Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh): Behavioral and decision-making skills for managing people play a pivotal role in the daily grind of police officers and during special projects or operations requiring them to assemble, lead, and empower a diverse and robust task force.
Keeping in view, the need for police officers to hone and sharpen the people management skills of DSPs, the Madhya Pradesh Police Academy, Bhauri, Bhopal, organized a training session on “life management” on Tuesday. The session was a part of the induction training program for the DSPs of the 42-A batch. Naveen Krishna Rai, manager, government affairs, IIM Indore, was the resource person for the session.
The session familiarized the officers with the difference between power, authority, and influence. The various sources and contingencies of power were also discussed. The session also looked at a variety of management theories and models that describe and prescribe approaches to managing people and understanding how they make decisions.
Talking about how people make decisions, the underlying imperative to understand people better was deliberated upon, which states that people do not always behave rationally and have biases. With the help of prospect theory, participants were told that people value gains and losses differently, placing more weight on perceived gains than perceived losses. An individual will often pick the option of having perceived gains.
Diving deep into the biases, the pseudo-certainty effect was discussed, which tells us that human beings have the tendency to make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome is positive but make risk-seeking choices to avoid negative outcomes. To overcome these biases, participants were advised to first acknowledge that they exist, then solicit feedback and perspectives from others and look for patterns in how they have perceived prior situations and where they might have made mistakes. For dealing with people outside the organization, essential concepts like the overtone window and the bridge experiment were expounded upon.
