Last month we started a discussion about how critical it is for an effective boss to understand and bring out the best in human behavior. Developing this ability is a major factor (deal breaker) in leadership success. It is very difficult for bosses to outperform the level of their understanding of how humans think, feel, and perform. Organizational flubs in just about every category are pretty much always human flubs-this (no-brainer) does not require much detective work, simply because virtually everything within pretty much any and every system is directly or indirectly connected to something involving humans. Another no-brainer is that everyone has a boss, so every flub involves a boss in some way; a major boss job is to predict/prevent flubs, manage flubs when they occur, and recover once they have occurred-and then do all that over and over pretty much forever. Humans will be involved in everything pretty much forever.
Given the current topic of a boss understanding and then effectively dealing with human behavior, I am not suggesting we all become clinically trained social scientists. That is certainly an admirable thing to do, but I am attempting to write something every month that is pretty simple and practical and that might nudge the reader to think more about the monthly topic. My hallucinations, thankfully, are published in a very tactical, oriented, long-standing, generally pretty technical fire journal. My comments are a reflection of working in every position in my fire department; and although I bounced into and got bounced out of a couple of universities (thank you for both), the most profound, practical experience for me was being on the receiving end of always having a boss and on the sending end when I got to be a boss. A lot of what I learned was the result of road rash-I guess you could say I attended Road Rash University. I now share with you my very “unacademic” human behavior observations.
All humans are basically two-sided: We have the natural capability to be perfect and imperfect. Built into us originally at the human assembly plant was a set of characteristics that occur along a range of from very positive to very negative. As an example, when you open the morning paper, you routinely can read on the front page about a very admirable person who selflessly assists the downtrodden, disabled, and displaced and in the article right next to that one about a vicious, violent, human monster who commits, say, an incomprehensible school shooting. Both individuals are human. Sadly, negative news is presented more often and is read more often than positive news. A reporter once told me that the only cats that are news to his readers (and editors) are those that get stuck in trees.
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