Lecture
The success of management activity essentially depends on taking into account the action of the laws of the human psyche, which determine interpersonal relationships and group behavior. They determine the strategy of business communication and its basic laws. Consider them.
The first law of managerial communication says: to understand is not to accept. It is intuitively obvious. If someone understood you, delved into your argument, understood your goal, it still does not mean that he agrees to accept everything for unconditional execution.
The lack of communicative contact or the absence of its productive performance, expressed in a concerted action, is a consequence of the fact that the first law of managerial communication is not taken into account. Thus, often the problem consists not only in reaching mutual understanding, but also in achieving agreement on positions.
The question of what is needed for an agreement is not a simple one. Firstly, it is required that the formulated agreement does not contradict the views and attitudes of the person to whom it is addressed. Secondly, it is necessary to eliminate the contradictions that arise due to different attitudes, prejudices, barriers of communication. Explanation is a natural means of eliminating these difficulties, it should reveal the position, make the message exhaustively complete and consistent. It should be noted that these actions are not self-sufficient. It is necessary to take into account the second law of managerial communication.
Its essence is that, ceteris paribus, people more easily accept the position of the person to whom they have an emotionally positive attitude. (sympathy, affection, friendship, trust), and vice versa, it is more difficult to accept (and often reject) the position of the person to whom one experiences an emotionally negative attitude (antipathy, hostility, hostility, hatred). This follows from the very nature of man and therefore acts irrevocably.
Consequently, in order to make a strategic plan acceptable for a partner, one must first of all be a pleasant person for him.
To accomplish this difficult task, there is a whole arsenal of tactics and tools, but, of course, one should take into account the existence of a number of laws of management psychology.
The most important of them require careful consideration.
Thus, a special place in managerial communication, and to the extent of importance and complexity of implementation, is occupied by the law of delegation of authority.
Delegation means the assignment of the performance of certain affairs to subordinates, the transfer to them of a clearly outlined circle of tasks and powers. None of the well-known management models is complete without this law. The advantages of delegation are undoubted:
one) releasing a manager to perform the most important work (in the Western management, the principle of “Beware of monkeys!” is popular, where “monkeys” mean big and small problems that are “transplanted” by employees from their shoulders onto the shoulders of the leader);
2) expansion of the volume of tasks performed by the organization, increase of the efficiency of activities;
3) development of subordinates initiative, skills, professional competence;
four) expansion of managerial decision making levels.
Delegation of authority is not the removal of responsibility for the performance of a particular activity. When delegating authority, there is a distribution of responsibility between the manager and the executor.
Management responsibility remains for the head, executive - is transferred to the employee.
Management responsibility includes:
- the choice of the performer;
- empowerment;
- help;
- control, evaluation.
Leadership and delegation are synonymous. A leader who is unable or unwilling to use delegation methods is not a real leader. Until he learns to do the work with the hands of others, the threat of the collapse of the organization will constantly hang over him.
The manager should be aware and always remember that the delegation of tasks and authority does not relieve him from responsibility. This is important to emphasize, since there is an opinion that the manager, “launching” decisions, delegates to the employees and his responsibility. This is not true. He gives workers responsibility, shaping it from them, but in no way does he “dump” his own. If he does so, then ceases to be a real leader. The professional leader is able to “take a punch” and in case of failure of the workers, he takes over the entire responsibility. Therefore, the problem of recruitment and the definition of strategic objectives are never delegated.
In management theory, the “golden rule” of management is universally recognized, the essence of which is this: the most important ability of a manager is to get results through his employees. The law of delegation of authority is based, on the one hand, on overcoming the negative dependence of workers on the head (forced to obey his requirements), and on the other hand, on overcoming the head's dependence on subordinates (forced to be responsible for the quality and timing of work). There is a mutual psychological compensation of inevitable inconveniences in management activities. The delegation of authority to employees psychologically implies a unity of trust and demandingness - the necessary conditions working to organize the desired communicative space.
The basic principles of effective delegation of authority are:
one) setting a clear target, that is, a clear statement of the tasks of the activity;
2) skillful selection of executive personnel, taking into account the fact that an excess of knowledge gives rise to a lack of desire;
3) art of motivation;
four) using control as an effective motivator.
Each of these principles can be sufficiently fully realized only under the condition of high professionalism of the leader and his psychological competence.
The following obstacles are typical for delegation of authority:
- the opinion of the manager that he himself will perform this task better than the subordinate;
- inability to delegate responsibility in the distribution of tasks;
- lack of managerial skills;
- diffidence;
- error avoidance position;
- unwillingness to develop the creative potential of their employees.
All these are symptoms of a “complex of threatening authority”, a very painful psychological state of a manager. Deeply hidden concern about their professional incompetence leads to serious consequences: blocking critical information (“Everything is fine with us!”), Refusing innovations and promising areas due to fear of risk, expulsion of talented employees, etc. As a result, the microclimate is poisoned human relationships in organizations and undermines people's creative attitude to their work.
This kind of managerial “illness” unfortunately affects many managers. To avoid it, the manager must, on the one hand, maintain a healthy psychological microclimate in the team, and on the other, constantly work on themselves, increasing their professional and psychological competence, skillfully use laws of management psychology.
Here they are in summary.
The law of uncertainty of response. Its essence is in identifying the dependence of people's perception of external influences on the differences in their mental structures.
However, different people (and even one person) at different times can react qualitatively differently to the same effects.
The head, giving orders to the employee, hopes that it will be executed by a certain date and with a certain result. But these hopes are far from always fulfilled. And during the "debriefing" revealed a complete discrepancy of positions and approaches. Most often, the basis of this undesirable confrontation between a manager and a subordinate is inattention, or even complete disregard by the head of the personal characteristics of the worker, the characteristics of his character, experience, and attitudes. A person is a very complex biosocial and socio-psychological system, and before addressing him with a serious task, it is necessary to understand his capabilities, orientations, motivation, etc.
The practical consequence of the law of uncertainty of response can be to, based on knowledge of the psychological characteristics of people, exert influence on them in different ways, differentiate the form of orders and commands in accordance with the expectation of subordinates, influence them in such a way as to maximize the capabilities of each employee.
However, the operation of this law is limited and corrected by other psychological laws.
The law of inadequacy of the mapping of man by man. Its meaning is that one can comprehend the essence and characteristics of a person only with a fair amount of relativity. The reason for this is both the supercomplexity of the human psyche, and the unwillingness of a person to reveal his features and capabilities, which directly follows from the biological law of the self-preservation of living systems. Eleven lines of psychological “defense” were discovered by a man of his inner world from attempts to invade from the outside (from biographical data to the intimate aspects of life).
Whatever the person, he always plays a little, showing himself not as he really is, but as he would like to look in the eyes of others. If such defensive reactions are not observed (“psychological striptease”), then this is the realm of psychopathology. A normal person is protected from full disclosure, the difference of characters only in the power of these "defense structures".
Therefore, it cannot be argued that you have fully comprehended a certain person and his essence (“I know him as a peeling one”). Meanwhile, the course is often quite sharp and categorical assessments and characteristics of people. And although in Russian more than two thousand words describing the properties of human nature, often only 10-20 concepts are used.
Understanding the limitations of our ability to know such a super complex system as a person, at the same time, we must strive for truth, selecting the necessary tools for everyone and trying to make the means of knowledge correspond to the degree of complexity of the object.
At present, the scientific principles of approaching man as an object of knowledge have been developed. The most important among them is the principle of universal talent (“there are no people incapable, there are people who are not engaged in their business”); the principle of development (abilities develop as a result of changes in the life of the individual and intellectual-psychological training), the principle of inexhaustibility (no human assessment during his life can be considered final); the principle of consistency (comprehension of a person is impossible without comprehensive comprehensive studies), the principle of permanence (no stage in the study of personality can be considered final, and therefore people must study people constantly).
The head is simply obliged to own both the simplest and modern scientific methods of psychodiagnostics of people, to be able to evaluate them objectively. Plus, he must learn to present estimated (not always pleasant) information so that it does not infringe upon the dignity of people, does not create conflict situations.
The whole difficulty lies in the manager's ability to give objective evaluations to others. To do this, you need the ability to separate objective information from the subjective, determined by the personal characteristics of the manager himself (his desire, addiction, peculiarity of character, etc.). But on the way to objective self-knowledge is an obstacle, called the law of inadequacy of self-assessments.
The law of inadequacy of self-esteem. This law can be considered as a special case of the previous law. When a person tries to assess himself, the same limitations interfere with him as in the case of analyzing other people.
In addition, the situation is further complicated by this circumstance. The psyche can be represented as a conscious (logical-mental) and unconscious (emotional-sensual, intuitive) components. The ratio between them looks like between the surface and underwater parts of an iceberg. Thus, logical, rational introspection is the study of, in essence, only the visible tip of the iceberg.
An interesting form of the level of human self-assessment was suggested by Yu.A. Tsagarelli (1982): A = G / 3, where A is the adequacy of self-esteem, G is the gnostic component, 3 is the protective component.
According to Yu.A. Tsagarelli, the gnostic (cognitive) component of self-assessment determines its adequacy, while the protective one acts in the opposite direction. The greater the role of psychological defense in self-assessment is, the less adequate is the assessment. And since a person is very emotional, full adequacy of self-esteem is impossible. Striving for psychological comfort, each of us passes into consciousness and fixes in it only that of self-assessments, which corresponds to our own attitude towards ourselves.
The manager needs to develop an installation that is very important for management activities - the desire to limit self-appraisal subjectivity.
The law of splitting the sense of management information. The essence of the law is as follows: management information (directives, orders, orders) have an objective tendency to change the meaning in the process of moving along the steps of the hierarchy (remember the game "spoiled phone"). Moreover, the change of this information directly depends on the number of people through whom it passes: the more people are involved, the higher the value of its meaning deviation from the original. The splitting of the meaning of information is predetermined by two circumstances:
1) the multi-layered language creates the possibility of different understanding and interpretation of words;
2) differences in the levels of intellectual, emotional, physical development of people distort the understanding and transmission of information.
Such a mismatch in management practice is fraught with serious costs. To minimize informational distortions, experts advise using the following tools: creating a special managerial language with a set of basic understandable terms for everyone, constant attention of managers to their speech as a tool for managing people, optimizing the ways of information flow in a management and production system.
The law of self-preservation. The leading motive of social behavior is the preservation of a person’s personal status and dignity.
Observations and experiments show that out of 100 people it is normal, but even at the very minimum of their capabilities, they can work in conditions that threaten the dignity and self-esteem of the individual, only 3 people. Therefore, a harsh shout or ridicule of the head of someone, for example, at a meeting, instantly "turns off" the brains of all those present. People involuntarily begin to work not on solving the problem posed to them, they try to guess the position of the leader. The generation of ideas and the production of new approaches imply the creation of certain conditions. The means for this is to organize the discussion of any serious problem in the mode of divided time: first, the collection of proposals without their critical analysis, then a critical analysis and “sorting” of the proposals put forward, the decision making. The ability to conduct collective discussions in the mode of divided time and is the basis for the implementation of the law of self-preservation in management practice.
The law of compensation. Its essence is that the insufficiency of any abilities is compensated by other abilities or skills. This compensatory mechanism usually works unconsciously, and the person gains experience through trial and error. But the effect can be enhanced if a person realizes compensation consciously, on the basis of knowledge of the law of compensation and the mechanism of its activity. Thus, weak memory can be enhanced by rationalizing the workplace (voice recorders, secretary, referent, notebooks, calendars, etc.). The insufficiently developed ability to generate ideas can be compensated for by the skillful organization of meetings using the brainstorming method, etc.
Ranamon's law. There are four types of people: who sit quietly and do nothing; who says that you need to sit quietly and do nothing; who does, who says what to do.
It is quite likely that the question will be: if such laws really exist, then why production does not stop when their leaders do not know them, and therefore do not take them into account in their activities?
Ответ прост. Законы управления, как и законы природы, действуют вне зависимости от их знания. Однако, так же как и в юриспруденции, незнание их не освобождает от последствий. Некоторые руководители интуитивно определяют необходимость учета действия законов управления и интуитивно согласовывают свою деятельность с их требованиями. Однако осмысленное использование законов психологии в управлении помогает добиваться больших успехов и обеспечивает эффективное взаимодействие людей в любой отрасли производства.
Следует заметить, что методика использования этих законов глубоко индивидуализирована и определяется, прежде всего, стилем управленческой деятельности руководителя.
Comments
To leave a comment
Psychology of management
Terms: Psychology of management