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SEVEN THINGS YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOUT
PEOPLE
When managing people it
is useful to be able to tap into their
natural tendencies rather than try to
fight against them.
When planning your
tactics for a specific type of
interaction, allow yourself to be guided
by the following rules of thumb:
1. People want to be free
2. People are accountable
for only their own behaviour
3. There are consequences
for all behaviour.
4. People must know what
behaviour is expected.
5. People must know how
they are doing.
6. People usually do not
destroy what they have created.
7. Like creates and
attracts like.
1. People want to be
free.
In general, freedom is
preferable to slavery, both in terms of
morality and effectiveness.
In a modern society and
in business organizations we no longer
have slavery. Nor do we have absolute
freedom.
If there is a scale with
slavery at one end and freedom at the
other, the closer people feel themselves
to be to the freedom end, the better
they feel about what they are doing.
Staff who are genuinely
empowered to make their own decisions
about how to achieve their part of the
organisation’s objectives will tend to
do so more enthusiastically and
effectively than staff who are simply
issued with orders.
Managing people
effectively has a lot to do with
creating a perception of greater
freedom.
You do this by gaining
their commitment to do what needs to be
done, not by telling them to do it, or
how to do it.
2. People are accountable
only for their own behaviour.
Part of the management
process is obtaining information and
explanations about what people have or
have not done. (See Accountability).
This is not for the purpose of
allocating blame, but to identify causes
and remedies or improvements.
In a managed relationship
an accountable person is one who is
obliged by the nature of their job to
give an account to their manager of what
they have done.
They are accountable only
for their behaviour, not for their
attitudes or beliefs. For example, you
may know that somebody holds racist
views. However, this can only be a
managerial issue if the person exhibits
racist behaviour in work.
You can only manage
behaviour. You cannot manage their
thoughts.
An additional feature of
this guideline is that a person is
accountable for their own behaviour, and
nobody else’s. You cannot expect a
person to give an account of what
somebody else has done, unless it is
part of their accountability to
investigate and report.
3. There are consequences
for all behaviour.
There are three types of
consequences for behaviour, and each
produces different results. It is the
role of the manager to ensure that
consequences of the right sort are
attached to various forms of behaviour.
The three types are:
Positive
consequences,
Negative
consequences, and
Neutral or
Zero consequences.
Positive consequences.
Positive consequences are
those which are perceived to be
pleasurable or rewarding. When a
positive consequence is associated with
a particular behaviour, that behaviour
has a tendency to be repeated.
Once an association
between a specific behaviour and a
positive consequence has been firmly
established, the reward schedule can be
reduced, and in fact infrequent reward
is more effective at maintaining the
behaviour.
Positive consequences
obviously can be administered to develop
desirable forms of behaviour. However,
if someone receives a positive
consequence for an undesirable
behaviour, that too will be reinforced.
As a manager sometimes
you will inherit the results of other
managers’ reinforcement style. You may
need a lot of work to undo a previous
manager’s mistakes.
Negative consequences.
Negative consequences are
those which are perceived to be
unpleasant or uncomfortable. When a
negative consequence is associated with
a particular behaviour, that behaviour
tends to decrease.
Negative consequences can
be administered for unacceptable
behaviour, though on the whole it is
better to manage by using positive
rewards where you can. For example,
sound pleased and make encouraging
remarks when a poor timekeeper arrives
promptly rather than tell them off every
time they are late.
Neutral or Zero
consequences.
These are either
consequences which are perceived as
having no positive or negative value, or
behaviour which is followed by no
consequence whatsoever.
A lot of managers express
the view “Why should I make an effort to
reward people for simply doing the job
that they are paid for?”
There are two main
answers to this. Firstly, most people in
most organizations do not do the job
they are paid for. They are paid to work
100% of the time, at 100% efficiency.
This is rarely achieved or sustained.
The average employee spends about two
hours per day pretending to work.
The aim of the effective
people-manager should be to shift them
nearer to the 100% mark. If you achieve
it that is great, but don’t set your
sights too high. So any technique,
particularly giving positive
consequences, which does not cost
anything, is useful.
The second answer is that
if we look at it from the employee’s
point of view we find them grumbling:
“I worked myself into the
ground to clear up that problem. Did I
get any thanks for it? Did I **ck!”
“What’s the point in my
making a set of recommendations when
they’ll only get thrown in the bin?”
When a person has become
used to receiving neutral or zero
consequences they tend to decrease their
positive behaviour and increase their
negative behaviour. If they can’t get a
positive consequence they will actively
seek negatives.
This approach is often
seen in the behaviour of children and
adolescents. What makes you think that
people behave in a more adult fashion
just because they are older?
4. People must know what
behaviour is expected.
When people don’t know
what is expected of them they become
very uncomfortable. There is a balance
to be made between specifying
expectations so tightly that they leave
no room for individual empowerment, and
expectations which are so open-ended
that they leave the person floundering.
When people have no
boundaries they will often behave in a
negative way in order to force the
definition of some parameters
Some of the parameters
for behaviour are set into the
job-specification and company handbook,
but often these are too general for day
to day guidance.
The job of the
people-manager is to define, at an
appropriate level of specificity for the
person, what counts as “doing the job
right”.
For some this may be
simple information if they are new to a
task:
“I like reports to have a
management summary, a conclusions
ending, and short paragraphs in
between.”
For others it may be a
reminder of what they already know, but
something you want to reinforce:
“When I ask for a meeting
at a particular time, I expect everybody
to be ready to start at that time.”
5. People must know how
they are doing.
People who receive no
feedback on their performance tend not
to perform at all.
On the whole, most people
start out with a desire to do things
right, but if they receive no feedback
they will not know what “right” is, and
will lose motivation.
This principle applies at
both an individual level and a group
level. It is part of making sure that
everyone knows why they are doing what
they do.
A surprisingly large
number of people just don’t know how
their work fits in with the purpose of
the organization, or how it relates to
that of their colleagues.
It costs nothing to let
people know how they are doing. The cost
of not telling them is immense. As with
the human need for consequences, if
people have no feedback they will push
until they get some.
6. People will not
usually destroy what they have created.
(Ok, some artists may
destroy their work but this is usually
in order to replace it with something
better.)
In a business context,
this rule means that if a person is
involved in creating the solution to a
problem, they are much more likely to
make it work than if they have had a
solution imposed upon them.
While it is tempting to
save time by just telling people what to
do, this does not create any feeling of
ownership. If they do not feel ownership
of a solution, they have little
motivation to make it succeed, and may
deliberately make it fail.
If they can be made to
feel that it is their idea, they are
more likely to make it work.
7. Like creates and
attracts like.
People model their
behaviour on other people around them.
Negativity attracts negativity. Positive
attitude creates more positive attitude.
As a manager, people look to you to set
the tone of the workplace. If you tell
people positive things about their
performance and behaviour you will find
more of it happening. If you tell them
that they are useless, this will become
true. If you say that something is
important, and then act as if it is not,
people will take their cue from your
behaviour.
Although you can only
manage people’s behaviour, and not their
thoughts, there is an interaction
between behaviour and thought. You will
find that after you have managed them
into positive behaviour, they will start
to generate their own positives.
Conversely, if you allow them to
maintain negative behaviour they will
continue to think negatively, and thus
generate more negative behaviour in
themselves and others. |
