1. Problems in Counseling

2. 1. The Values of Counselling vs. Those of Business
• The aim of counselling is to promote growth and autonomy
among the clients and to encourage clients to care for
themselves, to be assertive and to develop their potential.
But this is not always in accord with particular organizations
that do not wish employees to be autonomous. Many
organizations want teamwork rather than a concentration
on the individual; many require 'passive employees' rather
than 'active ones,' and many growth-orientated employees
would clash with 'macho managers'. highlights possible
conflicts:
• "One difficulty with counselling within the organizational
context is that the values and goals implicit in counselling
are not easily reconciled with the economic, rationalistic
models, which underlie organizational procedures and
processes. Counselling is generally concerned with providing
individuals with a greater sense of freedom, while an
important organizational function is the control of its
employees."

3. • Besides possible conflicts between counselling values and those of the
organization, there may also be value conflicts within employees counsellors
themselves where they struggle with their precise roles and responsibilities.
• Which comes first: the individual client or the organization as a whole?
Counsellors are trained primarily to deal with the individual and to put the
welfare of the individual first. This may conflict with company norms and
even policies. Moving from individual counselling, either privately or in other
settings, to employee counselling in the work-place can be problematic for
counsellors trained this way.
• Counsellors and managers struggle to understand and be changed by the
world of the other. Not only are some organizations reluctant to see a role
for counselling within their ambit but also there are counsellors who view
industry as simply against people and are concerned with making profit at
the expense of individuals. Clashes in values among counsellors, clients,
organizations and society have to be faced continually by work-place
counsellors who are trying "to integrate outer-directed business values with
the more inner-directed humanistic

4. Counselling Service
• The way the concept of counselling is used or understood
within a particular company will determine what the goals of
counselling should be, how counselling is practiced, and to
what extent the model of counselling presented is really
possible.
• Majority use counselling in the context of performance
review, both formal and informal inspired in one way or
another by the idea that the employee may have something
to contribute to the proper evaluation of his/her own work
and may then be more open to corrective action.
• Some use counselling as a part of their training methods, so
that trainees may have the opportunity to assess their
individual strengths and weaknesses.
• The term is also commonly used in the context of career
counselling and redundancy (job loss) counselling; where the
meaning most closely approaches the one that is adopted
here.

5. 1.Traditional Factors
• Historically, the original pressures behind the
establishment of employee counselling services were
linked to the following three things:
• The legislation held the employers responsible not only
for their physical safety at work but also for what might
be termed as emotional damage, especially where that
was construed as leading to catastrophic effects in
terms of illness or death.
• The incidence of alcoholism and drug abuse.
• The reaction of Health Insurance Company because it
had to pay more in terms of health cost, it attempted to
control the situation by correspondingly higher
premiums and more stringent exclusion clauses. The
agencies responsible for counselling services were also
willing to modify this tougher approach for companies,
and ran an employee-counselling programme.

6. 2.New Factors
Counselling services are linked to two things:
1. The economic recession in the world has put many
companies under pressure to reduce and/or
redeploys their workforce and at the same time
involve much more in people welfare. They have to
take a long-sighted view of manpower requirement,
to handle redundancies in a manager, to take steps
to attract the key industrial employees they wish to
retain.
2. To reduce the negative effects of stress on the
grand scale arising from pressure, pace and
fluctuations of modern life.

7. 3. Dilemmas of a Manager Counsellor
• When an independent counsellor is helping a client there is no conflict of
interest, because once the contract between the two is agreed, the process
is designed to satisfy only the interests of the client.
• It is important for organization's counsellor, manager or anybody, to
recognize that employers have a legitimate concern with performance.
There will be an emphasis on action-positive change and measurable
results. The root of the difficulties, which managers and supervisors may
experience, can be traced to certain ambiguities in the situation of the
manager acting as counsellor. Most of the times, managers are not willing
to take up the role of a counsellor for a number of reasons:
• They fear that their assessing/controlling role will be undermined
(damaged).
• They believe that the subordinates will exploit a show of sympathy on their
part.
• They think that being sympathetic with a person means they cannot make
any further demands on him or her.
• According to some of them their job description doesn't include social work.
• Some managers are reluctant to spend time as counsellors.

8. • Leadership and management are both said to hinge on the desire and ability
to make other people successful. The skills of counselling are subset of the
skills of leadership. They may not be deployed everyday but one timely
intervention by the respected boss or colleague can make a difference to the
individual and he might learn a valuable lesson which will stay with him for
the rest of his life and will also help him to make progress. Still there are
certain role conflicts experienced by the managers when they are playing
the role of a counsellor in an organization. Few of these are:
A. Different Priorities
• First, managers and supervisors carry a natural responsibility to evaluate,
control and improve performance. The company's objectives demand it; the
way they carry it out is part of what they themselves are assessed on. Such
pressures, from above and below, make middle management one of the
most stressed groups in an organization. The calm listening, the reassurance
and basic compassion of the counsellor are difficult to come by. The
manager cannot refrain from making decisions, from passing judgment.
• The manager and the counsellor may easily have different priorities. A
manager may need to confront where the relative independent counsellor
can afford to wait for the person to confront himself. The counsellor can
perhaps afford to accept any one of the three solutions to a problem, but
the manager may have to insist on only one. He or she may have to insist on
one particular result, one outcome, however much freedom the individual is
given to choose the means. The counsellor can usually be more relaxed
about goals as well as means.

9. • The gulf between the two perspectives may
sometimes seem too wide to bridge. One might say
that the counsellor works for the client, the
employee works for the manager-counsellor. But
this is to overdraw the difference in perspective. All
sorts of people in authority have the same situation,
the same dilemma.
• Likewise the manager may play now one and then
the other role. What has often been missing from
the manager's own education is training in
counselling. But the last thing it is intended to do is
to shackle managers in their main duty, i.e., to
manage. It is intended to show how they may do
both at different times and incidentally enhance
their authority as managers.

10. B. Difference in Power
• People often come to a manager because there is
something or other he can do for them; there is something
in his gift, so to speak. It is not necessary that they might
always be seeking counselling. They might be interested in
something as simple as can they or can they not extend
their sick leave, have a raise, go on flexi time, change their
client-base, and postpone a deadline.
• From the typical counsellor's point of view this may be an
enviable(lucky) position. The independent counsellor usually
does not have the executive power to bring about a change
in the situation, which will be beneficial to the client.
Managers sometimes do. They can sometimes nip a
problem in the bud simply by doing something.
• Another major difference between the power of a manager
and a counsellor is that the manager has the power to
decide when to counsel and when not.

11. C. Owning the Problem
• Another major problem is that the employee does not start by
owning the problem. Perhaps it is the new generation of
operatives who don't have the mechanical know-how to look
after their own machines. He doesn't see that his own
expertise came through experience, by being allowed to try
things, by being shown, by experimenting, by learning.
• The manager's first task would be to make him understand
that it is his problem and not someone else's. Counselling is a
delicate enough process. The need first to convince someone
that they have a problem is even more so. This is typically the
case with performance issues.
• The redundancy ( job loss) counsellor too may face the same
paradox. He or she is easily seen as the agent of the
organization, which has given the person their problem, and
can be the natural recipient of the welter of feelings which
are involved such as, panic, resentment, bewilderment, and

12. D. Conflicting Views on Confidentiality
• The reason most often given by employees why they
are reluctant to accept counselling from anybody in the
organization, even where there is no line relationship, is
that they cannot be sure that what they reveal will not
in some way prejudice their employment, either now or
in the future.
• Managers in their turn may want to refuse confidences
because they are not sure they could maintain an
unprejudiced personal attitude or an uncontaminated
judgment of the individual from the company's point of
view. Quite reasonably they may be afraid of having
their hands tied, wittingly or unwittingly, by an
employee's openness about a personal problem.

13. E. Ambiguity in the Situation
• The individual manager might be a caring person,
but company culture, policy or procedures are
geared in such a way that he or she might be
restricted from the outset in terms of the help they
may offer.
• Such people may hesitate to get involved where the
only response open to them is a kind of impotent
sympathy which would leave them feeling all the
more frustrated.

14. F. Ambivalence Towards Counselling ( mixed feelings)
• This is a more fundamental factor, which makes some
people frankly unwilling to be involved in the
counselling role. They may hide behind a protest about
the kind of ambiguities just discussed but in fact it is
more a question of personal ambivalence than role
ambiguity. This may be for a variety of reasons:
• Some people simply do not have a natural sympathy,
warmth or caring for others.
• Some would rather describe themselves as 'pragmatic',
by which they mean they don't let their feelings affect
their performances.
• Some nourish the conviction that people (i.e. other
people) are basically lazy or inept.
• Some see counselling as encouraging malingerers( ill
pretending) rather than building trust and loyalty.

15. G. Ambivalence in Good Listening
• There is another kind of ambivalence, which is rooted, in the genuine
difficulty of good listening.
• One aspect of it is the struggle anyone will experience when his or her own
emotions or values are engaged by what someone is saying. Most of us can
really only pay attention to one thing at a time. If our own vested interests
are being challenged (however unknowingly) by the other person, we do not
normally keep the focus of our attention on what they are actually saying.
Good listening—for whatever purpose, be it counselling, negotiating or
managing—needs to become second nature if we are not to become
entangled in our own reactions.
• A second and related aspect of this genuine difficulty in listening is that for
many people there is something inherently competitive about talking. If
someone tells me they nearly went under a bus, what is the most common
reaction? I want to tell them the same thing happened to me. Most people
don't listen for long before they start to itch to get in their own similar
experiences.
• There may be something here, something even more basic in many people,
which is a reluctance to listen, from the belief that if they listen they may be
forced to agree, that if they see the other's point of view they may have to
give up their own.