@work 2

“You can always find people with hard skills, but success or failure often depend on the softer, people skills; these are more difficult to find.”

The measure of people skills is about how people handle disagreement and, sometimes, separation. being liked is more a consequence of that, and it should never be seen as a goal.

A misconception is that people are born in a certain way, with certain skills, thats wrong, we are shaped by our environment constantly and will continue to change till we die.

Knowledge and insight matter deeply for mastering people skills, but people don’t master people skills by reading many books or by memorizing a finite list of knowledge points or doing well on exams. People skills are mastered in practice; it is a contact sport.

Let’s take the Golden Rule, which is often held as immutable. For example, if you want others to treat you nicely, it might be good to treat them nicely too.14 But it is also true that having a big stick helps to get others to treat you nicely. Moreover, if you are always nice to people, then why do they need to be nice to you? They could treat you crappy, and you would still be nice to them, hoping for better. So, in dealing with people, it seems that sometimes the Golden Rule might be applied, while in other instances some other adage might be better. Even the Golden Rule does not always or universally lead to favorable outcomes. Nor do individual adages apply as broadly some people think. Does the Golden Rule imply that those who push work off onto others would welcome others doing that to them too? This also means that there is almost always a common sense expression to justify one’s point of view, right or wrong, in some way. Ample adages and truisms exist that can be applied. For example, people can say that you did not get what you wanted because you spoke up and also because you did not speak up enough. Some people are veritable masters at justifying their actions, sometimes projecting confidence and superiority over others (e.g., “If you had just used common sense …”), sometimes justifying the impossibility of obtaining better outcomes.

Common sense and adages do not help enough. They stimulate a little awareness and insight, but they are not a reliable guide to correct answers.

In our experience, quite some managers are unable to move their departments along, and if not for their secretaries and one or more staff who hope to be promoted, their units would have even worse performance. Many managers are truly mediocre, sometimes borderline inept, yet such people exist with alarming frequency in many organizations. Common sense can scarcely begin to explain how such persons came into their positions and why their superiors tolerate their mediocre or poor performance. Common sense also provides little guidance to their employees on how to deal with them, which is of utmost need for them.

Common sense or pithy adages scarcely provide a basis for assuming what these processes and their main characteristics are. Newcomers might believe that merit is a key factor in hiring and promotion (e.g., “do well and good things will happen”), but that is not always or even necessarily a preeminent feature—it may be only a necessary but not sufficient condition. People are sometimes also promoted because of their loyalty to those above them (“he is reliable”) or so they won’t expose compromising information. Common sense also does not tell people what to do on the job. Organizations in which most people merely “follow orders” and “do what is their job” often produce highly mediocre and, for stakeholders, unacceptably poor results. Though people often need to do more than just their job, “just following orders” does not adequately tell people when they should do what.

As a management strategy, common sense also has its limits. For example, when crisis strikes, managers and leaders often fall back on common sense or their version of it. While the above adages may provide some guidance, they seldom do so adequately—such as in the face of employees failing to forward critical messages, when key office personnel threaten to resign, and when key Web sites are inoperable for several days at end. When people are overtaken by events, they need to get “waist deep” into circumstances, events, and facts and be all over what is happening and present like “gravy over rice.”20 People are sometimes seen to address crisis through rigid application of one or more adages, sometimes even citing biblical and religious dicta as guiding strategies, without fully understanding the facts and specific circumstances, which can cause poor or even dangerous outcomes to result.

Common sense also does little to help people with inevitably emotional moments at work. Frustration happens. How does common sense help us deal with physical symptoms of stress and intruding, negative thoughts of others? Physiologically, the evolutionary purpose of discomfort is to push us into action to deal with these threatening and unpleasant situations, but that does not mean that we have the tools for doing so very well. What should you do? “Not rock the boat?” “Act professionally?” “Love thy enemy?” “Save face?” Accept that “this is just how it is”? These give conflicting advice, none of which is specific enough to act on. Not surprisingly, many people often suffer long when they are confronted by such moments, and some people prefer not to work or seek happiness elsewhere than to engage in work and confront these matters for which they do not have adequate preparation. We need a better way.

Common sense also does little to explain how personal well-being and emotions affect decision making. Consider this quote from an Internet blog:

A young employee resigned after completing a costly six month company training program. She said the industry wasn’t right for her and that she had a new job with better pay, but when the manager pushed back on her reasons for leaving and found flaws in her story, the employee started crying and admitted she didn’t have another job, she was just quitting because she didn’t get enough praise from the manager and was feeling like a failure. Thus, she was moving home with her parents.

This is hardly an aberration. The generation gap is sometimes understood as younger workers giving more value to the Pleasure Principle (which states that people seek to experience pleasure and avoid pain) and older workers following the Reality Principle in their choices (i.e., people are able and willing to defer present gratification for future gains).Emotions drive and affect choices in many ways; modern management theory and practice have gaping holes dealing with the role of emotion and well-being. Generation X workers often work out of loyalty to their bosses, because they make them feel good about themselves, not their organizations, and they follow their managers when they can.All human beings want happiness and contentment. As one IT manager states, “People don’t quit jobs; they quit managers.”Even people who don’t care about personal well-being in the abstract do care about it when it affects them. In Japan, Karochi refers to death from overwork; who wants that?

Common sense and management adages are also thoroughly devoid of the impact of mental health on choices that people make. Such adages as “keeping your troubles to yourself” are increasingly inconsistent and harmful to dealing with the reality that, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, “an estimated 26.2 percent of Americans ages 18 and older—about one in four adults—suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year.”26 In addition, many more have proclivities and behaviors that do not constitute a “diagnosable mental disorder” but nonetheless affect workplace interactions. Also, about 6 percent of the population older than age twenty-five years reported illicit drug use in the past month.Indeed, mental health problems and addiction are often found to lie at the heart of behavior relating to sex, substance abuse, and stealing. Many young people are quite comfortable discussing mental health; in groups, they often readily self-identify with problems: “yes, that is us—depression! anxiety! attention deficit!” No surprise here; according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, antidepressants are the most prescribed drug in the United States.Yet older workers, some of whom are managers of younger workers, are ill informed about mental health, as they themselves often go undiagnosed and treated for these problems. Unaware of medical advances, their attitudes often embody the fear and stigmatization of mental health instead of allowing them to see these as partly reflecting physical realities too. It is obvious that knowing about mental health conditions and how they affect people doing their work and relating to others matters. While younger workers would like their bosses to know about their abilities as well as their limitations (e.g., “don’t push me!”), their bosses want to know only about the former. Younger workers correctly perceive that telling older workers about their stress, especially in conjunction with other afflictions, will have repercussions later, such as being denied rewarding assignments.

What you don’t know about yourself and others can hurt you.

It is paradoxical that those who live by pithy adages and axioms often fail to find the sound practical judgment and results that are promised. Yes, common sense, axioms, and adages help by suggesting standards to be strived for. Who is against the Golden Rule and principles of justice in the world, at least in theory? No one, of course. But common sense is often also inconsistent, confounding, and in need of the specificity of context and experience. Those who use it well often have decades of experience that they also bring to the table. Sound application of common sense requires this, as well; without this, common sense and adages are a liability or error waiting to happen. And some aspects of reality are beyond common sense, such as those dealing with mental health, compulsions, and emotional well-being. Common sense can be a useful pointer, but not always. In short, common sense is needed, but more than common sense is also needed.