How Being A People-Person Help Me Become More Humane
“No matter how advanced the technology is, we still need human touch & feelings even in a daily work environment.”
Switching a career from an auditor to an HR practitioner, especially in Internal Engagement had changed my perspective a lot. This includes the mindset of how to become more empathetic, how to become more humane.
For you who haven’t touched or met an auditor, let me tell you a short story. The main objective from an auditor is to provide opinion from financial report. But to be fair, providing this report isn’t as simple as it sounds. The process along the way was really challenging for me personally. With an “annoying” stigma as an auditor, our client could be so uncooperative sometimes. Thus, I should position myself in the client’s condition. How can I be more empathetic to them, so they can trust me as an expert consultant, not just a person who annoyed them to request a lot of data.
Long story short, I was so lucky that I can get the opportunity to join my first project to revamp the onboarding program to new employees in my previous company. In this project, I have a role to create onboarding training material and (of course) also to be a trainer which gives me new experiences such as creating training material, public speaking, and how to be agile in your daily job. Later I realized that I seem to enjoy communicating and developing people. I know managing people is not as easy as we think, but well… it’s better to do something that we enjoyed so much, right?
If you have the same characteristics as me, I would like to share with you why being a people-person can actually change my perspective in life.
What is a people-person?
Before we talk deeper, I want to share my thoughts about what is a people person? The dictionary defines it as an outgoing, gregarious person with good communication skills. Well, it’s true, but it is beyond just that. Being a people person means that you are someone that has a strong connection or empathy to other people. Because for me, having excellent communication skills without a strong empathy is useless. Without empathy, you will never have the right acts or solutions if you don’t understand what people actually feel.
How does being a people-person change my perspective?
Working inside the internal engagement team means that you have full responsibilities to make employees feel engaged to the company. Why is it important? Being an HR means you should support all the employees to make them feel comfortable and happy, to help them unleash their potential and boost their productivity and engagement with the company. What is the secret? Listen to them, what are their concerns or ideas, not just hear but actively listen. Focus, so you can understand them better.
I know that I cannot please everybody at the same time. Hence, analyzing what decision has the most impactful benefits to employees is important. Well, actually there’s nothing wrong if you’re not a people-person. I know not all people can be a people-person, but that cannot be used as an excuse. Here are the things I learned that might be beneficial for you, too, to help you understand your co-workers better.
Embrace everyone’s uniqueness
I believe everyone is unique, whether it’s their character, background, culture, behavior, etc. Everyone also has their own strengths and weaknesses. You can not force other people to act or think the same way as you, and vice versa. What you need is to set a higher bar about tolerance and embrace all diversities within your colleagues, it could be your workmates or your families (literally everyone!). In other words, put a highlight to their strengths. Imagine that your team only consists of “conceptor” people, we can not make it happen to execute something, or if your team only consists of introverted people, maybe you find difficulties in how to interact with many people. More diverse, more perspectives, more empathy you are.
Put yourself in other shoes
Since my team has the responsibility (or even I often say it “privilege”) to make any kind of events or campaigns to increase employee engagement, we must position ourselves in others points of view. We can learn what is actually needed, what things make them happy, what makes them discouraged. We take this as a baseline for us to create events or campaigns that are right on the target. So, please listen actively. Feedback always matters. As simple as positioning yourself in target participants, do you want to attend that kind of event, or will you be happy with initiatives like that, or it will drain your energy?
Grow together
Along with my career journey to be a leader in Moka, I gain a lot of knowledge and experience to think that it’s not just about me, but also my team. Not only about work decisions, but also their self-development, how can I help them grow personally. I learned that a leader’s role is to create a new leader, even a better leader than yourself. To be a successful leader, grow together with them. It’s not easy to be a leader, sometimes I should push away my ego and let my team give their extra miles. In my personal experience, there’s nothing happier than you see your team get a good performance assessment score and positive feedback from others.
Be impactful!
For me, life will be more meaningful if we can create a positive impact on others. Either with your actions, or with your words, everything matters. Help others as much as you can. I believe each of us can spread positivity and create a positive work environment, physically and mentally. For example, to start small I always share inspiring articles, news, or videos to my team, then I try to always share my lessons learned or experiences before, lately it becomes a habit for us to always share and inspire each other. If anyone could do the same, imagine how wonderful this world is :)
Being a people person can actually help me become more humane because I learned to listen deeper. This helped me to understand people better. Understanding a lot of new personalities, new ways of thinking, and different life choices. After reading this article, some of you might think that being a people-person makes you look great. But, no, it’s not that easy. Back to the first tips, everyone has their own uniqueness. Being a people person helps me a lot to be more humane, less judging, and embrace people’s diversities. What matters the most is your attitude and your willingness to always be a better version of yourself, so that you can contribute in spreading positivity!
