Managing your psychology

How far does your actual behaviour as a manager match your desired self-image A trusted friend or mentor may be helpful to you getting to the truth on this matter. Review your skills in managing your psychological processes ... 

Your personal power can be seen as a function of how you manage your psychology for your journey from A, where you are now, to point B, your desired future state. 

One way to manage your psychology is by consciously controlling and directing the various inner forces that you sense are driving you. The other way is to remove the driving force - let go of it. 

You do not need to understand theories of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis In order to manage your own psychology. On an everyday basis, it is something that we all do naturally, though perhaps with varying degrees of skill. 

Managing your oAvn psychology can be viewed as a process of self-counselling . There are two basic stages ... 

To discover how your behaviour is being affected by your psychology, you need to ask questions of yourself. Examples of self-interrogatory questions produced by a firm of consultant psychologists for use by managers are to be found in Box 10.7. 

Your starting point can simply be that you want to be more effective at managing the processes that mediate between your inner self and your outward behaviour - to keep in check any psychological forces that might meinlfest themselves in the kind of personal Incompetence or unwitting capriciousness described earlier in this chapter. You need too to be able to deal with any inner blocks to what you want to accomplish. 

We come now to the third box in Figure 8.2, preparing yourself to use power. This refers to the mental and psychological preparation that you may need to make in order to exert your personal power. Management consultant and counsellor George W. Watts has described personal power as being a function of singleness of purpose and lack of impediments (1993 107). That succinct summary touches the essence. 

Sun Tzu talked about the same principle in his epic Art of War written more than 2,000 years ago. He states the way to defeat your enemy most effectively is not by force of arms. Instead, invite them to take part in your conquests. They will not destroy what they helped build. Most quality improvement movements, like TQM, stress employee involvement. Modem management psychology research data shows engagement correlates highly with safety outcomes. 

We are motivated by consequences, however, so let s consider certain benefits you can expect to gain from a successful behavior-based safety management process as reviewed in this chapter. Since most injuries are caused in part by at-risk behavior, a reduction in at-risk behavior and an increase in safe behavior will lead to injury prevention. However, we d like you to consider five other benefits that result from people contributing interdependently to an effective behavior-based safety process. These outcomes are critically important and relate to much more than safety. In fact, they can benefit every important function of your organization. In explaining these we ll review most of the key psychological principles covered in this chapter. 

---