Interpersonal Effectiveness

The use of the word buttering implies that we are falsely praising a person. A few people (with very low self esteem) may enjoy being buttered, but others do not. Consider this. We do not like criticism from anyone – except from those we respect and when we know the persons have a genuine interest […]

  Today, a close friend of mine expressed anguish at the following incident. Yesterday, he learnt of the death of his sister’s father-in-law. He was close to the deceased gentleman and they had spent many moments together solving crosswords and discussing other similar mysteries of life. He went over to his sister’s house and started […]

I know that I am supposed to do a particular activity like an assignment, or study a book or write letters. But I tend to postpone these indefinitely, citing various excuses. Charles Handy talks about 3 things that are required in the motivational calculus. I should know my needs. These can be the need for […]

For that matter, why do people do anything? De Becker talks about 4 things. Justification: we make a judgement that we have been wronged, hence we need to retaliate. If we think about it, we have justified each of our actions (or inaction). Sometimes we say it was necessary or unavoidable. Sometimes, we assume an […]

Talking to some students, I realised that a person has a different set of rules for how they should be treated and for how they should treat others.  For example, we expect that juniors should obey our rules, but we should not obey any rules. A corollary to this is the expectation that if person […]

What happens when I give or receive feedback? Why is it that I give feedback with good intentions, but the result is not what we intended. An engineering graduate would say, feedback is provided, based on output, to the input of a process to modify the process. A negative feedback dampens the process, a positive […]

Emails are one of the worst inventions for interpersonal relationships. I know that it is cheap and fast. But it is impersonal. I are naturally shy and therefore hide behind emails. It allows me to compose at leisure and rewrite my mail, therefore lose all spontaneity. It therefore is not a true picture of who […]

I have a tendency to judge people or companies. They are all doing the best they can under the circumstances and we do not know all the circumstances to judge them. When a person acts in a particular way, he does it based on his beliefs. We take this action of the person and extrapolate […]

Drucker, in his book ‘The Effective Executive,’ points out that the more senior a person is, the less time he has to himself. Since that person is also paid more, time is at a premium. So if I waylay him and ask for advice, he will not be very keen on doing so – not […]