Without understanding the human characteristics of a business owner, it is impossible to make a career in an organization, nor to understand its corporate culture. So, if you are a real HR director, a serious consultant or a top manager working in “author’s company” with an active business owner, no depth of understanding should scare you. But what are “human depths”? I like the model of a person compared to the globe. Business owner as a globe To simplify, the globe consists of three parts. There is a hard crust on the surface. For a person, this is habitual behavior, actions, actions and words. In one they are frank and clear (the earth’s crust rises in the form of bare rocks), in the other you cannot immediately distinguish them under the “forest thickets”, or even under the “deep ocean”. Under the firmament of the earth’s crust there is a viscous magma of emotions and feelings. When the earth's crust cannot withstand the pressure of the magma of emotions, it breaks, and lava bursts out - behavior becomes unpredictable. And, finally, the solid metal core symbolizes the true essence of a person, his root values, beliefs, beliefs, attitudes and prejudices - that is true, which can only be approached through the development of deep awareness. The core contains values, basic attitudes, options for answering the givens and challenges of human life, its existential questions. The Earth also has a magnetic field - an ephemeral layer that protects all life on Earth from hard cosmic radiation.... In humans, this is possible call it “aura”, “energy”, but I am closer to the concept of a personal brand - the image of a person in the heads of others, helping them make decisions on how to act towards him in situations of choice. I have not yet seen a business owner, or even just a person capable appear equally effectively on all four levels. Personal brand of a business owner There are usually a lot of stories about a business owner who manifests himself at the level of a magnetic field - a personal brand: both about how he pardoned someone, and about how he got angry over something, and how he deftly and beautifully dealt with a difficult situation. Employees have an established image of the owner of the business and they try to adapt to it. They know that in such a situation they will yell, in another they will be happy, and so on... Then they try to create situations that are favorable for themselves and avoid undesirable ones. At the stimulus-response level, his behavior is absolutely understandable for employees. They know well what emotional states he sometimes falls into, and, accordingly, when to approach him with what question, and when it’s better not to catch his eye. He speaks more in slogans or short sermons, the content of which he learned from popular business - books or from training in courses and business schools (and most often for some reason in Skolkovo). He pours out ideas, demands their immediate implementation and, if there are resources, does not spare money to implement them, but does not believe how adequate they are for the current state of the organization, and (therefore?) ideas do not have time to be implemented, but he quickly generates new ones.O For such business owners, word spreads around the market - various stories are passed from mouth to mouth about their manifestation of will, creativity or tyranny. Most often, these are internally very lonely human beings, unable to build full-fledged relationships with others, but trying to actively use them. The charisma of such business owners is as fascinating as it is frightening. Behavior of a business owner At the level of the cortex - behavior - the business owner is focused only on measurable results. He speaks exclusively in a “business” way - nothing personal. The business owner requires only objective results, is interested only in profit and other objective indicators, trying to build the most dry business relationships with the top. Nothing personal, just business. Of course, in the long term, in conditions of constant changes in the external environment, in the market, in its purest formimpossible to achieve - “people, unfortunately, are alive.” Employees try to maintain “objectivity” only in the eyes of the business owner, and at the level of communication with each other, “magma of emotions” boils. Of all the indicators of the organization’s success, only financial and clearly verified KPIs are recognized. Constantly calls for prudence and restraint of emotions. Which he usually doesn't do very well himself. Subordinates master the skills of chicanery and sophistry - in order to convince the business owner of something, you need to build those tours on wheels. Emotions of the business owner At the level of magma - emotions, the business owner pays a lot of attention to relationships in the team, the appropriateness or inappropriateness of certain steps from a human point of view . He no longer thinks about achieving specific results (like the one that manifests itself at the cortex level), but about how to develop existing employees to the “right level” and where to find “real employees.” True, he usually cannot formulate requirements for “real” ones, since he no longer focuses on objective indicators, but on his own feelings. At the magma level, when communicating with the business owner, employees are especially sensitive to the form of expressing their thoughts and providing the business owner with information, calculating and taking into account in each situation his interests and the interests of other key people - coordinating these interests to maintain an even emotional background and, conversely, infringing them to provoke programmed emotional reactions. Subordinates play “politics”, spending a lot of time thinking not about what to say or do, but how to present what to whom and in what form. The essence of a business owner And, finally, a rarely encountered version of a business owner who lives at the core level - - essence, values. In the adaptive version, this is a person who was able to verbalize the results of his essential searches in the form of a system of principles (for example, based on some religious teaching) and encourages employees to implement them in business. Employees have no choice but to follow them - with joy or voluntarily-compulsorily. In a non-adaptive case, the business owner rushes about, trying to cope within himself with the eternal terrifying givens of existential loneliness - trust, freedom - responsibility, the inevitability of death and the meaninglessness of life (about these givens in the next article). Employees sincerely do not understand it, but as a given (pardon the pun) they accept the need to participate in general meetings, which slide into discussion of completely incomprehensible business-related issues. I have not seen full interaction between employees and the business owner at the “core” level within the company - I have achieved him only as an external coach. Inside the company, I think it is impossible, since, due to inclusion in the organizational structure - powers, responsibility and incentives, you can easily fly to the levels of magma, crust, and, in extreme cases, the magnetic field. What should a top manager do, in particular HR director, with the business owner, manifesting himself mainly at the level of the magnetic field. At the level of the magnetic field, the business owner is interested in what impression his company and each individual employee creates about himself, what the corporate culture is in the company. After all, corporate culture is “the average magnetic field of an organization’s employees.” How and to what extent does each employee fit into the corporate culture? For such a business owner, the formation of an appropriate “magnetic field” of the entire organization - corporate culture - becomes a key task for the HR director. Well, any top manager must first of all take care of the impression that he and his employees make. What should a top manager, in particular a HR director, do with the owner of a business, which manifests itself mainly at the level of the cortex? The cortex refers to the employee’s behavior, what he does and says the objective results he achieves. Managing the cortex seems easy - through KPIs,balanced scorecards... And in all organizations, employees are required to demonstrate a certain core of achieving results, adhering to a code of conduct, fulfilling KPIs... At the level of line personnel, for example, consultants on the sales floor, this can be limited to. In some international companies, they are trying to brush higher-level employees with the same brush. The trouble with top managers, and especially HR directors who grew up in companies of business owners, manifests itself mostly at the level of the cortex (or in public companies that like to concentrate on the bark), is that when, as carriers of the desired technologies, they find themselves in private Russian companies, they do not always understand that for a successful career in a new place, in a company with an active owner, they need to go deeper into the magma of unstructured emotions and sensations ...What should a top manager, in particular a HR director, do with a business owner who manifests himself mainly at the magma level? For a business owner, a business is more than a business. This is his life. The “nothing personal” principle doesn’t work here. And without including emotional intelligence, a top manager in any company has nothing to do with an active business owner, and especially with a business owner manifesting at the magma level. You need to be able to read between the lines, to care not only about what you say and do, but also how and with whom. -- Be aware of your emotions and manage them. Recognize and manage the emotions and feelings of others. Calculate and predict your impact on others. How much and who needs to work at the magma level, of course, also depends on competence at the crustal level. For example, the head of one business area always cuts the truth, defending his opinion, without looking at credentials and personalities. No social intelligence! But this is forgiven for him, since his business indicators exceed the expectations of the business owner. Or it happens that a HR director comes from an international company and begins to “introduce innovation” or “build a team,” as she learned at her previous job. The result is only greater closeness and disunity among the old employees and a reputation as a “mass entertainer.” Why? Yes, she reacts only to direct statements and obvious actions, but does not go into the magma, does not clarify what intricacies of emotions and human relationships lie behind words that, at first glance, are familiar to her. And the head of one service department is not always able to cope with his aggressive “volcanic eruptions”, inappropriate actions in business interactions and is aware of this (including the inability to cope), but the business owner is in good standing, since at the crustal level he is the only one who demonstrates the desired focus on business development. Plus, he sees well the weaknesses of others at the magma level, which is extremely important for a business owner interested in developing people in an organization. There are few ideal people who act equally well even at both the crust and magma levels. But there are business owners who want more - the core level. What should a top manager, in particular the HR director, do with a business owner who manifests himself mainly at the core level? What is working with people at the core level of personality? – Constant awareness, comprehension, reflection, search for one’s own and others’ selves, the “true self”, revision of one’s values... This process, of course, is endless. Why are people immersed in this level of personality needed in an organization? The fact is that they are in constant search. These are people who go beyond the boundaries of the “tangible”, striving for the “transcendental”, seeing the possibilities of “blue oceans”, capable of a business breakthrough. What could be the ambush? A person who is concentrated only on the core of the personality, but is not friends with either its magma or the cortex, is at least a schizoid, if not a schizophrenic. – Excessive immersion in the core most often leads to an inability to communicate clearly with others. His “breakthrough ideas” will be pretentious,.