Boris Pakhol | Contemporary HR and business trainings: humanistic views on staff management and education

Teaching people is an art.
Top-manager should be a real specialist in the psychology of interpersonal relations.
The need of spiritual development is one of the strongest driving forces of a person.
One needs to teach people how to learn.
A man expresses his personality in his activity.
The company is not the one which develops, this is only a the metaphor, the people are developing.

Boris Pakhol

Boris Pakhol | Contemporary HR and business trainings:
humanistic views on staff management and education

Boris Pakhol, business consultant, trainer, psychologist and personnel management specialist considers that problems in business always reflect certain psychological problems, which, in their turn, reflect spiritual problems of the person. He pays attention to the fact that forming corporate culture and self-development of employees start with the head of the company, which means that top-managers should go through profound education first. This issue together with the latest trends in the world of business consulting and training, as well as his views upon development of the art of people management were the subject of this interview.

Boris, please, let us know about the directions of business trainings that you provide.

Boris Pakhol: According to my many-sided education and a lot of years of my training and consulting experience, the range of issues in which I can call myself an expert is comparatively wide. It varies from political, ideological, business consulting to inter-personal relations, health and individual qualities development.

Concerning the scope of business trainings, it is necessary to split the trainings and consultations to "basic" - essential for all the participants of work process without any exceptions, and "specialized"- chosen depending on the activity, profession, position, request and development level of the individual.

It is obvious that trainings and range of professional interests of a novice seller of goods or services will be quite different from expectations of a middle or top manager. There is no question about the business owners, politicians or public figures. However training crossing is rather possible in some cases due to common psychological features that are required to perform certain job tasks for different professions.

For example, confrontation or time management trainings might be useful for all professions. But specialized sessions aimed for creating a culture of thinking or art of debates and negotiations are necessary only for those professionals who are involved in intellectual activity. Special trainings on accounting or studying programming languages ​ will be useful for experts in these fields. On the contrary, and the reason why is clear here, questions of image and public views creation, structure of the popular mentality, charisma and so on can be interesting only for top management, business owners and public figures.

However, expanding the boundaries of consideration, there are groups of trainings, related to psychology, sociology and cultural studies and those, to my opinion, would be extremely useful for all the developing people without any exceptions.

If to talk about education that I provide, I should mention its diversity and individual approach, so I will give a few examples:

- The Basics of Professional Psychology

- Culture of Thinking and Art of Disputes

- Corporate Culture: the Art of Managing people

- Visual Psychodiagnostics

- Interpersonal Conflict Resolution: Theory and Practice

- The Art of Business Negotiations

- Psychology of Social Communications

- Time Management

- Rhetoric and Principles of Charismatic Influence

- Special Management and Team Building Trainings

I also offer consultations on the following issues:

- Personnel Management and Formation of Corporate Culture

- Social and Professional Development of the Personality

- Interpersonal and Family Conflicts Solving

- Physical and Mental Health

- Correction of Relationships with Children

Tell us, please, what makes the essence of your teaching methods.

Boris Pakhol: In the field of human teaching, methods or rather their understanding and deliberate application are the highest mastery. And of course the masters rarely talk about it. Can one give sufficient and brief description of the issues that he has been learning through over than 20 years of his life? More likely that he can’t do it.

You can certainly speak about the personal touch, the self-development, the non-direct approach, the versatility and the creativity, the humanism and so on, however it will say nothing to the reader, and the diffuse words can only decrease the importance of teaching methodology issue. Enumeration of the instructional techniques does not make any sense; as the matter is not in the method itself but in the way the teacher uses it, what factors he takes into account and what goals he aims for.

In fact, the issue is very complex, many-sided and is connected with the very essence of the art of teaching. Nobody knows how the realization happens; it is always a creative act and is based on a personal experience of the master. We can lead a person very close to understanding, but the last step he always makes on his own - and of course it is not a matter of just two paragraphs. Education of people is an art, and the core of every art is irrational and therefore can not be fully described step by step.

However, there are attempts to describe this creative process in the categories and concepts of modern science, to find it rational grounds and the optimal algorithms. Such kind of search can be very interesting and its results can even be applied in practice, but no one knows how it really happens.

For instance, Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) is a wonderful project on implementation of the rational approach to the issue of people management. And the founders of this project are likely to have learned a lot, while analyzing and dissecting the behavior of those people who already knew how to do it.

But these methods do not work without refined skill of feeling emotions - both of one’s own and of the other people - as well as without charisma. Conversely, charismatic person applies impact techniques, not even knowing which exact method of NLP he or she now uses.

And is it really possible to rationally define the phenomenon of charisma or feelings and emotions? Probably not, but they can be felt, one can learn to manage those after understanding more complicated rules of their occurrence.

What are the key differences between your methods and the ones from the wide training assortment on the market?

Boris Pakhol: It is very difficult to talk about the differences in methods in the way not to make harm to my colleagues, but it is possible to cover the most widely spread problem.

It grows from he fact that each training technique is based on some metaphysical grounds, on a certain image of the world which are described with their unique language, images and symbols. The approaches of numerous training schools vary so much that it is not easy, even for an expert, to link them into a whole picture. And the abundance of models and terminology leads to confusion of trainees.

In fact, to become a good coach one needs not only good education, better academic one, years of varied experience in business communication, charisma, constant striving for self-development and many personal qualities, motives and goals.

And, what is the most important, one needs to love people.

Talking about the peculiarities of my approach, first of all, it is necessary to say about the principles, not the methods. After all, most of the methods and techniques, to some extent, are taken from the same sources. And principles, vision, open-mindedness, experience are always unique, and here the scale of the coach personality, as well as of the manager’s one, plays a dominant role.

In my work I go from the principles of humanistic education, organically combine various techniques and use the language which is agreed with the academic scientific psychology that allows me to communicate with representatives of all the business areas, and does not create terminological confusion among trainings participants.

As to my understanding, training technologies are conscious self-transformation tools; the center should always be on a particular person; and the person develops only through his or her personal inner effort, or as they say among the experts, spiritual endeavour. It should be noted also that the need for spiritual development is one of the strongest driving forces of a man. And sometimes when we talk about staff motivation, we forget about it and manipulate people - that fact on my opinion is not permissible.

And to mention another important point: psychological work intended for people development ends where the canon, templates and oversimplification begin. And incorrect understanding of the objectives and mechanisms of techniques, lack of a systematic approach to self-development are the main problems of the modern generation of practitioners.

Please, share with our readers, at least briefly, the results of your market research of business-training services: what are the pros and cons that you have found? What consequences they may have on life and business of the audience?

Boris Pakhol: Recently I have talked a lot with HR directors and noticed as an interesting trend that many managers do not involve internal trainers, that negates the activity of HR department. The formation of the corporate culture and the culture of employees’ self-development starts with the head of the company, which means that the top managers should be trained first.

Of course, the coach or HR specialist do not feel often the inner right to influence on and teach their board of directors without enough experience, authority, etc. In this case it is not hard to guess what are their functions and what consequences their activities can have.

HR department in such a harsh situation starts to search for other way outs: to solve minor issues with the help of staff rotation, changing the workspace or other manipulations, but it does not lead to major changes. I can tell you that such sense of constraint and inability to change anything in the company is recognizable enough.

Today in Ukraine not all the companies have grown yet to deliberate introduction of coaching. Some of the owners are still in line to grow spiritually for this.

Another common mistake of business coaches is the treating manipulative techniques as normal ones. In particular, I'm talking about sales trainings. You can speak a lot about the details. But the concept of so-called flogging or cold calling is to be left aside long time ago, but for some reason it still remains in minds. Customer complaints are obvious, and the negative psychological atmosphere and constant staff turnover will not allow the company to take a serious place in the business world.

Or you can refer to some recruiters that have decided for some reason that their duty is making an emotional stress for an applicant and started to organize the interview in the mode of interrogation. In this case it is almost impossible to reveal the potential of employee and moreover to create a friendly team of professionals. I am not talking now about the damaged image of the company. But we are happy to see that the number of such situations is decreasing.

Another important aspect that I would recommend to pay attention to for top management is training dedicated to developing a culture of thinking. It is not really popular among us to admit incorrect thinking and to let the boss know about it - and the amount of specialists who can teach a person to treat his or her own mind is little. Yet this area is poorly developed not only in the Russian-speaking world but in a wide range of Western business trainings, and its positive results are obvious.

In general, there is always room to grow.

A huge amount of trainings and business making theories came to us from the west. How Western practice can be implemented in our environment? Has Ukraine its own business tradition?

Boris Pakhol: It's no secret that most of the trainings, presented on today’s markets of Ukraine and Russia, are copies from the Western models. It is so that Russian-speaking countries lag behind in business development comparing to the western ones, first of all, because of ideological reasons.

This is clear as the main customers of business training in the west are mostly private companies, and in the Soviet Union business as such at a massive scale has never existed, and it was ideologically suppressed.

Actually with the development of both academic psychology and psychoanalysis the Western world began active implementation of psychological knowledge in the sphere of business relations. Just think of Dale Carnegie whom the USSR became aware of only in the 70s; Kurt Lewin, Werner Erhard, Alan Pease and the other founders of training technologies who were absorbing the achievements of academic psychology and some its branches, which were considered non-academic not so long time ago.

However social training in the broadest context has always been the adaptation of psycho-therapeutic techniques. If you examine the methods of Reich, Lowen, Berne, Adler, Perls and other founders of psychological schools, you can see the direct borrowing. Gradually the procedures that previously were applied only to mentally abnormal people started to be used for mentally sane ones.

In a sense, Westernism is nothing but a kind of an attempt to get the essential qualities; their lack started to become vivid after the transition of the Soviet Union to a market economy. Copying trends and forms of stable and successful companies was quite a simple and effective method.

And in the 2000s, such request has been satisfied. Step by step the Western companies implemented their own training standards, and local business was eager to learn, so it took over the basics. The children of businessmen studied in European universities and began an active introduction of new management principles.

Emerging demand for qualified specialists could not be satisfied that quickly due to high cost and long preparation of a good business manager. And the short-term courses proved useful. There training specialists, coaches, consultants and other training experts focused on the business sector were taught.

As a rule the method of coach training was focused on their fast preparation and it lead to a narrowing of their influence and responsibilities. For example, today we divide business education on coaching, psychotherapy, counseling and so on. This is quite understandable, because it is very difficult to prepare a real master for a year or two; it is hard to prepare the expert who will have wide outlook and vision on personal and corporate development issues.

At the best a former manager or business owner, having tough experience, began to study psychology and conducted workshops on their own. And during these sessions they learned from their mistakes, which usually has given them excellent results. However, this has not resolved the global demand for professional coaches.

During the last 10 years the uniformity of programs and the theoretical models behind some training technologies has led to a kind of stagnation. There are training standards leading to addiction and the development of protective mechanisms of the trainee staff. The customer company expects coach to comply with international standards, which unfortunately at the same time destroys individual approach, the impact of personality, creativity, killing completely the effectiveness of coaching.

But you can also see the reverse trends in some companies, especially large ones, that already have had enough standards, and now they request for a unique approach and innovative solutions. This can tell us about the pursuit of development and readiness to change as the essential principles of strong companies.

After all, how can one check the competence of coach? Where can one get the venerable experienced coaches at a moderate price? How can one be sure that the methods, using which his staff has being trained, are not worse than the neighbor’s ones?

Creativity of coaches should be compensated with trends of stabilization and development of standards, otherwise the process can destabilize business space and break mutual understanding. At the same time, the simplicity of psychological models, which are the base for standard trainings are not sufficient for self-development. And attempts to develop people in 1 or 2 days or at least a week, even using the most wonderful methods, are doomed to failure. People grow slowly. A personality of coach plays a key role in the training - and this is the main difficulty. For example, recently I have had the opportunity to chat with a strong coach, who admitted that the coaching certification program is too restricted, so she is continuously using the other psychological approaches. Only the many years’ managerial and coaching experience helps her in solving the complex problems of her clients.

In this regard coaching traditions in Ukraine do not exist. But there are specific persons who are beginning to organize the youth around themselves. So soon that could be change.

The issue with business traditions is quite complicated, especially taking into account the fact that the Soviet Union has broken up recently. It is still early to talk about the local traditions in this field. But there are many West-oriented companies with well-structured corporate culture. If we talk about the closest for a post-Soviet person type of corporate culture, we can say that actually the American model is the most easily adopted one.

However, tradition means unchanging principles of conducting business communications over several generations. We have got yet the first generation of businessmen, that just gives way to the next one. We shall see.

You are practicing as a business consultant and trainer for over 15 years and had worked with a few thousand people, therefore, I can say that some statistics you have certainly accumulated. Hence, the question arouse: what are the problems one should better appeal to you with? What is the reason of these problems on your opinion? What solutions do you see?

Boris Pakhol: A man expresses his personality in his activity. And this is the most important observation result. For instance, problems in business are always the reflection of the corresponding psychological, and those, in their turn, person’s spiritual problems. Anyway any difficulty, disease or conflict is a spiritual crisis of man, the result of his incorrect behaviour and requires careful consideration. And, above all, it should be the intention of the person.

One needs to teach people how to learn. You can’t go further without knowing the basics of psychology, having a deep understanding of the protective mechanisms of a mind, and operating skills of attentiveness and culture of thinking.

It is probably the most essential point I was actually referred to by people. While there, sometimes they come to me for inspiration, for new horizons, for a fundamentally different point of view, but it is usually for those who have already worked with me before. Well, there are enough primary reasons for people to develop spiritually in their life. Someone has business problems, someone is ill and someone can’t manage his or her private life. People seldom come consciously to me and ask me to teach them to think correctly.

It is crucial that a person comes with a request to really change something - this is important. And this power can start the process. But having started his education a person begins to meet new demands in future, but it is a question of methods.

What is a success, on your opinion?

Boris Pakhol: Success is when you have done something that you really wanted, and it was your true desire.

What qualities do you consider necessary for the successful modern man, and how would you advise to develop these qualities?

Boris Pakhol: I think that attentiveness and memory are necessary first of all for self-development. As attentiveness I mean sensitivity to different aspects: feelings, sensations, thoughts, environment, people around, words, actions, and so on. Without attentiveness no one can see the repeatability, and without memory the sense of spiritual work is lost.

These are the fundamental skills and there are numerous techniques for gaining them. For example, you can try to accurately record 10 seconds of your conversation with someone, literally, and then examine the record. Or you may think of all the people with whom you have communicated during the day: either from memory or write down every event in your entire day. Of course, these practices will not have any effect separately from the whole programme. As after a few such practices the adaptation begins and the body starts to resist. But in combination with other techniques, in a certain order, with keys to understanding, these practices give tremendous results, and skills they produce become the basis for any further spiritual work.

Boris, you have the education of musician, psychologist and lawyer - was it a search of your destination or a completely conscious purposeful development in incompatible spheres, so it seems to me? How does it help you?

Boris Pakhol: Since an early age I have being engaged in self-development and I have done the choice of my occupation consciously. It was made according to the principle: "It will be more difficult to master this activity in future." Music was a difficult language, and I had originally no predisposition towards it. I was earless and with no rhythm sense, I could not sing anything or just rattle a rhythmic pattern. But persistence and strong desire to develop my musical abilities have brought results.

Psychology is what I was totally into at the age of eleven, and special education seemed so interesting to me - more than obligatory. And law school is a necessity of our lives nowadays. A person needs to understand the law - at that time I was seriously engaged in the business and legal literacy was vital for me.

In fact, I have also other types of education, I develop continuously.

Such diversity allows me to communicate freely in numerous areas, to understand the issues and nuances of different people attitude. And skills that I have received can be often applied to my main occupation.

What style of management is closer to you as to HR-specialist and why?

Boris Pakhol: I am very impressed with the modern European style of management, based on humanistic views. When commercial profit of organization is aligned with the highest humanistic principles and is secondary to these values. And the company pays the same attention to various aspects of human relationships: financial, interpersonal, social and of self-development. When behind the social role they see a man with his internal diversity, desires and potential.

What personal qualities of a leader and corporate values ​​are the basis of successful company and how these qualities / values are associated with success?

Boris Pakhol: When we speak of a growing company, we can not help but appeal to the humanistic ideas, projecting the human image to a company. The company is not the one who actually develops, it's a metaphor. People are the ones - they develop. The rules of people communication development are becoming more complicated and transmitted to the next generation with the principle of the constant search for and introduction of new rules.

In this sense, the success of the company is a result of correct decisions of its administration on internal and external communications. Under conditions of constant change it involves the continuous development of all staff. For example, a P&G company. When I have acquainted with the internal rules of the company more deeply and had a conversation with the top management, I was amazed by the extent to which they focus on the development of all the employees with no exceptions. I have seen that the idea of ​​self-development and non-direct mentoring policy runs through the company from top to bottom. Of course, it has some limitations, for example, some of the topics in the company are ignored due to their tabooing in society, but the idea is great. And it implies for a company the possibility of change along with the society. Moreover, the founders of the company are likely to be very surprised at how the company has changed in hundred of years. Management changes, the principles remain. Probably, this is one of the most remarkable examples.

Political and economic crisis in Ukraine - they characterize the situation in the country today in these words. How would you describe the current situation? How is it connected to HR potential of managers in business and politics?

Boris Pakhol: When we talk about personnel potential, we should remember that these are actually real people with their inherent human problems. I think that the level of development of the people in power is correlated with the average level of education and development of the country's population which they manage. So it is necessary not to change the authorities but to start self-education, as for that we have already had the base created.

If the general cultural level of the country rises, the people in government will also change. But taking into account the strong inertia of Ukrainian society and criticality towards any new ideas, this process will last longer than for other cultural types.

Recently, I was informed that according to statistics, about 80% of Ukrainians have never traveled outside of the area in which they live. What's this? Is it a lack of interest? Or may it be a specific feature of our character? This is a rhetorical question, in any case, until that inertia is very high.

It is no wonder that we go for the second and third round of the same problems such a nationalism in its worst, as it still exists in the minds of people. More precisely, these people are easy to catch with it, as it is important for them, emotionally important. It is the effect in its turn of lack of education in the matters of culture, history of political science, psychology and simple lack of a culture of thinking.

History should not be forgotten if we do not want it to be repeated. Memory and attention, as you remember, are so important for a particular individual as for large groups of people. And as Leonid Kravchuk said: “One needs to read more scientific literature.’’

How would I describe the events that are happening now in the country? Perhaps I would name the situation as the crisis, spiritual crisis of specific individuals in power. At present they have psychological difficulties: there is a need to formulate new goals, to change casual emotional roles, to think over the previous experience, to apologize for some mis-communications, to understand some situations and pay for some mistakes. And these are not easy decisions. But while they have a crisis, the whole country is frustrated. In a sense it is managerial crisis. A number of previous events, highlighted in the media led to the accumulation of a large number of claims, both external and internal, and they are needed to be addressed. Specific methods of resolving will be chosen, whether the top managers of the state will pass their spiritual crisis in a harmonic way, whether they will make right conclusions.

Can you describe the global trends in corporate management you see now, and how they will change? What aspects of the development should the modern manager focus on? What is primarily important for top manager in Ukraine?

Boris Pakhol: For now it is very important to learn listening attentively and thinking correctly. I do not even say about the charisma, precise understanding of the company's goals, skills of influencing people, empathy - it's obvious. And one more remark for Ukrainian top management: the HR specialist or coach, whom your have hired, is an expert in the managerial psychology, and it is advisable to listen to him or her, as you have hired this professional specifically for performing this function. Otherwise you will have a management crisis. In any case, it is the most common problem. Ideally, a top manager should also have high expertise in psychology of interpersonal relations.

Nowadays, when the computer programs are replacing humans more and more, corporations are trying to automate the production and minimize the impact of the so-called "human factor", will the famous saying "Cadres are all-important" become actual and in what context will it be applicable?

Boris Pakhol: People, the team are the base of corporatism. The concept of bureaucratic technocracy is good in static society, when the well-built process may be reproduced without change for a long time. However, this utopia has already led to a crisis in the Soviet Union, the so-called “stagnation”. Need for development is one of the strongest driving forces of a man: society is constantly changing, new needs and desires are emerging, the social structure is becoming more complicated.

Positive aspects of automation and cybernetization result in the appearance of high technologies to liberate a man from routine work, leaving room for creativity.

Having regard to the fundamental impossibility to make the algorithm of creative process, people will still be the most important source of social relations and their participant at the same time.

And here are a couple of questions about the trainings. "Visual psychodiagnosis" - what is it? How and where can it be applied?

Boris Pakhol: In short, the visual psychodiagnosis is the art of determining the current emotional state and psychological characteristics of a person on the basis of his or her gestures, posture and body alignment.

Speaking of visual psychodiagnosis we always mention Paul Ekman and the popular TV series "Lie to Me" based on his academic work. In these series the main character easily defines the truthfulness of people’s statements by their facial expressions and gestures. Of course, it is beautifully filmed, but we should not forget that it is shown as a simplification for non-professionals.

Interpretation of what you have seen is a very complicated process that depends on many factors. We must remember that human emotional reactions, manifested in facial expressions and gestures, are always conditioned by the context. We need to consider not only the facial expressions but also text, environment, feel the emotions as well as the attitude of a person and so on. All these, of course, requires from a master not only the ability for surveillance of gestures, but also a complex theoretical background, empathy skills, culture of thinking and even more.

Visual psychodiagnosis is an art and one needs a special training in it under expert guidance.

The attempts to determine the psychological parameters of a person, based on his or her appearance, were made in different cultures for centuries. For example, you can remember Alan Pease and his famous book "Body Language", or various types of body and character from the works of Petlenko and Chernorutskiy, and even Ayurvedic typology of doshas. And in spite of the fact that the interpretations, made ​​on the basis of these observations, are significantly outdated, and theoretical part is good only for the history, the very fact that people have noticed the connection of physical manifestations and the psyche gives us, modern people, the limitless possibilities in the exploring ourselves and people around.

Talking about the applicability of this art is not necessary. At least it's just fun. Understanding the motives of a person, his or her current emotional state, the most probable forms of response and vulnerabilities - all these give us significant advantages in communication, making it more efficient. These skills are indispensable for HR professionals and senior managers.

Boris, you have never rest on laurels, always looking for new ways of personal development, please share with us what else do you want to study? What other areas of life and science are you interested in?

Boris Pakhol: I am very interested in issues related to scientific philosophy and history of religious ideas, as well as in the exact sciences, because of the fact that I'm a humanitarian. The application of these disciplines in coaching, in principle, is possible but it requires special training for the trainees and is relevant for politicians and public figures, and therefore goes beyond the scope of business training in pure form.

Thank you!