For people to do business together and make progress, it is imperative that they must go ahead and make deliberate efforts to recognize each other’s humanity. When you take a moment and think about all of that time when a manager or a colleague at work took genuine and deep interest in you as a person, your goals, ambitions, aspirations, and also took out time to get to know about your life outside work, did this make you feel special.
Not a Resource
It is entirely true you met the person in a professional setup. Maybe you had a boss who was aware of your personal story, how you joined the company and how you reached the present work position. The important thing here is to note that your boss treated you as a human being and not as a resource.
The Extra Mile
This treatment in itself made you feel great and it sure did motivate you to go the extra mile all the way.. During the course of your working life you must have surely come across contrasting circumstances as well, just think about the time and place when a manager or colleague just knew you only by your name and by your job function.
Awesome
The guy from operations, and that was your introduction to people from other departments, a quick compliment thrown in like awesome, or great. That was about it, superficial, empty observations, just surface level and nothing more, pretty much mechanical approach, just going through the motions.
Disdain
There was a distinct disconnect, between you and the superior, an impersonal relation at the most. You vividly remember being treated with a sort of veiled disdain, as an expendable professional from which the former can get something and perhaps abandon at the first possible instance, job security goes for a toss, and there is no reason to forge a personal bond sort of.
Expediency
Well getting into this kind of a situation is not a very pleasant experience and the motivation takes a huge dent. Well let us not idealise any of the above situations, maybe they are hypothetical or they could be as real as possible. The current fast paced global market is highly competitive, and as a company grows expediency kind of becomes hard to avoid.
Being Productive
Each one of us has a lot on our plates, it is a classic case of biting more than you can chew properly. Every moment that we spend not being productive seems to be wasted time which could perhaps be better utilized. Getting things done in a professional environment turns out to be incredibly hard, whether it is within teams or needs to be accomplished cross – functionally.
Final Words
Once the superiors are trapped in this mindset, they start treating people as dispensable resources as opposed to treating them as people sharing in the same experience as humans who connect, collaborate and grow. People are then merely used as vehicles to accomplish tasks. When we look at the big picture, we find that the focus has shifted from we to it, there is un urgent need to re-focus and reverse the damages that have accumulated so far. The guiding light should be people first and professionals second.
