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Newsletter,
Issue 1, July 2008 This
is the first newsletter from the Bouklas Group: we expect to regularly share
with you essays, seminar excerpts, and other valuable material to help you to
effect a more productive, positive, and profitable working environment for
your business. We
will use this opportunity to introduce you to people whom we feel provide
exceptional service in the form of Strategic Partner Profiles, upcoming
events sponsored by both the Bouklas Group and our affiliates, and other
links to resources we think you will find helpful in the course of our
travels. Thank
you for reading, and feel free to respond to this letter at info@bouklasgroup.com to give us your
comments and suggestions. George
& James Bouklas Essay:
Increasing the Skill of Observation It
pays to accurately read interactions in the workplace. An employee working in
his cubicle suddenly stands up and starts screaming. I bet that ten onlookers
could agree on how his head surged above all the others, how he shook his
hands in the air and what words he yelled out. But here’s the question: Were
those ten people looking in the right spot? Was that the assessment that
would yield progress and a positive result?
One
way to find out is to speak with the employee. He will tell you how he
perceives the situation. But get more information with wider circles of
inquiry, and you will find a new picture emerging. In most cases, this
employee is the one with the lowest threshold of pain. He’s the one who
squawked first. He is a telegrapher of something that’s going on in the
office. You can fire him, and that’s one kind of solution. Your office
problems go underground for a bit. But they surface again, in some new
mishap. We
function in America with a faulty notion of personal responsibility. It’s
faulty because the overwhelming majority of us work around other people. We
depend on them and they depend on us. We already behave as if we understand
that we are part of a thick weave of work relations. We will state,
nonetheless, that every person is responsible and accountable for his
performance. This is how theory gets in the way of observation. Theory:
“Everyone is responsible for his own fate.” Observation: “We can make each
other look good or look bad and it pays to look at the interactions at work.” Direct
observation reveals that all employees function in an “ecology,” an
environment made up of other living beings all of whom are constantly
affecting the fortunes and survivability of one another. All behavior occurs
in a context. Understand that context and you increase your profitability.
Understand how employees are impacting one another, how employees are dealing
with regulators and suppliers, how they are dealing with the customers, and
your observational powers are the most accurate. I
started with the stark example of an employee who loses control. Now let’s
step back to less extreme behaviors. How about the employee who cannot get
his work out? The employee whose effectiveness is flagging? The employee who
cannot get along with others? It’s easy nowadays to simply brush off the
dynamics and conclude, “Oh, he’s a science (math) kind of guy, you know,
Asperger’s.” I’m a psychologist and I’m here to tell you trait names are
hardly accurate and they hardly ever help. Look
at the ecology. Look at the particular situation, and at the whole company.
Zoom in an out. Get us to help you. Attention, observation and awareness are the
hallmarks of behavioral analysis. For more, visit our website, bouklasgroup.com.
Strategic
Partners of the Bouklas Group
We
have chosen to partner with Murray Kleiner because of a unique talent. He
strides two very different fields of endeavor, integrating his social
aptitude with a research literacy. He grasps the most complex and detailed
content of a business through the thought process of a beginning employee or
a customer. This is his gift. He articulates the vision and the knowledge of
key people so that resulting tutorials can be readily understood by people
with lesser baseline skills.This makes training material of all kinds
accessible to a company’s target audience. Practice
equates with repetition, or doing the same thing over and over. But think
about this interesting question: “A craftsman has been rolling expensive
tobacco leaf into fine cigars for years. Lately, he has found that his rate
of production has increased. In addition, more of these cigars are packed at
just the right density to provide maximum flavor. What’s happening?” The
answer is very simple, but remains hidden because we think of the cigar-roller
as a fully accomplished specialist. He is learning! Practice works because
you keep on advancing your skill; you do it better. I
made a dozen business presentations with two esteemed colleagues this year.
These were experienced psychologists who knew exactly what they had to do in
front of an audience. Still, I encouraged them to practice with me. I became
the audience and they took turns offering techniques for business owners.
Each time was different. Something new came up with each subsequent
presentation. Their message was enriched as they found ways to bring up to
the surface what they knew. And they learned from the feedback I gave them. Here’s
the kicker: Everybody knows all kinds of things, which are not evident
because they reside in the background of professional life as latent skills.
And they will remain there unless we practice what we know, again and again,
in order to tease these skills into the open, where they can help us the
most. Behaviors like modeling, cueing, praise and informational feedback need
to be practiced all the time, so we can learn to use them with greater
effect. For these and fourteen other skills that we need to practice in
business all the time, go to bouklasgroup.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ When your company has people problems, we conduct
behavioral assessments. |
