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It is common practice to appoint new department or school managers from the ranks of successful teachers or trainers or, in industry, engineers or other “production” positions. Such appointees sometimes have had little or no practical management training. This article can then be an important “gift” to such newly appointed managers. It describes brain-friendly, productive management practice. Good managers are good leaders.The basic job of a manager is to help those who report to him or her to be successful at accomplishing their missions. Any manager who acts simply as a “boss and evaluator” is not providing members of his or her team with an environment that encourages maximum productivity. The most effective managers lead their team members with clarified goals and systems, sensitive listening, opportunities for involvement in shaping operations, opportunities for professional growth, and non-intrusive monitoring. A major goal is to give team members help when they need it, not to “catch” them at not succeeding. Solid leadership behaviors are a foundation of good management.Good managers focus on basic needs of team members. Those basic needs are:1. Belonging, 2. Personal power, 3. Freedom, 4. Fun.Let us review each of these in turn.Belonging. Employees can be most productive if they perceive themselves as valued members of a team (department, division, group). A manager-leader can support this perception by:1. Holding periodic coordination meetings to keep everyone thoroughly informed and to give opportunities for feedback, planning revisions, and cooperative discussions.2. Advance discussion with the team or an individual member about possible changes in mission, roles, resources, etc.3. Being conveniently available for discussions of individual ideas or problems.4. Being willing, where possible, to arrange special working conditions to accommodate temporary personal problems of an individual team member (making loyalty a two-way process).Personal power. Team members need to be respected and recognized to maintain their enthusiasm. The manager-leader should work to ensure that:1. Each team member has important tasks that he or she can accomplish.2. Important accomplishments are rewarded with recognition and, where possible, with broadened responsibility or authority and salary progress.3. The ideas and suggestions of each team member are carefully considered and where feasible, used.The above actions show each team member the power of his or her personal effort.Freedom. The manager-leader should give each team member as much authority and freedom to direct his or her own work as possible within school, company or mission guidelines. Having choices and control over one’s own work processes can be a major motivating factor. Second-guessing and over-direction from a manager are major demotivating factors.Fun. The best teachers know that student productivity increases with careful use of down time and relaxation periods. The best managers know that balanced opportunities for relaxation, humor, and socializing are an important part of motivating team members.Now let us review other important factors beyond needs of team members. These include Evaluation, Two Direction Management, Lateral Management and a Special Caution.Evaluation of team members. Evaluation should be a monitoring and helping process. A manager should accompany any constructive criticism with helping suggestions and/or resources. This does not preclude the right to require that some concern or issue be addressed. It simply fulfills the basic management responsibility for helping people to succeed. Also, be sure to allow evaluatees to appeal or explain evaluation issues; give their explanation sincere consideration.A manager shows strength and confidence in himself or herself when he or she decides to change an evaluation because an evaluatee makes a good case for such change. Finally, the entire evaluation process is strengthened if a management-by-objective, participatory process is followed. That process is one of the manager and an evaluatee deciding on objectives and desired performance standards in advance, each contributing to the process. Then the later evaluation can be much more objective because standards have been agreed upon in advance.Two direction management. Previous suggestions have focused on a manager being supportive of his or her members. However, remember the opposite direction. As a manager, another one of your basic tasks is to keep your manager informed – - the no unnecessary surprises principle. That allows your manager to help you and to depend on you. In other words, you are now teaming in two directions – - with your team members and with your manager. Expect this same no-surprise principle from your team members. It helps to tie an organization together.Lateral management. Whenever possible help and cooperate with your management peers, for example, other department chairpersons. Again, expect this lateral help among your team members and from your team members to those on other teams. If everyone in an organization accepts the basic task of being helpful when possible to anyone else in the organization, the culture of belonging gets even stronger. Organization productivity can go even higher.A special caution on your manager. Before you take a management position, have a two-way discussion on these suggestions with your prospective manager. If he or she does not agree with some of the basic principles in this article, think carefully before you accept an appointment. For example, if your prospective manager does not plan to give you a significant degree of freedom and authority, you will find it far more difficult to grant such to those who work for you! If your prospective manager does not see evaluation as a helping rather than a do-it-to-you process, it will be more difficult for you to emphasize helping.If your prospective manager “never changes his evaluations” when such are appealed or explained, he or she is not someone who listens carefully to others; that could leave you treated and evaluated unfairly in a new management position. If you do accept a management role under a manager with beliefs or habits that could undercut your effectiveness, do so with full recognition that such managers tend to blame the results of their brain-unfriendly practices on others; you could become one of those others. Avoid such managers if possible. Certainly do not become that type of manager yourself.Summary of main points. Here are summary lists of some brain-friendly (good) and brain-unfriendly (bad) management practices. The numbering in each list is related to the other list. Work at using the good practices and avoiding the bad ones.Brain-friendly/Good Management Practices:1. Clarify mission and goals.2. Listen carefully to others.3. Involve your team members in planning and decision-making in a management system.4. Provide your team members with professional growth or learning opportunities.5. Use monitoring data to help your team members succeed.6. Hold coordination meetings. Keep everyone informed.7. Be conveniently available for individual discussions.8. Be willing to arrange temporary special working conditions to help individuals with special personal problems.9. Define meaningful tasks; recognize and reward progress on same.10. Consider and use suggestions from team members when feasible.11. Give team members as much freedom and authority as you can to direct their own work.12. Support balanced opportunities for breaks, relaxation, socializing, humor, and fun.13. Emphasize the helping and encouragement aspects of evaluation.14. Keep your manager supported and informed (no surprises).15. Promote lateral helping between peers.16. Evaluate the philosophy of your prospective manager before taking a job as a new manager.Brain-unfriendly/Bad Management Practices:1. Assume that team members know their mission and goals.2. Emphasize telling those who work for you what to do.3. Emphasize telling those who work for you what to do.4. Let team members shift for themselves on professional growth.5. Evaluate at the end of tasks; do not “bother” folks until then.6. Emphasize memos to tell team members what to do.7. Restrict your availability for individual meetings.8. Enforce the same working conditions and rules for everyone at all times.9. View solid performance as normal and expected, not deserving of specific recognition.10. Emphasize telling those who work for you what to do.11. Require team members to do things exactly the way you define.12. Concentrate on work and production at all times.13. Use evaluation to “shape-up” others and to tell them what to do.14. Do not give extra information to your manager; just answer when questions are asked.15. Keep focused on individuals doing their job and not on them being concerned with others in the organization.16. Do not be concerned with the habits or beliefs of your prospective manager. You cannot do anything about those.And now, good luck with the responsibility and the fun of helping others to succeed! Following that theme can make management positions very rewarding.

You bought into the Internet Merchant Dream. You now have one or more websites selling products online that you are convinced are in great demand. Now that the entire internet world becomes your customer base, you figure that your sales will blossom your websites into a ‘Wal-mart of Websites”!Most likely you have received one or two calls per week from a number of Internet Marketing companies who promise you the glories of improving one or more of these:
Your traffic by establishing reciprocal links
Your Google Ranking through Hundreds of Directory registrations (registrations that are repeated 2 -4 times each month)
Web Traffic through writing articles for eZines and BLOGS
Traffic (up from the number of Visitors you now have – whatever that number is) using Marketing using email campaigns
Search Engine Page inclusions based on the proper selection, webpage positioning and page density of Keywords, Meta Descriptions and Meta Keywords to improve search bot sweeps of your site.
Search Engine Page Inclusions with XML and ROR sitemaps for Google and Yahoo Search Bots
Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns
Web Banner campaigns
Advertising Revenue through Affiliate Programs, Adsense, el al

Each Marketing Company will pitch you the importance of their company’s offering providing you the “winning formula for the Internet Selling Bonanza”. Well almost!Take it from me – someone who operated a “mortar and brick” business: a franchise that offered a great new way to merchandise healthy life style products and services. We all want to hear how quickly we can make thousands and thousands of dollars as a Retail Merchant. We all get convinced by a few of these “get the sales quicker” Internet Marketing Companies pitch that their product or service will vault us into Conversions (fancy name for Internet Sales) with unbelievable speed.We entrepreneurs, each and every one of us, must first buy into the concept, the products, the vision of demand for the products and services offered. Our hope for a successful business, coupled with our zeal to quickly start our business, clouds our vision in applying the basics of building a business. Beware these purveyors of “Business Bliss”!I am often reminded of a story we read back in elementary school called Stone Soup. It is fable about a traveling Minstrel who had devised a simply ingenious way of obtaining food at each of his stop-over destinations. The housewife invites the Minstrel into her home intrigued by the promise of a “Magic Stone” capable of turning plain boiling water into a delicious soup.While the Minstrel is stirring the Magic Stone (free for the taking from the roadside) in a huge pot of boiling water, he begins to tell the unsuspecting housewife how wonderful the soup is going to taste. He weaves a tale of a tasty and healthy meal for her family. But then he states, “As delicious as this Magic Stone Soup will be, it would be even more delicious if we added a few carrots.” The housewife always obliged and would eagerly add diced carrots to the Magic Stone Soup.The Minstrel would continue this charade of suggesting other vegetables to enhance an already excellent tasting Magic Stone Soup. And the housewife, or another person in the village or town, would eagerly add what vegetable the Minstrel suggested to the soup pot. At the end of the story, the soup created was a great soup, filled with vegetables donated by the towns people! This Magic Stone Soup is then shared with the lady of the house, and the whole town. Once he has had his fill of soup, the Minstrel would remove his Magic Stone and continue on his way to the next village or town. This is the technique used by many Internet Marketing Service companies – Stone Soup Selling. They start you with something simple (and free or of little value) and before you know it, you have to invest more of your money and time to make what they originally sold you work.I will agree that a balanced approach toward applying ALL of the items above (and more) are necessary for getting people to your website. But getting them to move from Visitors (browsers) to Sales Conversions (buyers) requires good old merchandising and pricing and promotion techniques as well.So don’t buy into the Stone Soup ‘Quick Fix’ messages delivered by most of these Internet Marketing Companies. Like any business, whether it be Mortar ‘n Brick or Internet, it takes months to years to build a loyal client base and reap your Merchant Fortunes. Be patient. Be diligent. Apply the many aspects of marketing; whether it is theFIVE P’s: People, Price, Product, Promotion, Place orFIVE C’s: Customer Solution (benefits), Customer Cost (competitive) , Convenience (right to your door), Communication (engage emotion, information).Remember: there is no such thing as a quick road to riches (at least not morally and legally). There is no magic Stone Soup. Beware the “Minstrels of who weave a tale of Quick Money”.