The Thing About Working With People
Image by Michael Gaida from Pixabay
It’s amazing to me that the one subject that has had the most influence on our ability to get anything done in business (and, frankly, personal) life is also the one that is given the least attention (relatively) at Business School: working with people.
Don’t get me wrong - it’s not as if there isn’t any acknowledgement that it’s critical (there is) or that Professors don’t speak to its importance (they do). It’s just that, in an arena specifically designed to prep tomorrow’s business leaders, there is simply not enough real emphasis on just how important, how valuable it is to be good at managing people.
At the end of the day, in any vocation, your ability to work with and manage people to do what’s needed is nothing short of ‘make or break’. The ability to manage people well helps us achieve our goals, helps them achieve their personal objectives and helps the company move forward.
That said, I don’t know if there’s a practical way to accomplish this goal - and specifically, I mean, to instill how essential good people skills are.
Case studies that speak to people issues are one way but unless you identify with the situation or the subjects, there’s a tendency to become academic in your analysis.
Structured team activities are another, likely more effective, way but my concern here is that they are short term in nature and cannot account for the complexities of real world dynamics.
Longer term group assignments (e.g. over a semester) are much better but again, are the stakes high enough to really illustrate the gravity of the situation? I’m not sure.
At the end of the day, I suppose nothing trumps practical experience, where there are real world consequences depending on one’s ability to get things done with others. Someone will or won’t get paid. A customer will get serviced, or not. An initiative will lower costs, or it’ll raise them. Someone will get promoted, or they won’t.
In other words, the true education in terms of how to manage people happens at the sharp end (as the Brits like to say): when we face the gravity of consequence and then have to weight the implications, size up who we’re working with, assess what will work for them, decide what and how to communicate it and then make sure it gets done.
I suppose these real lessons in life can’t be simulated - they have to be experienced, failed at, learned from, iterated and improved. They cannot happen in class, by reading a book or just talking through a situation. We just have to get out there, take some risks and live it.
