consequences.
On the other hand, effective workplace communication from employees to customers makes happy customers. And happy customers are repeat customers.
Effective communication within the business is crucial as well. Perhaps you’ve had a boss who was too vague in describing exactly what he wanted you to do on your latest project. You think you heard “do XYZ” and later he says, “No, I told you to do ABC.” Time is wasted, you’re both angry and frustrated with each other, and it may even put your job on the line.
Based on your perceptions and your view of the job, you might actually have heard “do XYZ”. Likewise for your boss, who has another scenario in his head that fits with you doing “ABC.” But without the communication to explain thoroughly what expectations are, disaster isn’t far away.
Your experience with your emotions and understanding your control is an important element. There are assessments to find out and some great books to help. Understanding your role with emotions and how they play into other lives can help you have a better impact on your career and personal life. It makes for better communication skills in the work place and others.
Business Communication
Business communication in its simplest definition is just what it says: communication in business. But because people are so different and the business workplace is often so hectic and bustling, effective workplace communication can be difficult to achieve, let alone master.
Consider, too, that workplace communication is no longer only through meetings, phone calls, or memos posted around the water cooler.
When email became the main course of communication in the workplace, misunderstandings and hurt feelings arose. Why? Because missing in email (and other written communication, too) is the tone of the writer, the non-verbal cues, the body language. People tend to read into an email based on their current state of emotions and their relationship with that person.
A message as simple as “Good one” can be misunderstood. Is it a compliment or a sarcastic retort? But, “Good one. The client was really pleased!” makes the message clear and it takes only a few seconds more to clarify.
There is so much emphasis on communication in every aspect of our daily life it’s really important to understand the impact. A mumbled “thank you” with no eye contact has no meaning. An enthusiastic “Thank You!” with eye contact and a nod, wink or smile can move mountains.
When you get an email that makes you feel hurt or angry, before you type a long outcry take a moment and talk to the person when you aren’t feeling so hurt or angry. Maybe wait an hour or maybe a few hours. Many times people type a long response to something that they perceive is a wrong without thinking it through. Emotional outbursts even in email form don’t really have a place in the work place.
There are many employees out there working everyday to do well in their jobs and make a difference, they diligently send out department or company emails with instructions or information, often they feel they are sending the information to a void. Take the 5 seconds and send them a “thank you, I really appreciate you getting this out to everyone” and follow up with your subordinates if you have any. You have no idea how affirming it is to them, to be acknowledged and feel appreciated, and what did it take from you?
Any communication sent your way is usually a time saver for you. Decide how to best use it. Don’t assume your people read their emails. Typically as people move up their reading comprehension becomes more important, it’s important to develop those skills in your people and yourself.
Effective workplace communication
One of the biggest stresses for employees is often they feel “out of the loop” or like they aren’t told anything. This is a morale killer among a lot of other things. It is critical for you to develop a way to get information to your people. Or maybe you can do it for your supervisor. There is no perfect method, find something easy to maintain and understand.
Communication Skill Builders
Your communication skills, like your leadership management skills, can always benefit from a refresher course, from a session of communication skill builders, or from other communication exercises.
Aside from taking communication building courses, you’ll find a slew of communications management magazines, websites, seminars and courses online.
It’s also maybe a good idea to understand some of the reasons there are problems with communication. The book “The Emotional Intelligence Quick Book”, by Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves, gives a great insight to some common errors and misunderstandings. The book also comes with a free online assessment, that is if you buy it new and no one has used the code yet. It is a great tool to get started.
And for the serious communication buffs, a degree in organizational communication might be in order. This would open up career doors in areas such as management, human resources, training, consulting, and more.
Good Leadership Skills
Posted by: | CommentsMany people consider themselves to have good leadership skills when in reality they’re better at discouraging than encouraging. They’re better at scattering people than gathering people around them. Just being in a leadership position does not turn a person into a leader any more than sitting in a garage turns a person into a car.
Leadership seems to be innate in a few people, but most of us have to learn how to be a good, effective leader.
What are Good Leadership Skills?
Good leadership skills encompass so many aspects, they are rather intangible.
Yes, a leader leads in the most basic definition, but how do they gain the trust of those following them? How do they make people feel safe in their situation, even if it’s a dangerous situation? What do they do that makes people say, even years later, “She was such a great person to work for” or, “If he hadn’t been my boss, I wouldn’t be as successful as I am today.”
There is nothing more rewarding than helping others to be more successful. If you help others to improve their abilities and they are able to better provide for themselves and their family, what is better than that?
Good Leaders Care
Good leaders care about those they lead and seek to provide for their well-being. A military commander tries to keep his troops alive and win their battles. Parents work to provide a house and food. Supervisors look for opportunities to better their employees, perhaps through additional training and responsibilities that prepare them for promotions.
It’s important to care about your people, there isn’t a way to shortcut this. If you don’t care there are several books that can help you care and understand caring. You can get training and coaching on Emotional Intelligence and it will help. (It helped me!)
Good Leaders Listen
Good leaders listen. They assimilate information and process it against the big picture goal. They listen to people who work above them to understand the big picture and company goals. They listen to team members working for them to understand their concerns and ideas.
Good leadership skills
The best information you can get is from your people. Your people have vital information, perspectives, understanding, even tidbits they hear from other departments or competitors. Your people have good ideas, if you are fair and manage them well they will do their best to help the team succeed. Build the team. Follow the steps, use the tools.
Good Leaders Change
Because change in life and business is inevitable, a leader has to be able to adapt well to change. More than just adapting, good leaders continually look for ways to improve a situation and, where possible, initiate positive changes themselves.
One saying you can be assured is accurate “The only constant is change.” Don’t fight it, it’s useless. Embrace it. Use the change to build your team and help them grow from it. There’s no point making a negative if you can turn something into a positive. Every chance you can turn negatives (or spin them) into positives is a win for you and your team.
Good Leaders Share
Leaders are all about teamwork, not dictatorship. Now, your position may have you working in a bureaucratic type of environment where “the rules are the rules” and there’s not much room for creativity. You can still be an effective leader to your team. You can still encourage, listen, create goals for their personal and professional growth, and develop them into the best team in the company. It just takes adapting to your situation.
You can create motivational fun things with potlucks, movie tickets. Find leadership development material and have a mini-series of classes for them, they will appreciate it and become better managers themselves. Volunteer as a group to paint a children’s center or volunteer as a group somewhere, have a cause that matters. If the company is stifling you should try to find outlets for creativity of your team.
These are only a few good leadership skills. Do you recognize any in yourself? If you don’t already you can if you want to.
EQ Numbers
Posted by: | CommentsThere are many, many numbers on EQ and its effects on performance, productivity, employee engagement and much more.
The following numbers are from Daniel Goleman’s book Working with Emotional Intelligence.
Daniel Goleman’s analysis of 181 jobs in 121 organizations found that emotional competencies were the best differentiators between star performers and typical performers.
In top leadership positions over 85% of the difference in performance is due to emotional competence.
Salespeople selected for emotional competencies at L’Oreal outsold collegues by $91,370 each, for net revenue increase of $2,558,360.
Met Life salesman who scored high on the optimism sell 37% more insurance in their first two years.
At L’Oreal sales agents who were selected for their strengths in emotional competence had 63 percent less turnover during their first year than those whose selection disregarded their competence profile. Daniel Goleman, Working with Emotional Intelligence.
Among newly hired sales reps at a start-up computer company, those hired for emotional competence were 90 percent more likely to finish their training than those hired for other criteria. Daniel Goleman, Working with Emotional Intelligence.
With some of these examples, and there are countless others, how can companies afford not to educate employees in these topics? What’s more, how can an employee, knowing education and training is out there, not take the opportunity to become better and more promotable?
Think of these statistics…..
The following are from Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves.
EQ is so critical to success that it accounts for 58% of performance in all types of jobs.
Only 36% of the people we tested are able to accurately identify their emotions as they happen.
People with the highest levels of IQ outperform those with average IQ just 20% of the time, while people with average IQs outperform those with high IQs 70% of the time.
The link to EQ and earnings is so direct that every point increase in EQ adds $1300 to an annual salary.
Self-awareness is so important for job performance that 83% of people high in self-awareness are top performers, and just 2% of bottom performers are high in self awareness.
What Next?
Emotional intelligence can be improved upon. In fact, it might be a great training focus for your employees or yourself. It takes constant focus to overcome old habits and make behavior changes.
Early in my career I found that I was stressed out and running around like a chicken all the time and I had less than 20 employees. I was very controlling, I didn’t care what was going on with my employees other than what they could get done for me. I found I snapped at people, was by the rules and really focused on results.
At the time, my direct supervisor was influential in my development. He had conversations with me where we would work out the rational of what needed to get done and why. He was always understanding, asked my input and there was more… He even knew people two tiers below him and would ask me if I knew so-and-so liked horses too. Did I know so-and-so’s husband was in the hospital…. On and on.
It dawned on me one day that if he could find time in his busy day to chat with me and all these other people, why couldn’t I? Didn’t I have more responsibility to my subordinates than he did? Didn’t he have more to do than I did? So… I dug in.
It took months and months. I then read Daniel Goleman’s book, Working with Emotional Intelligence and I finally understood all the components. It still took months, but with the use of my journal and my boss at the time I did become a better people person. I was also able to manage people more effectively and with a lot less stress. I smiled more, talked to my employees. Guess what happened next? It carried over into my home life as well.
I would never of won the awards I have won over the years or the monetary prizes. I would of never been able to help as many employees go on to become successful themselves. I would never of had the compassion to take an average or D player and find out how to make them successful.
It’s really that important.
Types of Leadership
Posted by: | CommentsDifferent types of leadership styles exist for different personalities and businesses.
One leadership style might naturally suit you best, or you might have to adapt to one due to the company you work for.
All of these styles are important in the right environment. Don’t think one is the perfect method. In certain situations each of them has positives and negatives.
It’s best to understand how each of them work and watch them in your boss or other supervisors. Know how you are being managed. How does it make you feel? Which style do you prefer to be managed with?
Types of Leadership:
Laissez Faire
Laissez Faire leaders are very “hands off” in their management style. Face time with their team members is minimal.
Some managers seem to employ this type of leadership – if you can even call them leaders – because they don’t want to get involved. It’s more of a “lazy” type leadership for them. This is not laissez faire leadership.
The laissez faire style works well if you have a team of highly trained individuals who are also highly motivated. They know what needs to be done, they do it, and they do it well. One problem that can come up with this style is the employees don’t feel valued or appreciated.
Types of Leadership: Autocratic
An autocratic leader has the total authority to make decisions. They make the rules, period. The autocratic leadership style can work well on teams needing close supervision and are new or still learning. But it’s not so effective when you’re working in an environment where team collaboration is necessary.
Many people find this style to be stifling and they don’t feel valued if their boss uses this style exclusively. This is a good method when there is an emergency and someone has to take charge. This is also a good method when handling a dispute between a couple employees.
Types of Leadership: Democratic
The democratic leader, on the other hand, has the authority over the final decision, but they go to the employees to get their input and suggestions.
Because the team has a part in the process, they feel ownership of the decision and are more likely to embrace it. Even if they don’t agree with the ultimate decision, they know they were heard and considered. They also have the benefit of knowing the “whys” of the decision and understand the big picture better than someone under an autocratic leader.
This method is great for building teams and the why behind that will fill up another entire page!
A dry erase board or giant paper with an easel comes in handy when using this type of management style during a meeting. Ask a question or describe the problem then have everyone contribute ideas to answer a question and write them down. Then systematically go through the answers and ask the group the pros and cons of each.
I often knew the outcome of the question I asked but instead of just telling everyone what to do I knew they would do it better if I involved them in the decision.
This method is great if you are trying to develop junior managers. You can go through all the steps of your thought processes by asking questions and letting the group begin the journey of understanding the why behind solutions.
If you use this method exclusively you can run into problems just like the other methods, although this leadership style has the least amount if used correctly.
The people that don’t appreciate it are the people who want things “perfect” or who believe completely in the chain of command. I have had employees that would rather not be involved in a decision, they want to be “told” what to do, it reassures them and makes them more comfortable.
The other people this method doesn’t work well with is the disengaged employees, they might think you are “weak” just because they aren’t in touch with the rest of the group.
Types of Leadership: Bureaucratic
If you’ve ever been managed strictly “by the book,” you’ve experienced a bureaucratic leader.
While it might sound outdated and unpopular, “by the book” bureaucratic leadership types work well and are necessary in some fields. Universities, hospitals and banks benefit from bureaucratic leadership. The strictness of following particular rules helps increase security within the company, and reduces corruption. A downside is that it’s slow-moving in order to ensure adherence to policies and procedures.
This leader has a tendency to be very un-motivating and is prone to not having synergy in their teams. They don’t like “flow” because you have to “fly by the seat of your pants”, they just want things exactly as they have dictated. They are necessary and excellent in certain fields or positions.
If this type of manager works for you it’s important to follow up with their people and ensure they feel appreciated and valued. It’s easy to forget to tell this manager the same thing, so make sure they get told, usually they won’t tell you they enjoyed hearing it, but they do.
Types of Leadership: Charismatic
Charismatic leaders are all about energy and motivation. Teams led by a charismatic leader can have a very difficult time when that leader leaves. If you are taking over a management position that was previously led by a charismatic leader, be prepared for some challenges.
In certain positions at certain times I have been very charismatic, and indeed the manager behind me had a difficult time.
This method is perfect if you are trying to feed energy into a group. Feed energy you may ask, yes, FEED energy. When I was doing this it was to bring the intensity level up in the group, the energy level, the drive.
It is extremely exhausting to do it, you have to be consistent, do it every single day. But it works! It’s a great method to increase sales or get some big projects done. You also need to make really big deals out of every positive, thank EVERY person exuberantly. Say “hi” to everyone. You have to stay highly visible for it to work.
Plan this well because it can take a few days or even a few weeks for it to even begin to work, but once the energy in the group is going it usually starts to snowball and feed itself. Also be aware, this method doesn’t work if you don’t have employees that care and respect you. You have to have trust and respect first.
Types of Leadership: Relational
A relational (or transformational) leader is opposite the laissez faire leader. They are highly communication based and highly visible. This is not to be confused with a micromanager. Relational leaders are focused on the big picture and they are surrounded with people who accomplish the details of the big picture.
They don’t usually care about the details of something, they care about the who. Who is doing what? How is so and so doing? How was your weekend? Who is doing that? If you start to go over a bunch of details you will find their eyes start of glaze over and their mind wanders. They care about the who.
What’s Your Style?
You might have natural tendencies towards particular types of leadership. Your company may require you to lead in one of these particular methods, which can be difficult if you’re used to an opposite style.
Learning to manage in a different style will only benefit you in the long run. If fact, using only a couple will slow your career down. You need to understand when to use the different styles to fit your employees.
It’s even possible… NO… I would say you will need to alter your leadership type multiple times working for the same company if you take on different teams or projects over your years of employment.
Most likely you will need to change your style multiple times a year at a minimum.
