Unit IV
A. Human relationships in academic and professional life
B. Importance of (professional) communication management
C. Communication in the management context
D. Importance of words/language
E. Communication in management and management through communication
F. Horizontal and democratic communication
Human relationships in academic and professional life
human relationship - a relation between people; (`relationship' is often used where `relation' would serve, as in `the relationship between inflation and unemployment', but the preferred usage of `relationship' is for human relations or states of relatedness); "the relationship between mothers and their children"
relation - an abstraction belonging to or characteristic of two entities or parts together
partnership - a cooperative relationship between people or groups who agree to share responsibility for achieving some specific goal; "effective language learning is a partnership between school, teacher and student"; "the action teams worked in partnership with the government"
Human relationships in academic
Old Friendship - Childhood Friendship, Long Lasting Friendship
The role friendships play throughout life is important, multifaceted and profound. To cite a Nigerian proverb, “Hold a true friend with both hands!” This overview shows how these wonderful friendships we all cherish in adult life evolves through the developmental stages of childhood and adolescence.
Friendships for children provide numerous important functions including companionship, stimulation, physical support, ego-support, social comparison and intimacy, and affection. Each of these functions has a different degree of importance at different times during development. Many theorists view the development of friendships similarly to other areas of human development, as going through predictable progressive stages.
Friendships as a Handy Playmate
In the first stage, , friendship, for children seven-years old or younger, is based on physical or geographical considerations and is rather self-centered. A friend is a playmate who lives nearby and has “neat” toys. There is little or no understanding of the other person’s perspective or personality traits.
Friendship as Assistance and Mutual Trust
In the second stage, children between seven and nine begin to understand reciprocity and develop an awareness of the other child’s feelings.
In the preadolescent stage, children nine to twelve, have friendships based on a pattern of give and take. Friends are now seen as people who help each other. At this stage, children realize they can evaluate their friend’s behavior and that their behavior can conversely be evaluated. Trust, a benchmark of mature friendships, appears for the first time. In the latter part of this stage, rifts between friends are not as easily “patched up” as in early childhood. Instead apologies and explanations are necessary.
In late childhood, friendship patterns are based upon sharing activities such as playing ball, riding bikes, or using computers. During adolescence, friendships assume a more crucial significance and are multifaceted. As adolescents become more independent of their families, they depend increasingly upon friendships to provide emotional support.
Friendships now become the testing grounds for new values and behaviors. Close friends help the adolescent work out his or her identity. In order to accept this identity formation, the adolescent must feel accepted and liked by others. Additionally, the “status” of friends during adolescence provides a sense of reflective – self-esteem. Being in the “popular” groups in adolescence elevates self-esteem into young adult life.
During adolescence mature pattern of friendship develops with deepening trust and intimacy and increased pattern of empathy. Statements such as, “I can tell my friends anything” and, “I know how my friends feel without them telling me” are common statements during adolescence.
Friendships at this age provide many needed developmental structures beneficial to psychological health and competence. This includes opportunities to explore the self and develop a deeper understanding of another, provide support dealing with the stresses of everyday life, and improve attitudes toward and involvement in school.
Quality and Consequences of Friendship
There is little doubt that having friends is extremely important to children. More than half the children referred for emotional or behavioral problems have no friends or experience difficulty in peer interactions. Friendships contribute significantly to the development of social skills, such as being sensitive to other people’s point of view, learning the rules of conversation, and learning sex and age appropriate behaviors. They also help define both self and self worth.
Friends also have a powerful influence on a child’s positive and negative school performance and may also help to encourage, or discourage, deviant behaviors, such as delinquency or drug use. Compared to children who lack friends, children with “good” friends have higher self-esteem. They are less likely to be lonely and act more pro socially. They are able to cope with life stresses and normal transitions and are also less victimized by peers. Interestingly, children with friends of both sexes, as a group, are more well adjusted and have greater social skills than children who have only same sex friendships.
As parents, it is important to keep in mind that although friendships follow a somewhat predictable developmental sequence, as in other areas of physical, cognitive, or social-emotional development, not all children progress at the same rate and delays are not necessarily a need for concern. Additionally, parents who interpret their children’s desire for solitary play as loneliness and attempt to “push” friends on them, may be making an incorrect assumption. As important as friendships are, like their adult counterparts, children may greatly enjoy and choose solitary activities. It’s important to distinguish between being lonely and the desire to be alone, even in childhood. Like adults, children need “alone space” to grow and develop and, in their own way, reflect on the day’s activities.
Job opportunities for human relation professionals are expected to be excellent, particularly for applicants with appropriate postsecondary education. The number of social and human service assistants is projected to grow much faster than the average for all occupations through 2012.
Demand may be particularly strong for certain specialists. Employers are expected to devote greater resources to job-specific training programs in response to the increasing complexity of many jobs, the aging of the workforce, and technological advances that can leave employees with obsolete skills. This should result in particularly strong demand for training and development specialists. In addition, increasing efforts throughout industry to recruit and retain quality employees should create many jobs for employment, recruitment, and placement specialists.
Good human relationships at the workplace
It is a social problem, entrenched in the heart of people’s lives, that has been brought to light through the media: human relationships in business are crucial because they can lead to the best or the worst. Francis Bouyer, founding director of Be The One, the leading Recruitment Agency in Fashion, Beauty, Decoration and Selective Distribution, knows the subject well enough to have, at the request of the government, established a “Charter of good human relationships at the workplace” together with several partners. A truism? No, but a need to attract the attention of everyone, and particularly Managers, to something that, in the end, is not all that obvious.
The idea behind this charter is to have something simple to offer management and their teams. “Human relationships at the workplace are a fundamental element for creating well-being (or discontent). It consists of reinstating human relationships at heart of the concerns of the company with a Charter, an orderly summing up of some of the fundamental attitudes known to everyone, in order to improve them; in relation to oneself and the others, as an employee, team leader or Manager.
Companies and institutions signing this charter will be able to officially show their employees their willingness to respect the human factor in the company. The charter validates and formalizes this priority.
“Our ambition is not to change the world”, François Bouyer explains, “but to remind people that it is a key issue, a source of commitment and performance. Human relationships are created, not through rationalization, but by feeling, sensitivity – this is an essential point of the charter. No Manager is currently trained on how to manage others from a relational point of view”. Everything lies in the attitude (different from behaviour) of the Manager “attitude is positive only if the person exercising the power is at peace with himself. Yet understanding oneself is a subject that has stirred humanity since the beginning of time!”
More concretely, the Charter of Human Relationships at the Workplace, launched in 2009, already signed by a large number of companies, will open a door for dialogue and consideration between Managers and employees.
This is a large multi-factorial issue that spills out into many realms. Every workplace has some degree of stress, and this is inevitable since we are dealing with humans who bring a variety of their own personal lives, as well as their own pathology to work. Levels of insecurity, perceptions of success, individual needs, jealousy, the narcissistic boss, and the gross inability of many individuals to not admit wrong doing when it comes to an honest mistake, all factor into the workplace stress scenario. Humans can be a strange breed of species; money motivates, human interaction is needed, and a need to be viewed as competent and wanting to be liked clouds our goals. The work environment can be pleasant, stressful, or grossly incestuous. Many individuals bring to work their personal problems, their home stress, and have minimal boundaries when it comes to what is appropriate to disclose and what is not. On the other hand when friendships develop there can be a time and place for sharing, bonding and appropriate support. Some individuals are hyper vigilant even paranoid, others are reclusive, and others show their narcissistic slip underneath their skirt of insecurity talking about themselves and their embellished accomplishments. All of these will become an interplay in the working environment. We will focus here on the dynamics between upper management and employees and the behavioral acting out that emulates a family environment.
Imagine the owners of a business and management as the parental figures of a family and human resources, billing etc. are the extended family members. The employees are the children in this family environment. When you have a management that has any dysfunction such as narcissistic traits, poor communication styles, and authoritarian discipline as opposed to collegiate interaction you have the setting for acting out by the children, even revolt. Employees will begin taking on different roles. These roles can be the escape goat, the emotional leader, the acting out child, and of course the “suck up.” Dysfunction in the work place invariably begins at the top. Poor, inadequate communication, lack of understanding and empathy for the employees, and strict discipline as opposed to behavioral reinforcement. The need or want for production out of the employees mimics the want or need as parents for our children to be productive in life. The difference; as parents we love our children and the “boss” usually does not possess this emotion towards their employees. Decreased production leads to the usual punishment, reduced bonus, and verbal warnings. Employees act out, stomp and scream and may or may not produce more. Combine this behavior with their own unique pathology, and you have a growing abscess of stress waiting to explode into a crisis, which can cause depression, decreased work productivity, and even spill out onto the employees home environment.
It is this author’s opinion that the majority of business owners do not have a clue of the far reaching effects of demeaning behavior, and over powering their employees for more production. Whether it is on the line in a factory, or in a hospital or clinic employees need to be treated with respect, and appreciation to increase productivity and decrease workplace stress. For myself, I error frequently as jumping into the personality pool of pathology to help the other employees. This metaphor is actually my fiancées, and her concern of me biting off more than I can handle when trying to help. She sees me as diving from a high dive into a large pool of pathology. This pathology can be employees personal life trauma, issues with management, and inter-office squabbles. I clearly have a tendency to spread myself to thin, and try to reach out the best I can to calm a crisis. This is a common scenario for many victims of abuse, the”white knight syndrome” the need to protect and help. I am thankful I have a life preserver, which is my my fiancée, who recognizes when I spread myself to thin, and become frustrated at the basic mis-treatment of employees for the owners gain.
We also have sibling rivalry. Employees vying for the attention of the parent, the boss and jealousy of each other given a variety of positions and promotions. Throw each persons pathology into the mix, the owners and their needs, as well as an economy that is disintegrating and you have chaos and stress.
How does one reduce workplace stress?
There are many ways to reduce workplace stress. there are individual ways, and then there are techniques for the corporation. Should they be open to change? Respect, and the want to create a pleasant work environment is crucial for employees. One would want the employee to be comfortable which translates into wanting to come to work, and increase productivity. Screening employees from the interview process. A good corporation screens out the pathology and the extremes in behavior initially. Of course you will not catch everyone, however this process can be fine tuned and will benefit one down the road. A team atmosphere must be empowered, everyone should feel they have a say, but then the feedback given should be implemented within reason and if not an explanation. Real, honest listening skills….What a concept? Communication, as in a dysfunctional family where communication is poor at best, open communication is imperative, decrease post-it notes, decrease e-mails of serious content and have face to face communication. Remember before the computer days when people actually sat down and talked. E-mails are proficient, and have their niche, however one does not get the inflection of the voice, the eye contact, and sincerity as much as a face to face discussion.
As an owner do not assume all the employees see you as a “nice guy.” No matter how open and how generous you are as an owner employees will NOT disclose all their true feelings and concerns. There is an inherent fear. As in a family, I know of no teenager that discloses everything to their parents. Recognize this and act accordingly.
Individual stress can be relieved with a variety of techniques from meditation, to medication. When workplace stress leads to tardiness at work, insomnia, substance abuse, home conflict, and inner office arguments one should seriously look at these red flags before they escalate. One should be conscious of the “poor me” scenario. Where an employee feels entitlement and they deserve more than they actually deserve. This personality type is perceived by others as ugly, and is a person others usually do not want to work around. There will always be a few that will climb on their bandwagon, and rally the crying towel, which is usually to no avail. It is important to stay within yourself, recognize your limitations, know what you do well, be willing to learn new tasks, and learn to communicate openly and honestly. There is really no need to disclose personal home trauma, and ask yourself, what are you really looking for when you do share? Mental health is a journey, filled with mistakes, and short comings. There is no better way to learn than to fail. Keep risking, recognize your stress, and do something to change it. You will be amazed how your work place will be better but your home life will improve also.
Professional Communications Management and Leadership (PCL)
Professional Communication Management and Leadership (PCL) delivers the strategic skills and knowledge for professional and organizational practitioners who want to direct the organization in delivering public information, managing internal and external communication, dealing with the media and addressing public relations. Practical hands-on applications, national trends and current global practices underscore the excellence of the program.
Introduction
In recent times the notion that communication simply reflects organisational realities has been rejected by contemporary scholars and replaced by a view that understands communication as a formative process which creates and represents the processes of organising (Putnam, Phillips and Chapman, 1996:396). In this contemporary view, organisations are structured and sustained though the articulation of meaning produced in communication. Organisational realities are established through these formative communication processes, power structures are developed and maintained, and organisational outcomes determined.
The role of professional communication in organisations needs to be similarly reconsidered. Until recently, professional communication has been seen as yet another organisational variable. Indeed, better communication has been considered an obvious solution to many managerial problems. Within this view, professional communicators played a limited and peripheral role in the management of organisations. They were seen to posses useful writing, presentational and public relation's skills; however, they were not really managers.
In the context of a more contemporary paradigm, Ticehurst and Ross-Smith have linked professional communication with organisational strategy. They define professional communication as intentional communication that has the objective of achieving strategic goals within organisational or professional contexts (1998:3). The development and maintenance of the linkage between communication and strategic goals of an organisation is the responsibility of the professional communicator. Linking professional communication with strategy is crucial to the way we think about professional communication, and the way we practice it.
To make this view of professional communication useful in contemporary organisations three orientations need to be developed by practitioners. First, there is a need to overcome the treatment of communication as a superficial aspect of organisational life; rather it needs to be seen as a core organisational process with multi-dimensional aspects. It is clear that although professional communication can be defined as a functional concept in organisational settings, its understanding and practice cannot be separated from, and is dependent upon, other communication activities in the organisation.
Second, the idea of communication as an inherent good in itself that requires no justification needs to be dispelled. Rather, the professional communicator must be one who can link diverse communication dimensions to organisational outcomes and strategies. To achieve this there is a need to move beyond simple communication formulas which see professional communication as a straightforward linear process, to a view which takes into account individual needs and cultural sensitivities.
Third, globalisation has forced an assessment of cultural influences on the ways organisations function effectively. While the exact dimensions of cultural similarities and differences are often hard to define, it is valuable to explore them when international business concerns make adaptation to national cultures necessary. Trompenaars, for example, maintains that
Organizational culture is shaped not only by technologies and markets, but also by the cultural preferences of leaders and employees. Some international companies… have subsidiaries, which would be unrecognizable, as the same company saves for their logo and reporting procedures. Often these are fundamentally different in the logic of the structures and the meanings they bring to shared activity.
Express your thoughts clearly:
To be effective in interpersonal communication, organize your thoughts. Think through what you plan to say before you say it. Choose the appropriate words that will best communicate these thoughts, and speak in the language of the listener. Strive for utmost clarity.
Be willing to express your feelings:
Those people who are able to express their feelings are more likely to be effective communicators than those who are not. This does not mean an irresponsible venting of emotions; rather, it means expression of feelings tempered with responsibility. If you are unable or unwilling to express your feelings, others may view you as bland. Your people want to know where you are coming from. Tell them! Move beyond merely exchanging data and information. Enrich your communication with a clear expression of your feelings about the issues at hand.
Put yourself in the place of the other person:
The effective communicator has empathy: the capacity to participate in another’s thoughts or feelings. Empathy is the ability to see the world through the other person’s eyes. It is an attitude, a frame of mind, which has a profound effect on the quality of the communication. Empathy is what helps set up the exchange as a living mutual relation.
Be "truly present" When engaging in interpersonal communication, many managers appear to be preoccupied with other thoughts. Their body language conveys the impression that their thoughts are paying attention on something other than the matter at hand. Don’t be guilty of this type of behavior. Whenever talking with another person, give that person your undivided attention. Even if you have only 10 minutes to give, give the person 10 minutes of your undivided attention.
Be a good listener:
It has been estimated that no more than about 10 percent of the general population might be considered really good listeners. That means that about 90 percent of us have room for improvement. It will be to your credit if you develop a reputation for being a good listener. Be an active listener and listen with understanding. Ask good questions. Paraphrase the key points that the other person has made. Check your perception of the person’s feelings. Link the elements. Achieve unity. These are things that you can learn to do. Great effort is required, but making the effort will surely enhance your effectiveness in interpersonal communication.
Postpone evaluation:
Whenever a new idea is being presented for consideration, many managers are too quick on the draw in evaluating the idea. Before they have really understood the idea, they judge it to be either good or bad. Such behavior tends to inhibit communication and may cause the manager to miss out on some promising ideas. Whenever a new idea is being presented to you, discipline yourself to postpone evaluation until after you have demonstrated that you fully understand the idea.
Avoid becoming hostile when another person’s views differ from your own:
Employees learn a great deal about their manager on the basis of how the manager responds to opposing views. (And body language speaks louder than words.) If the manager appears threatened or distressed whenever an employee offers an opposing view, the employees in all likelihood will be reluctant to challenge the manager in the future. As a consequence, the manager’s ideas may go untested, and some potentially good ideas may never be considered. Avoid becoming hostile to opposing views. Try to understand the other person’s views: what they mean, how they came about, and why the person supports these particular views. Then, when appropriate, try to incorporate these views into your own thinking, while at the same time giving due credit to the person who generated the ideas.
Be willing to change your convictions as new truths are uncovered:
Too many people believe that they have a "lock" on truth. There is only one way to the top of the mountain, and that is their way. Their own views are obviously correct, which means that any opposing views are obviously incorrect. One of the greatest challenges for you as a manager is to keep an open mind. This does not mean a wishy-washy approach in which you agree with every opposing view, but it does mean that you will hear others out and try to understand their views, even when the views are contrary to your own. Perhaps it will turn out to be a significant learning experience; you may glean some insights that will help you strengthen your own views.
Be willing to confront:
Conflict is an integral part of life. If we are encouraging people to be authentic in expressing their thoughts and feelings, conflict is inevitable; if we are calling for people to be creative in expressing their own views, conflict is inevitable; and if we are requiring people to work in complex and ever-changing organizations that have competing demands, conflict is inevitable. Conflict is not something to be avoided; rather, it is something to be guided and channeled for productive ends. Whenever your views differ from those of others, be willing to confront. This is essential for authentic dialogue.
Think win-win:
When confronting others, there are those who think only in terms of win lose. There obviously will be a winner and a loser. This is a basic attitude that has been ingrained over the years. Don’t get trapped in the win-lose mentality. Transcend it! Focus on ends rather than means. Ask yourself: In this particular confrontation, what might be done to assure that both my adversary and I achieve our objectives? How can we both emerge as winners?
No comments:
Post a Comment