Manager's Guide to Human Beings , livre ebook

Troubador Publishing Ltd - Bronach Crawley

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

56 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

Organisations are full of human beings, stacked high with them indeed. Whether hot desking or working from home, employed or on-contract, people breathe an organisation's air and rub shoulders physically or digitally with other human beings. Although machines, platforms, robots and computers have radically changed the way in which we work, organisations are still humming with people. Why is it then that after at least two centuries of practice, so many initiatives designed to enhance human performance fail to hit the mark? Why is it that organisations still don't get the human bit of human being? This book explains why. If you want to break this pattern, The Manager's Guide to Human Beings is here to help. By clarifying the core characteristics of our human self, it gives managers a framework against which the myriad of approaches that flood the HR market can be considered and indicates why some are doomed for failure and some have a higher chance of success. In this short and accessible book, the manager is taken below the surface, to the very core of what human beings are all about and given practical ideas to make life easier in the real world of managing real human beings. By developing a more complete understanding of your people and yourself, you have a greater chance of improving the performance of your team and, more importantly, helping to build a more fulfilling life for the human beings around you. And that includes you. The Manager's Guide to Human Beings is the missing link in HR books. All those who manage or lead people, regardless of sector, seniority or discipline, whether managing nurses or investment bankers, will find this book a resource to come back to time and time again.

Sujets

Sociologie, société et politique

Psychology

Informations

Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	11 juin 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781789011272
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0300€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

THE MANAGER’S GUIDE
TO HUMAN BEINGS

Understanding our human nature at work

Bronach Crawley
Copyright © 2018 Bronach Crawley

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

Matador®
9 Priory Business Park,
Wistow Road, Kibworth Beauchamp,
Leicestershire. LE8 0RX
Tel: 0116 279 2299
Email: books@troubador.co.uk
Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador
Twitter: @matadorbooks

ISBN 9781789011272

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
About the Author
Bronach Crawley BSC PhD MPhil MSc
For over thirty-five years, Bronach Crawley has worked as a psychologist in both the commercial world and the public sector. Trained in both clinical and occupational psychology, she has a fascination with how individuals manage their work life and how the collective organisation behaves. She has held roles as a university lecturer and clinical psychologist at the Institute of Psychiatry, worked in career development in financial services, been an HR consultant in a major consulting firm, and run her own business, Bronach Crawley Consulting. She is currently a director of the Domino Partnership. Throughout, her interest has been, and remains, uncovering the real reasons human beings do what they do. She is a specialist in assessment, psychological profiling, facilitation, teaching consulting skills, coaching at senior levels with teams and individuals, and designing programmes to promote sustainable change. Bronach is an associate fellow of the British Psychological Society and a member of the BPS specialist group on coaching.

For my boys,
three wonderful human beings.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction

Chapter 1 What Makes Us Human?
Chapter 2 We Are Heart and Computer
Chapter 3 The Manager as Human Being Detective
Chapter 4 Why Look at Behaviour, the What?
Chapter 5 Why Look at Style and Preferences, the How ?
Chapter 6 Why Look at Values and Beliefs, the Why ?
Chapter 7 Why Look at Core Needs, the Why for All Human Beings?
Chapter 8 I Am Safe
Chapter 9 I Matter
Chapter 10 I Belong
Chapter 11 I Change
Chapter 12 Helping Human Beings to Find a Voice
Chapter 13 Harnessing Motivation: The Importance of Purpose
Chapter 14 Helping Human Beings to Give of Their Best
Chapter 15 Reclaiming Our Status as Human Beings

Notes
Acknowledgements
This book would still be a jumble of thoughts languishing in my brain had it not been for the help of numerous exceptional people. A round of applause goes to Hilary Farrar, Philip Lindsay and to the inspirational Sandy Cotter who took a risk on me and transformed my academic approach into something useful, to Lawrie Philpot who had confidence in the notion of this book so very long ago and to all my friends at YSC for allowing me to be their associate, drink their coffee and be part of their furniture for many years. Particular thanks go to Professor Patricia Bossons, Sherief Hammady, Rachel Robinson, Nik Kinley and Guy Gumbrell for their invaluable comments on earlier drafts. I am grateful to the Harvard Business Review, the CIPD and Aaron Hurst for allowing me to quote from their texts and, of course, endless thanks to Guy, Dominic, Tom and Joe just for being you.
Introduction
People are people regardless of where they are and what they do, whether they are tending to the needs of the sick, figuring out finances or selling clothes on the high street.
Putting robots, computers and buildings aside, the environment in which we earn our crust is made up of other human beings (whether leaders, subordinates, managers, clients, customers, shareholders, suppliers, patients, ombudsmen, legislators and every name you can think of) and, whenever human beings come together, interesting human being things happen. What’s more, while the technical nature of a role challenges us on a range of fronts, the majority of our difficulties at work are centred on people. Human beings can be the highlight of work but they can also be the root of pain, as in pain in the backside.
Throughout my career, I have been fascinated by how much time is taken struggling with people issues when we are awash with information to help us. The books on psychological theories, management techniques, neuropsychology and emotional intelligence fill libraries. We have management development initiatives, leadership programmes and coaching coming at us from all angles. We work in an environment of people. We are people ourselves. Surely, accounting for the human being aspects of work should be like falling off a log, that easy, but somehow, it just isn’t.
Recognising and managing people as human beings is a tall order for many reasons. Surprisingly, the very systems and processes that are supposed to help us in this quest can easily lead towards further misunderstanding and confusion. It seems that the more we attempt to systemise and categorise our understanding of people through sophisticated HR methodologies, the further we seem to be from recognising the human being within each of us. I hold my hand up here because those of us on the inside of HR have much to account for. We have created an industry with tools and techniques that promise much but which often oversimplify and thereby mislead. We have suggested to managers that the burden of difficult human being tasks can be lifted and placed elsewhere. Yet, it isn’t possible to outsource the responsibility for managing people to techniques, systems, other functions or other organisations because real people management takes place within every interaction we make. It consists of the everyday world of contact between human beings, the us and the them and, make no mistake, it’s as much about us as it is about them . If you’re a manager, it’s about you and your people. It’s time to face up to it: managing human beings is difficult but it’s also the stuff of real life, every single day.
Beyond this, we have been so keen, or perhaps so browbeaten, to align ourselves to the financial drivers of business strategy that we have lost touch, literally, with the individual human beings that are the living cells that create a living organisation. We have also chosen to pay only minimal heed to the purpose of organisations as entities that serve all stakeholders, that is, all the human beings affected by an organisation’s actions whether directly or at the end of a lengthy chain of events. In the long term, this organisational blindness begins to erode the foundations on which an organisation exists and may, in part, explain why corporate lifespan has shortened considerably over the past century, with average longevity now below that expected for a human being 1 and with many not even reaching adolescence. Certainly, organisations appear and disappear for a variety of reasons but forgetting the impact of human nature on organisational life seems to wield a critical injury.
… there is currently evidence that corporations fail because of the prevailing thinking and language of economics. To put it another way: Companies die because their managers focus on the economic activity of producing goods and services, and they forget that their organizations’ true nature is that of a community of humans. The legal establishment, business educators and the financial community all join them in this mistake.
De Geus, The Living Company (2002) 2
If ignoring the human element is a risky and potentially damaging business, the need for an alternative is self-evident. We can only foster a true understanding of how we humans operate by putting human being, rather than human resource, issues high on the organisational agenda. By consciously working with, rather than against, our nature we will be better placed to harness the power of motivated people, using their talents and energy to bring innovation and commitment to a common purpose. This can only be a good thing and it’s what this book is about.
So, whether you manage people on a small or large scale, I hope that by reminding you of what matters to you, to your family, friends, colleagues and all those you encounter in your work life, you will see beyond their title or associated performance indicators, to meet them as human to human and reap the rewards of your effort.
The style of this book
If you are holding a paper copy of this book, you will have noticed that it’s a slim volume. Strangely, it started as a much longer, rather academic book but as I learned more it shrank. What study and, more importantly, experience have taught me is that the most valuable lessons that help in our dealings with other people fall into the category of straightforward common sense. Unfortunately, in our quest to become more sophisticated operators (and to make money out of HR), simple ideas that don’t need a training course or a certificate before they can be applied have often been overlooked. Understanding these basic concepts matters because, if we are to build meaningful ways of helping people give of their best, we need to get the foundations right. By stripping away peripheral HR speak and goin