I went to college part-time. While it seemed to take forever, the benefit was my ability to work full-time along side my studies and apply what I learned right away in a real work place. One thing I learned quickly – something gets lost in translation.
In college, we were taught that the perfect manager is very logical, humane and fair. Every case study had one right answer. In the real world, however, there were many different answers to a problem. Sometimes you had to do things that didn’t seem logical. Dealing with people was not always easy and text book suggestions didn’t always guarantee the desired outcome. Basically, what I learned, is that no matter how much we want to standardize business practices and divide every activity into processes, at the core of every corporation are people.
Yes, corporation, as defined under the law, is a separate legal entity with its own unique vision/mission/values, but these elements were ultimately crafted by a person! Most likely that person infused a part of themselves into the process. It is easy to forget that when we always use inanimate definitions such as stakeholder, workforce etc. The best advice I got from my boss at that time is: don’t forget, there is always another human being on the other side of the phone line. It helped me a lot while negotiating with vendors, clients, customer service etc.
So my question is, why don’t we just admit it? Why don’t we stop pretending like everything is black and white in the world of business and instead start teaching emotional intelligence and psychology as major subjects in the business programs. Lets shift the focus from just accounting and finance.
One of my professors kept advocating for the emotional intelligence. Sometimes he would spend the whole class on this instead of teaching us BUS101 and then would give us the questions that would be on the test. He did this because he was a strong believer that EQ (emotional intelligence) is more important than IQ. Of course nobody took him seriously at that time. Today, I am very interested in taking courses on the subject as I see real value in this knowledge and my work would definitely benefit from it. Instead of letting a business problem become an emotional issue, imagine being able to identify which episode caused the negative experience and triggered the response and then helping your coworker, client or customer work through it without judgment. We need to be able to recognize that some issues cannot be solved using just logic. Instead, too often I have been in a situation where one party starts to get emotional, which triggers the other party to clam up and get defensive. These situations usually take a while to resolve.
When I began consulting on my own, after leaving a full-time job, I decided to participate in the entrepreneurial workshop called Innovation Camp. Going in, my expectations were: to find my weak spots and seek improvement in those areas; to learn how to see problems as opportunities. The experience was excellent and I did find out in practice that one of the areas for improvement was negotiation. As a result, I turned to Linked In Answers and was recommended Jeanette Nyden. In sharing her unconventional wisdom, she recommends to realize that people do really stupid things, like deny responsibility for their obvious mistakes. From a child that stole a cookie from a jar and denies it while its still in his mouth, to a contractor who did a lousy job on your roof and doesn’t want to fix it – we don’t seem to change.
Lets come to terms with the fact that we are only human. We are inherently irrational due to the fact that we are heavily influenced by our emotions and character traits, which we have little control over. As much as we try, we are not robots. We do not suddenly turn human again when we leave the office. So lets set some realistic expectations for ourselves so there are less misunderstandings. Even economists stopped expecting people to act rational so why do we still assume that just because a person is surrounded by a cubicle, their cognitive process is different.
I would like to finish with another quote from Jeanette:
Life is lived in shades of gray. Americans in particular like to talk in terms of the “bottom line”, bullet points and principles. The reality of the situation is that what you are negotiating is not likely a black and white issue. There will be nuances and shades of gray. The solutions are the gray areas.
Would love to know what you think!