Learning resource on Employee Counsellng produced by Humantalents Interantional

1. Counselling As A Method To
Understand Your Employees
By
Jayadeva de Silva.M.Sc, MBIM, FIPM, FITD
The most important attribute of human beings is their
intelligence. This can be defined as our ability to
make fresh, appropriate responses to each new
situation. It may be impossible to prove that every one
like this. However, one of the best sources of
information about our nature is our small children.
They usually show these qualities to a remarkable
degree-highly intelligent, loveable and powerful in
getting what they want. When we work closely with more
and more adults we find that this is our inherent
nature.
People respond best and learn most when they know have
the highest expectations of them, and yet clearly,
people do not behave like this all the time. Some
behave like this more than other people. When we think
about people around us at work places or elsewhere, we
see that most of the time we function amazingly well.
At other times we do not. It may be something like
fatigue or some bad news that gets in the way or
something occurs that triggers a response out of
proportion to the actual event. When this happens the
difficulty is something more fundamental, which the
Behavioural Scientists refer to as ‘distress pattern’.
This is a habitual way of reacting in certain
situations, which is not a fresh accurate response but
a rigid, patterned way of reacting. Some thing happens
which reminds us of a past hurt. Our attention goes
inwards and we reacting intelligently.
This reaction may have been appropriate long ago when
the original hurt occurred, but now completely
inappropriate. Or we may react this way because of
unhelpful messages given to us by our parents when we
were small. These patterns are sometimes major
difficulties in highly successful and able adults.
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2. For example little boy who was told, “you will never
make a success of anything” might become the man who
tries to be successful at all costs. Patterns like
these are often really important development issues
confronting people in Organisations. These are usually
more significant than deficiencies in knowledge or
skill. We should be able to think about how this
applies to our own selves and to people we know. What
can we do about these difficulties?
Ones again we can learn a lot from our small children.
When they are hurt emotionally, they cry or express
their anger. Afterwards they feel fine again. A lot of
this can be quite hard on the parents, but it works
well for the children. It is a natural healing process
which the behavioural scientists call “discharge”
Unfortunately we are taught not to do this e.g. Men
don’t cry etc. Thus a natural healing process has been
blocked. Of course it would not be appropriate to give
immediate vent to our feelings in most situations. We
have to learn function well despite how we feel.
However, we have to recover this natural healing
process. It is much healthier than repressing our
feelings, taking them out on some one else or resorting
to alcohol. Furthermore feelings can impair our
judgement in ways that are highly detrimental.
Then, counselling can be offered as a far better
solution. When we are distressed, what we need is a
good listening to. We need to “discharge” i.e. talk
about in an appropriate way & express how we feel. We
can then re-evaluate the experience and think and act
intelligently again.
Our patterns prevent us functioning well. They stop us
from getting our work and the rest of our lives the way
we want it to be. Patters need to be contradicted. For
example man, who was told as a little boy that he would
never make a success of anything, needs to contradict
the message and accept that as a mature man “I can make
a success of anything “. This is a simple process and
does not require expert skills through it will require
some training. This is not theory.
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3. It is simply a basic human process, which help us to
live and work well. Now let us consider the
implications of the above for the management and
development of human resources.
• At the very least we can use this as
background information to help understand
why talented people sometimes behave less
than intelligently. It may help us to
respond more appropriately when they do
this. (What is the difficulty? What would
help? )
• It explains why listening is often the most
valuable thing we can do.
• We find this is very useful to distinguish
people and “patterns”. It becomes much
easier to like someone when we realise that
they are fine and it is only the “pattern”
which is thoroughly obnoxious. When realise
it is a “pattern” it is easier to stay
rational.
• It gives us an extremely valuable
developmental tool and provides us with a
way of working with people
We work in Organisations where the culture does
not usually make it easy to be open about our
difficulties. Frankly there is usually a lot of
pretence. In this environment we have to approach the
introduction of counselling as a key leadership
development tool with a good deal of sensitively. It
requires judgement to decide whether and when to
introduce counselling to an individual or group of
people. The key factor seems to be safety. When there
is enough trust and safety people may be ready to use
counselling.
Author can be contacted in SriLanka Tel 077 7272295
E mail djayadeva@gmail.com
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