The Counselling Approach

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The Counselling Approach
Counselling Skills
MTL Course Topics
COUNSELLING SKILLS

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Counselling Skills
MTL Course Topics
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Counselling Skills
MTL Course Topics
ARE YOU READY?
OK, LET’S START!

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Counselling Skills
MTL Course Topics
INTRODUCTION
In the last few years, counselling has become something of a
growth industry. It seems that no major life event, whether
joyous or traumatic, can take place without being
accompanied by an offer of counselling. This growth has
extended to the workplace. Here effective managers have
adopted the very best of counselling skills and adapted
them to improve face-to-face communications with their
staff. The result is not strictly counselling in the professional
sense but a way of managing people that we can call "the
counselling approach".

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Counselling Skills
MTL Course Topics
DEFINITIONS OF COUNSELLING
The following are 3 definitions of Counselling:
"Counselling is one of the means of identifying, recognising
and overcoming the blocks to self-awareness, wholeness
and spontaneity.“
Workplace counselling is any activity where one individual
uses a set of techniques or skills to help another individual
take responsibility for and manage their own decision-taking
whether it is work-related or personal. (IPD Statement on
"Counselling at work")
The task of counselling is to give the client (employee) an
opportunity to explore, discover and clarify ways of living
more resourcefully and towards greater well-being. (British
Association of Counselling)

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Counselling Skills
MTL Course Topics
PROBLEMS AT WORK
There are three main reasons why the workplace itself may
give rise to the need to counsel employees.
1. Organisations themselves may advocate the use of a
counselling approach when managers deal with people
problems. Examples include counselling as the first
stage in discipline and counselling for career
development.
2. Organisations themselves may create people problems.
Many psychologists actually regard the demands of the
organisation for order and stability as being directly
counter to the individual's needs for freedom and self-
expression. In many cases the outcome is tension and
stress.
3. Organisations where people are forcibly thrown
together create inevitable tensions between people of
different personalities.

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Counselling Skills
MTL Course Topics
PROBLEMS OUTSIDE WORK
Individual employees can never totally divorce their private
lives and private personalities from their work lives. Often,
home life spills over into working life in a dramatic way: the
trauma of a divorce, the distractions of a romance, death
and illness in the family. When work is affected, these issues
need to be resolved by management action. Counselling is
one of the means of dealing with them.
Occasionally, employees will approach managers to help
them with difficult problems at home, even though work
itself is not directly or immediately affected.
Turning to the manager for help has in some ways become
the modern-day equivalent of turning to a respected elder
in the past, perhaps a figure in the community such as a
priest or doctor, or a wiser member of the family.

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Counselling Skills
MTL Course Topics
ARE WE TALKING?
Research shows that while most managers believe that
interpersonal skills, listening and communication are vital
skills for the 21st century, many managers still find it difficult
to achieve success in these areas. What's more, employees
don't rate their success either.
In a wide-ranging survey conducted by the Department of
Trade and Industry and the Workplace Employee Relations
Survey, 40% of people rate their managers as poor at
communicating, compared to 30% of people who rate them
as good.
Some comments from employees:
Although my boss says that I could approach him at any
time, he always gives the impression of being too busy.
When you approach my boss, she has an ever-so-nice way
of telling you to go away. It's very dispiriting after a while.

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Counselling Skills
MTL Course Topics
PEOPLE MAINTENANCE
One definition of a manager is that he or she is responsible
for resources and for adding value to those resources. The
chief resource a manager has is the people he or she is
responsible for. They are usually the most costly. Like any
other resource, such as a machine, an office or a piece of
land, people are best managed when they are looked after,
carefully handled and properly maintained.
There are five main options in dealing with people
maintenance problems:
1. ignoring them because they are nothing to do with the
job
2. telling people what to do to sort themselves out
3. advising people on how they should sort themselves
out
4. manipulating people towards our preferred solutions
5. using the skills, techniques and assumptions of the
counselling approach.

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Counselling Skills
MTL Course Topics
IGNORING THEM
Some managers do not feel comfortable handling people
problems and choose to ignore them. Although they may
recognise that an employee operates at below par because
of a personal problem, they convince themselves that it has
nothing to do with them.
Such managers...
1. don't believe people should bring their home or
personal problems into the workplace
2. see the work person and non-work person as separate
3. don't believe the workplace is a place for emotions
4. are themselves embarrassed to get close to people
5. lack the skills to handle people problems
6. have no time, place or resources to help others
7. fear where things might lead to if they get involved.
Ignoring people problems solves nothing and may make the
problem much worse

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Counselling Skills
MTL Course Topics
TELLING THEM
The "telling" approach to people management is still
practised by many managers who believe in the traditional
way of dealing with people problems.
This approach to managing others is based on a military
model and makes the following assumptions:
1. people are basically lazy, feckless and unable to work
things out for themselves
2. people do not have enough self-control to discipline
themselves and therefore need others to keep them in
line
3. people have problems because they are weak,
ineffectual and lack moral fibre
4. people do not know how to deal with their problems
either in or out of work, but management do.
Many of the above assumptions are based on absurd
perceptions about others that are not applied to ourselves.

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Counselling Skills
MTL Course Topics
MANIPULATING THEM
When a manager manipulates others, he or she undertakes
to help them but leads them to an outcome that has already
been decided. In a manipulative helping relationship...
1. the manager resolves every problem with people in the
same way, eg by sending them to a counsellor
2. the manager gets people to solve their problems by
doing what he, the manager, wants
3. the manager enjoys letting people reveal their
vulnerability as a way of re-confirming his or her power
4. the manager fools himself into believing he is helping
the person even though it is help on his or her terms.
A manipulative helping relationship is only different from a
"telling" one in terms of its more subtle approach. It is
however likely to be just as ineffective.

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Counselling Skills
MTL Course Topics
ADVISING THEM
When confronted by people problems, many managers opt
for the advising, or Agony Aunt, approach. This is the
approach used on personal advice pages of magazines.
The Agony Aunt approach can have a number of benefits.
When the manager genuinely knows what is best for the
employee, he or she can give useful advice about what the
employee should do. The manager may also offer
alternatives that the employee hadn't thought of.
The Agony Aunt approach also has some serious drawbacks.
It assumes that the manager has the answers to the
employee's problem which may not be the case. It assumes
that the employee can't work things out for themselves. The
Agony Aunt approach has the flavour of "tea and
sympathy"; its answers are invariably along the lines of:
"Now this is what you should do, love."

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Counselling Skills
MTL Course Topics
A COUNSELLING APPROACH
Since very few managers are either trained counsellors or
carry out counselling full-time, the approach they use when
counselling is best described as "the counselling approach".
This means making use of the principles, assumptions, skills
and techniques of counselling proper.
These include:
1. seeing the manager-employee relationship as a helping
one
2. believing that people want to do their best at work
3. using interpersonal skills such as listening, supporting
and understanding to help employees help themselves.
Using the counselling approach is by far the best way to deal
with people problems. It calls on skills which managers
already use, such as communicating and interviewing and it
reduces the burden managers have for people problems by
giving them back to their employees.

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Counselling Skills
MTL Course Topics
BENEFITS
The counselling approach to people problems has a number
of advantages over alternative approaches such as advising,
telling and manipulating.
1. it recognises that each person's problem is unique and
needs to be dealt with as a personal problem
2. it seeks to uncover the roots of a problem
3. the counselling approach allows the person to discover
lasting solutions
4. counselling is a person-centred approach to
management and thus places the onus on employees to
work towards their own solutions
5. the manager is freed from getting overwhelmed by
crises which he or she cannot and should not handle
6. counselling is a modern way of dealing with people
problems in line with other techniques such as active
listening and facilitating.

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Counselling Skills
MTL Course Topics
THE SYMPATHETIC EAR
In research carried out in New York in 1981, line supervisors
in a range of businesses were found to carry out counselling
of one sort or another.
It found that...
1. the average team leader spent 7% of their working
time, ie up to about 3 hours a week, dealing with
problems brought to them by members of the team
2. the most difficult problems were those concerned with
money and relationships
3. the most common counselling technique was "the
sympathetic ear"; team leaders encouraged staff to
work out their own solutions
4. most of the team leaders thought it was part of their
job to help out if they could
5. most of the team leaders were happy to have been
approached and felt that being able to listen helped the
team to work better.

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Counselling Skills
MTL Course Topics
THE CASE AGAINST
Many people deplore what they see as "the counselling
culture" in our society and increasingly in our workplaces.
They argue that counselling, like therapy, encourages people
to believe they have problems where none exist and that a
counselling relationship offers no real or permanent
solutions to deep-rooted problems.
They further argue that counselling encourages people to...
1. become dependent on others
2. believe they can avoid difficult confrontations with
management by pleading helplessness
3. talk about their problems instead of sorting them out
4. blame others for their own failings
5. avoid responsibility
6. expect others to help them.

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Counselling Skills
MTL Course Topics
THE CASE IN FAVOUR
Counselling as a management skill is of fairly recent origin. It
has its roots in the successful use of people-centred therapy
skills such as those practised by Carl Rogers in America. Its
most widespread use in the workplace is as an alternative to
discipline.
Counselling works because:
1. it seeks to solve people problems by helping and
supporting not controlling or dictating
2. it clears the air when there are problems
3. it uses a well-founded set of principles based on
counselling proper
4. it avoids unhealthy confrontation between people
5. it is a skill for our times, being in line with other people-
centred approaches to management such as facilitation
6. it offers a framework within which managers can deal
with troublesome issues for which there are no easy
answers.

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Counselling Skills
MTL Course Topics
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
Emotional Intelligence is a relatively new concept in people
management. It means being aware of the role which
emotions play in the way people work and using this
knowledge to improve the way they are managed.
1. Effective teamwork depends on whether the people in a
team like each other
2. Effective leadership depends on igniting positive
feelings in people, such as enthusiasm, passion and
commitment
3. Negative emotions such as jealousy and fear are as
much a part of relationships at work as they are outside
of work
4. Big decisions are taken with the heart not with the head
5. Motivation depends more on how we feel than on what
we get.
"The heart has its reasons which the reason doesn't have."
(Blaise Pascal)

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Counselling Skills
MTL Course Topics
PRINCIPLES
The counselling approach to people problems has five key
principles.
These are:
1. when people at work have a problem the organisation
also has a problem
2. the counselling approach is the best way to get to the
root of a difficult problem concerning people
3. the nature of the problem and its solution are best
approached through discussion
4. the problem's solution is ultimately the employee's
solution
5. the manager is there to help the process and his or her
role is that of facilitator.
"All people at work may need some form of counselling at
some time in their working lives." (IPD statement on
Counselling at Work)

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Counselling Skills
MTL Course Topics
HELPING MANAGEMENT
For most of the 20th century, managing people was founded
on the assumptions of the organisational models of the
Industrial Revolution. These in turn were based on a
militaristic view of people that saw some people as officers
and the rest as soldiers. The watchwords of this style were
order, discipline and control.
While this approach undoubtedly led to huge strides in
industrial progress, it did not change the way people felt
about their own role in the workplace. Until recently, and in
some places still, people were able to describe the way they
were managed as "feudal": them and us.
As the Industrial Age disappears, so are many of the old
assumptions. In a rapidly-changing world, people no longer
want to be "told and controlled". They want to be helped to
manage themselves.

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Counselling Skills
MTL Course Topics
CARL ROGERS’ LEARNINGS
Carl Rogers is widely regarded as the father of person-
centered counselling. In his book "On Becoming a Person",
Rogers describes seven "learnings" underlying his approach.
These are:
1. People have a basically positive direction.
2. In my relationship with others, it does not help if I act as if
I were something that I am not.
3. I am more effective when I can be myself.
4. We cannot move away from where we are, until we
thoroughly accept what we are.
5. I have found it of enormous value when I permit myself to
understand another person.
6. I have found it enriching to open channels whereby
others can communicate to me.
7. The more I am open to the realities in me and others, the
less do I find myself wishing to rush in and fix things.

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Counselling Skills
MTL Course Topics
A CASE FOR TREATMENT?
The likelihood of success a manager might have in using the
counselling approach is not solely down to his or her
counselling skills. Some people make better candidates for
counselling than others.
The most suitable are those who...
1. have short-term, recent problems with clear reasons for
the problem
2. can express themselves and talk about their feelings
3. take personal responsibility for the nature of the
problem and its solution
4. are independent enough to cope
5. can relate to helpers
6. are committed to the workplace.
Such people are likely to be found in organisations which
invest in the development of their people and incorporate
counselling into the way they manage.

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Counselling Skills
MTL Course Topics
THAT’S
IT!
WELL DONE!

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Counselling Skills
MTL Course Topics
THANK YOU
This has been a Slide Topic from Manage Train Learn

The Counselling Approach

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