The Business Case for Corporate Psychology
Corporate psychology is based on the study of human behavior in the work place. Consultation centered on this area of psychology applies the theories, knowledge, research, processes, and practices of behavioral science to help people be happier and more productive in the work place, and to help organizations achieve stronger results. In short, corporate psychology focuses on helping individuals, teams, and organizations grow and develop. It sits at the intersection of strategy, structure, and people.
Just as a key that fits correctly in a lock can cause the tumblers to align and open the lock, fitting the right person in the right job can unlock superlative performance and financial results for our clients. Improving our clients’ bottom line by linking our services to their strategic business objectives is what we do.
The intellectual underpinnings which describe how corporate psychology services unlock organizational effectiveness have been well documented. In his book, The New Economics, W. Edwards Deming writes:
“Psychology helps us to understand people, interaction between people and circumstances, interaction between customer and supplier, interaction between teacher and pupil, interaction between a manager and his people and any system of management… …People are different from one another. A manager of people must be aware of these differences, and use them for optimization of everybody’s abilities and inclinations… …A leader of transformation, and managers involved, need to learn the psychology of individuals, the psychology of a group, the psychology of society, and the psychology of change.”
From the Speakers Library of Business, Donald E. Peterson, Past Chairman and CEO of Ford, states:
“What is a corporation? Plants? Product lines? Assembly lines? Bottom lines? Distribution lines? Not really. A corporation is people. People organized and working and producing to serve people. That’s what it is all about in the end.”
And in the words of Peter Drucker, writing in his book Peter Drucker On the Profession of Management:
“Executives spend more time on managing people and making people decisions than on anything else — and they should. No other decisions are so long lasting in their consequences or so difficult to make. And yet, by and large, executives make poor promotion and staffing decisions. By all accounts, their batting average is no better than .333: at most one-third of such decisions turn out right; one-third are minimally effective; and one-third are outright failures. In no other area of management would we put up with such miserable performance. Indeed, we need not and should not. Managers making people decisions will never be perfect, of course, but they should come pretty close to batting 1.000 — especially since in no other area of management do we know as much… …Making the right people decisions is the ultimate means of controlling an organization well. Such decisions reveal how competent management really is, what its values are, and whether it takes its job seriously. No matter how hard managers try to keep their decisions a secret — and some still try hard — people decisions cannot be hidden. They are eminently visible.”
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