The Hindu Business Line : Great results come from great people

ALL ASSETS do not show on the balance sheet. Though unaccounted, people constitute valuable assets for any business. "Great results come from great people," proclaims the back cover of John Adair's Effective Motivation — a book about how you can get "extraordinary results from everyone". A sampler:

Motivation is the sum of all that moves a person to action. Motives can be mixed. They can range from consensus to unconscious. Motives are necessary for action but not sufficient in themselves. For action to happen a decision has to be made or the will engaged. Hence the legal maxim: "We must judge a person's motives from their overt actions." The reasons we give for our actions, however, do not always correspond with our motives.

Social needs are intrinsic to our human nature. We are born into a small society — the family — and we become individuals. But we never lose our need for each other. Work, as Maslow suggests, does provide one important means by which this need within us is met. For work is a matrix of friendship and camaraderie.

Herzberg linked the `hygiene factors' with what he called `avoidance needs', or the human tendency to avoid painful or unpleasant situations. In work situations the general basic need finds a degree of fulfilment if the job allows some meeting of the related needs for professional growth and for the exercise of creativity. If these possibilities are intrinsically absent from the job, then heavy compensations in terms of hygiene factors would be necessary to adjust the balance.

One big difference between leaders and managers is that leaders are much more visible. Then you can stimulate, prod, encourage and even inspire as the situation requires. And be there when you are needed.

Commitment is strong motivation that has passed through the junctions of your conscious mind and the signal box of your will; it moves through firm decision and into action. Such a commitment releases new energies. It is as if the forces of your personality align themselves into a new magnetic field.

Break the inertia to read the book.

Are you in the team?

WHILE individualistic achievement is a laudable thing, team efforts are no less. "Few things are more satisfying in life than belonging to a really successful team," writes John Adair in the intro to his book Effective Teambuilding.

"There are few more rewarding activities than using your qualities and skills as a leader to create such a team." A few glimpses:

Work groups that stay together for a long time, such as an orchestra, tend to take on some of the characteristics — good or bad — of family life. Employers may regress and begin to treat their staff as children — the worst sort of paternalism — or they may develop into `father-figures' in the best sense. The crews of British nuclear submarines today often refer to their captains as `father'.

A group-norm — an oft-used phrase in the textbooks — is simply an authoritative standard. Norm derives from the Latin word for a builder's or carpenter's square, the tool which gives him the perfect right angle.

Individuals are just particular persons. The word individual has gone through a revolution of meaning. Coming from the Latin individuus, indivisible, it was once used to emphasise that we are joined together: as individuals we are inseparable. Now it stresses the exact opposite, namely that each person is an indivisible whole, existing as a distinct entity.

The test of a good team is whether or not its members can work as a team while they are apart, contributing to a sequence of activities rather than to a common task which requires their presence in one place and at one time.

Beware of placing people into categories and labelling them as roles, for this can lead to stereotyping. The roles that people occupy in teams are based primarily upon their knowledge and skills, not their personalities. Beyond that, each of them should be good in the general role of team member. Some will be equipped for the role of leader.

Get you team to read this before getting on to work.

Two-way road

SPEAKING, listening, writing and reading. These are the four `basic communication skills' notes the back cover of John Adair's Effective Communication — a book on `the most important management tool of all'.

The author asks: "Do you use words to their maximum effectiveness, to persuade and really be heard? Listening is perhaps the most elusive of the communication skills. Do you hear what people are really saying? You can write, but do your letters and reports really get across what you want and need to say? And could you improve your absorption and comprehension of the thousands of words you have to read every day?" More:

Look at the appearance of the word first. It is one of those rather cumbersome, long abstract words that derive from the ancient Latin, like verification, clarification, domestication, and so on. Many people naturally avoid such terms, especially if they do not come from educated backgrounds where the use of long words tends to be encouraged. Shorter and simpler Anglo-Saxon words, like talk and listen, are preferred by those not subjected to an education which stretches their vocabularies.

Most people seem to regard spoken communication as getting a message across to another person: `You tell him or her what you want them to know.' This concept implies a one-way traffic from one person to another, with all the emphasis being on transferring a message from one mind to another. But communication is essentially a two-way process; it is shared or common activity. Meaning isn't something conveyed like electricity from one mind to another; it is a magnetism created when two minds meet.

`Speeches are like babies,' it has been said, `easy to conceive but hard to deliver.' Certainly speeches are like babies in that they come in all shapes and sizes. They range from informal to formal, extempore or prepared.

Always keep a pocket-book or some paper at hand so that you can take some notes of any new ideas or information. The master thinker knows that ideas are elusive and often quickly forgotten, so he pins them down with pencil and paper. Heed the Chinese proverb: `The strongest memory is weaker than the palest ink.'

When managers do not listen they cease to be business leaders and revert to their former status as hired business administrators. So-called managers of this low calibre hardly listen at all: they ignore, forget, distort or misunderstand much of what they hear.

If only lessons on effective communication got communicated to one another as easily as communicable diseases.

Decide, now

COMPANIES have top managers and they are supposed to take decisions. But do they? John Adair's Effective decision making is a guide to thinking for management success, because as the book's cover states, "Few managers devote enough time to the thinking processes they should apply to their jobs." The result is that "long, energetic hours at work are wasted if business decisions are not logical, clear and correct." A few picks:

People with the very qualities which enable them to reach positions involving important decisions — such as burning ambition, the desire to achieve and the capacity to work intensely hard — are the very ones who are most vulnerable to `stimulus overload'. They may also fall victim to the kind of stress that can create such physical disorders as hypertension and coronary disease, and, more seriously, impair their thinking abilities and the quality of their decisions.

One result of disciplining your mind to logical thinking is a greater awareness of the part that premises play, especially the kind that are generalisations. The danger of holding a large stock of unsubstantiated generalisations in your mind is that you might start using them as premises. What goes wrong in reasoning or argument can usually be traced to unsound premises. More often than not the reasoning is sound, it is the premises that must be examined.

Business flair is a consistent theme in the lives of great industrialists and merchants. They intuitively spot an opportunity for making money. They can smell a potential profit where others can see nothing but present losses. It is an instinct apart from the dictates of reason or logic which guide more plodding minds.

Learning to relax and listen for the answer is a necessary condition for creative thinking. Times just before going to sleep or shortly after awaking, when the body is in a state of complete relaxation, are often as fruitful as those of physical activity. On rare occasions, ideas come disguised in imagery during the course of a dream.

Seek new experiences. Ruts and routines are enemies of mental fitness: they induce staleness and rigidity. These will turn eventually into mental arthritis if you do nothing. A fresh challenge can bring life flooding back into the dry cells of your mental battery.

Get charged with Adair.

(Books courtesy: East West Books (Madras) P Ltd. ewb@vsnl.com)

Tailpiece

"Are you a son of the soil?"

"But do you realise that soil stretches all over the globe?"

ReadingRoom@TheHindu.co.in

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