It
was the habit in some rural areas of old Egypt that a groom
before his wedding
night would hide a cat in his room. On the
wedding night, when
alone with his wife, he would move a chair
slightly to so as to
free the cat. He would then demonstrate his
might to his wife by
getting hold of the poor cat and strangling it
to death! Why? So
that the first impression of him imprinted in
the mind of his wife
would be one of awe!
A group of officers once
travelled to attend a
training program on
interpersonal skills in the work environment.
On the first day, they
arrived early to the classroom and
began chatting in order to
get to know one other. Suddenly, the
instructor walked in and
they fell silent. The instructor’s eyes fell
upon a student who was
still smiling.
“Why
are you laughing?” He screamed.
The student replied:
“I’m sorry, I wasn’t laughing.”
“You were!” screamed
the instructor, and chastised him further,
saying, “You are not
a serious student! You should return
to your family on
the next available flight! I cannot teach your
likes!”
The
poor student felt embarrassed and gazed at the instructor
and
then at his colleagues in confusion. The instructor then
frowned
at him, pointed to the exit and said, “Get out!”
The
student got up frightened and left the room. The instructor
looked
at the rest of the students and said, “I am Dr. So-andso.
I will be teaching
you such-and-such a subject. But before I
begin, I would like
you to fill in a questionnaire without writing
your names on them.”
He then distributed the questionnaires
to the students. The
questionnaire was about the instructor’s
performance and had
five questions:
1.
How do you find your teacher?
2.
How do you find his teaching?
3.
Does your teacher allow opposing views to be aired?
4.
Would you like to be taught by him again?
5.
Would you like to meet him outside the institution?
Every question had
multiple choices; Excellent, good, fair,
poor. The students
filled in the questionnaire and returned it to
the instructor. The
instructor began his lecture on interpersonal
skills in an office
environment, and in the middle of the lecture he
said, “Oh! Why
should we deprive your colleague of this lesson?”
He went out of the
classroom, shook the hand of the ejected
student with a
smile, and brought him back in.
He
then said, “I think I lashed out at you a little while ago
without
any particular reason. I am having some personal problems
due
to which I behave quite erratically at times, so I beg
your
pardon. You are, after all, a committed student, and the
proof
of that is the fact that you left behind your wife and children
to
come all the way here. I would like to thank you, in fact
all
of you, for your commitment. I am very honoured to be your
instructor.”
He was, thereafter,
very light-hearted with his students.
He then picked up
more copies of the questionnaire and
said, “Since your
colleague didn’t get the chance to fill in the
questionnaire, how
about if you all were to fill it in again?” He
handed out the
questionnaire and they filled them all in and returned
them to the
instructor. He then took the previous questionnaires
and the new ones and
began to compare between the
two, to discover
that the ‘poor’ boxes in first set of questionnaires
were all checked,
while the second set of questionnaires
did not have a
single check against ‘poor’, or even ‘fair’.
The
instructor laughed and said, “What you just witnessed
was
a demonstration of the ill effects of the lack of interpersonal
skills
in the work environment. What I did to your colleague
was
an example of this which I wished to demonstrate to you
all.
Note how your views of me changed as I changed the way I
dealt
with you!”
This is all part of
human nature, and hence, one must take
this into
consideration, especially with those he meets for the
first time.
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