A company’s most crucial yet most sensitive and volatile asset is its employees. Henry Ford saw them as one big headache, immune from any analgesic’s curative powers: “Why is it that I always end up with a person, when all I really want is a pair of hands?” But, it’s a person that a business gets, and if executives believe people are of value, then the question becomes how to go about managing, motivating and inspiring them – and, just as important, learning how to unlock their embedded value. Here’s a guide on the do’s and don’ts to reach that goal.
First, the don’ts. Having practiced employment law for nearly 27 years, I can say with absolute clarity and total conviction that abrupt e-mails, rude comments and angry directives fail – always have, always will. Confirmation of my subjective feelings comes from two business professors, Christine Porath and Amir Erez, whose revealing study of rudeness and its toxic effects is illuminating. They subjected two groups of study participants to varying degrees of rudeness, and they asked a third group to only imagine they were the object of the rudeness. All groups were then asked to perform tasks requiring cognitive functions. The result? In all three groups the ability of the participants to think was severely impaired. Why? They were unable to use their cognitive processing power to perform the tasks, wasting their brain wattage on mulling over and ruminating upon the rudeness, or parsing the comments and figuring out how they should have responded. This included the bystander group, asked only to empathize. Talk about collateral damage. Want to learn more? Check out “Rudeness and Its Noxious Effects” in the March issue of the Harvard Business Review.
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