Organizations have to deal with myriad factors that contribute to and affect their performance. Nowadays, they are realizing that, of all these factors, the human element is clearly the most critical, precisely because it is at once the most important – a company is only as strong as its weakest employee – the most volatile and the least predictable of all the things that companies must concern themselves with on a daily basis. It is impossible, after all, to reduce human beings to mere numbers on sheets of paper or in a computer program – or, moreover, expect them to react the same way every time to stimuli. This means, therefore, that in order to make a company work, everyone within it must learn how to deal with people. And this is no mean feat at all, as many a manager or human resources practitioner has learned the hard way.
Managing people is all about working on the human element and synchronizing these human factors with an organization’s overall strategy so as to give said organization a competitive edge. So by definition, knowing how to manage people is more than just an HR-specific role.
Knowing how to deal with people is so vital that, despite the fact that this area is traditionally that of the human resources department (and of course many specialized facets of ‘dealing with people’ still do remain under the ambit of human resources), there is still a pressing need for people in a company to learn how to deal better with people. Most especially managers, who deal with their staff first and foremost and as such must strive to learn the basics of HR.
Books like Y.C. Halan’s Managing People provide their readers with necessary basic information regarding the various facets of people management. Think of them as HR manuals for non-HR specialists.