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HOW YOUR BELIEFS ABOUT PEOPLE CAN MAKE OR BREAK YOUR BUSINESS

While it may come as a surprise, the assumptions you hold about people in general - their attitudes, belief, and behavior with respect to work - strongly affect the kind of work environment you create for your business. They can also make or break your business. Consider the following two statements. Which best represents the beliefs you hold about most people most of the time?

Statement 1:  People, by their very nature, dislike work and will avoid it when possible. They have little ambition, tend to shun responsibility, and like to be directed. Above all else, they want security. In order to get people to work, it is necessary to use coercion, control, and threats of punishment.

Statement 2:  Work is as natural to people as resting or playing.  External control and threats of punishment are not the only - or even the best - ways to get people to work. If given the chance, most people are capable of being self-directed and self-controlling. The average human being learns not only to accept, but to seek responsibility, if given the chance and offered the right rewards for achievement. The capacity to exercise a relatively high degree of imagination, ingenuity, and creativity in solving problems is widely distributed throughout, the population.

The chances are you don't fully subscribe to either of these statements, but you probably lean more toward one than the other.  Throughout our work lives, we arc constantly interacting with our fellow workers. From these interactions, each of us begins to form - perhaps unconsciously - a set of fundamental beliefs about people in general.  Consciously or unconsciously, the beliefs we form affect our behavior toward others, particularly people we employ and supervise. Your basic beliefs influence your behavior and the kind of working environment you will create for your business.  
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If your assumptions about people are closer to Statement 1 than to Statement 2, the chances are you will create a work environment with many controls. You will pay a great deal of attention to whether your people show up to work on time. You will establish rules, regulations, policies, and procedures for every thing, or most things you ask your employees to do, and you will be watchful to see that the rules are followed.  Regardless of the type of work you need performed, you will try to break it down into simple steps.
In fact, you will probably divide responsibility for "doing" and "checking." You will organize so that one person does the work and another - perhaps you - checks to see that the work was done correctly.  If you are a Statement 1 type, you may have difficulty in delegating tanks or responsibilities to people, particularly if the job or assignment is very important. Perhaps unconsciously, you will be stingy with rewards and quick to punish or correct one of your people when he or she makes a mistake. To attract good employees you will try to offer slightly higher base pay or hourly wages than your competitors and stress the potential for promotion or job security as an inducement to those employees you want to attract and retain. Since you will be concerned that your best people might leave should their job security be threatened, you will be reluctant to share much information about your company's performance with employees, particularly if you are experiencing a downturn in the business. Finally, as your business grows you will create layers of managers, supervisors, and quality checkers.  For every three to five workers, you will have someone you trust to oversee their work.

If the assumptions you hold about people are closer to Statement 2 than to Statement 1, your approach to managing people and the way you organize and conduct your business will be quite different.  As a Statement 2-type manager, you will create a work environment that is much more open and flexible. The rules, regulations, policies, and procedures that you develop for your business will be simple and few in number. You will care much less about how the work gets performed. You are likely to be most comfortable with just giving general direction to your people and then letting them do things their own way. Instead of breaking jobs down into small steps, you will tend to assign people a "whole job" to accomplish. You will have few inspectors and supervisors, since you will expect everyone to check their own work. If you are a Statement 2 type, you may have just the opposite problem from your Statement 1 counterpart. Where he or she is reluctant to delegate tasks and responsibilities, you may have a tendency to over- delegate.  While, on the surface your operation may seem chaotic, that doesn't mean you aren't a tough taskmaster. The difference between you and your Statement 1 counterpart is that you pay attention almost strictly to results, where he or she is concerned not only with what was accomplished but how it was accomplished.  You can he very tough when desired results aren't achieved, but you prefer to praise people rather than punish or criticize them.  In respect to pay practices, you are likely to place more faith in incentives than base pay. You like to reward people for results with bonuses, but you don't think people work just for money.  You therefore use a lot of token awards - caps, pins, plaques, dinners, and so on - as a way of recognizing and reinforcing your people. Most important, you spend a lot of time talking to your people about the business and the "grand mission" you have in mind. You want them to feel as excited about the business as you do. Compared to your Statement I counterpart you are much more open about sharing information about sales, the competition, and even your company's profits.  Finally, as your business grows, you are reluctant to add managers or supervisors. Part of you resists because you don't want to become too remote from your people.  Another part of you just resists creating any bureaucracy.

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