Self Help

As a leader, whether in the home or at the office, your duty is to treat everybody with the self-respect they deserve. This empowers both the recipient of your kind words as well as yourself for building another person’s self-esteem.

All people in our society (with a few pathological exceptions) have a need for a stable, high evaluation of themselves. They have a desire for self-respect and for the esteem of others. Satisfaction of the self-esteem need leads to feelings of self-confidence, worth, strength, capability, adequacy, and of being useful and necessary in the world.

Adhere to the following 5 tips to build up other people’s inner strength as well as performance output:

1. Treat each person with dignity and respect. Treating each of your people with dignity and respect should be such an easy thing to do. Through your words and actions, convey to each of your people that you view him or her as a unique human being and as a person of worth.

2. Show each person how his or her work contributes to worthwhile ends. Experience shows that jobholders can be motivated in carrying out very mundane tasks if they understand how these tasks contribute to worthwhile ends. They are “turned on'’ by the ends, and they realize that the mundane work must be done to achieve these ends.

3. Promote self-management on the part of each of your people. Self-esteem is linked closely to a feeling of freedom and control over one’s own work. To the extent that jobholders feel that they can control and direct their own day-to-day activities, they will have more self-esteem. A practical way to bring about this state of affairs is through management by objectives. Assuming that you and the staff member reach agreement on the staff member’s performance objectives for the coming year, then the latter should be able to direct his or her efforts toward these objectives with only minimal supervision.

4. Ask your people for their ideas and opinions. What a great boost to self-esteem: “My boss asked me for my ideas on what should be done. That made my day.” You should do it with sincerity. And be sure to give your people credit for their ideas and contributions.

5. Recognize individuals for good work. Some managers can be characterized as “bad finders.” It is as though they carry in their heads a template that represents the ideal, and they then zap any individual who deviates from this ideal. Certainly you cannot afford to ignore errors and examples of poor performance, but place them in perspective by evaluating them in the light of the individual’s total performance. As you consider this total performance, make a special point of giving recognition for good work.