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“Dealing with people is the biggest problem you face.  A person’s ability to understand and get along with people…and actually win others to their way of thinking is key to moving up in today’s’ organizations.”

-Dale Carnegie

  As I travel the country and consult with companies and organization throughout theUnited States, something became very apparent to me. People have forgotten how to successfully work with people. From customer service, to co-workers, there seems to be an attitude of “I don’t  care.”. Many of today’s workers fail to make the customer to paycheck connection (CTP), meaning if customers stop coming through the doors, we stop getting paid-period. The quote above is by a man who conducted some 30-years of empirical research before coming to this powerful conclusion.

 Who Wants Be a Millionaire 

  Dale Carnegie concluded that in order to move up in today’s organizations, one must master the art of dealing with people-successfully. Interestingly enough, Carnegie conducted his research in the early 1900, nevertheless the human condition remains the same. The question that begs to be answered by employees in the workplaces of today is: How do I get along with the people I work with? In every business sector imaginable, people grapple with this dilemma- from sales reps, to engineers, from customer service reps to architects, from law enforcement to child care, and from the White House to your house. Eighty-five per cent (85%) of your ability to make an incredible income for you and your family will be directly related to how well you get along with people and, how skilled you are at winning others to your way of thinking. How do I get people working together for the common good of the organization?  It is a question top producing companies cannot shy away from.

 Businesses Lose Billions Annually

 Each year in Americaour economy loses billions of dollars because of inefficient, untrained, uninformed employees; as a result productivity suffers tremendously. An aggressive company trains and prepares its people for success. Even though its been over four decades since Mack R. Douglas wrote these words in back in 1966, yet today, companies continue to make costly mistakes when it comes to human production/and human performance systems. Ken Blanchard wrote in his best selling book, “The One Minute Manager,” that most companies spend 50% to 70% of their money on people’s salaries. And yet they spend less than 1% of their budget to train their people. In fact, he wrote, most companies spend more money on maintaining their buildings and equipment than they do maintaining and developing their people. To succeed today, organizations need to refocus their attention on human development.

 What is Human Development (HD)?

Chevalier defines human development (HD), or performance improvement) as the systematic and systemic identification and removal of barriers to individual and organizational performance. Therefore, HRD is the practice of valuing humans as assets within an organization, and being committed to their long term effectiveness.  When the term development is employed in human resources, subsequent terms such as performance, productivity, learning, improvement, quality, efficiency, competency, outcomes, assessments, analysis, and evaluation all come to mind.

Don’t just blow this list off; study each one profusely because these are the ones top performing companies utilize to dramatically increase the productivity of their employees and expand the bottom line profits of their organizations. In order for your organization to remain competitive now and well into the future, you must have teams that have learned to work together (or put another way- teams that have learned to get along with each other). To this I add only one thing: work hard on your people skills because they are the skills that will get you paid (big time). The mother’s milk of organizational failure is confusion.

 Conclusion

  Dealing with people is the biggest problem organizations face today.  A person’s ability to understand and get along with people…and actually win others to their way of thinking is key to moving up in today’s’ organizations. To succeed today, organizations need to refocus their attention on human development.

  2012 Cubie Davis King. All Right Reserved Internationally.

www.cubieking.com 

References 

Blanchard, K. & Johnson, S (1981). The one minute manager.New York,NY:BerkleyBooks.

 Carnegie, D. (1936). How to win friends and influence people.New York,NY: Simon and Schuster.

 Chevalier, R. (2004). Human performance technology revisited.Silver Spring,MD:

  International Society for Performance Improvement.