Problems in Counseling

1. The Values of Counselling vs. Those of Business

2. The aim of counselling is to promote growth and
autonomy among the clients and to encourage clients
to care for themselves, to be assertive and to develop
their potential. But this is not always in accord with
particular organizations that do not wish employees to
be autonomous. Many organizations want teamwork
rather than a concentration on the individual; many
require 'passive employees' rather than 'active ones,'
and many growth-orientated employees would clash
with 'macho managers'. highlights possible conflicts:
"One
difficulty
with
counselling
within
the
organizational context is that the values and goals
implicit in counselling are not easily reconciled with
the economic, rationalistic models, which underlie
organizational procedures and processes. Counselling
is generally concerned with providing individuals with
a greater sense of freedom, while an important
organizational function is the control of its
employees."

 Besides possible conflicts between counselling values and those

of the organization, there may also be value conflicts within
employees counsellors themselves where they struggle with their
precise roles and responsibilities.
Which comes first: the individual client or the organization as a
whole? Counsellors are trained primarily to deal with the
individual and to put the welfare of the individual first. This may
conflict with company norms and even policies. Moving from
individual counselling, either privately or in other settings, to
employee counselling in the work-place can be problematic for
counsellors trained this way.
Counsellors and managers struggle to understand and be
changed by the world of the other. Not only are some
organizations reluctant to see a role for counselling within their
ambit but also there are counsellors who view industry as simply
against people and are concerned with making profit at the
expense of individuals. Clashes in values among counsellors,
clients, organizations and society have to be faced continually by
work-place counsellors who are trying "to integrate outer-directed
business values with the more inner-directed humanistic

Counselling Service
The way the concept of counselling is used or
understood within a particular company will
determine what the goals of counselling should be,
how counselling is practiced, and to what extent the
model of counselling presented is really possible.
Majority use counselling in the context of
performance review, both formal and informal
inspired in one way or another by the idea that the
employee may have something to contribute to the
proper evaluation of his/her own work and may then
be more open to corrective action.
Some use counselling as a part of their training
methods, so that trainees may have the opportunity
to
assess
their
individual
strengths
and
weaknesses.
The term is also commonly used in the context of
career counselling and redundancy (job loss)
counselling; where the meaning most closely
approaches the one that is adopted here.

1.Traditional Factors
Historically, the original pressures behind the
establishment of employee counselling services
were linked to the following three things:
1.The legislation held the employers responsible not
only for their physical safety at work but also for
what might be termed as emotional damage,
especially where that was construed as leading to
catastrophic effects in terms of illness or death.
2.The incidence of alcoholism and drug abuse.
3.The reaction of Health Insurance Company
because it had to pay more in terms of health
cost, it attempted to control the situation by
correspondingly higher premiums and more
stringent exclusion clauses. The agencies
responsible for counselling services were also
willing to modify this tougher approach for
companies, and ran an employee-counselling
programme.

2.New Factors
Counselling services are linked to two things:
1. The economic recession in the world has
put many companies under pressure to
reduce and/or redeploys their workforce and
at the same time involve much more in
people welfare. They have to take a longsighted view of manpower requirement, to
handle redundancies in a manager, to take
steps to attract the key industrial employees
they wish to retain.
2. To reduce the negative effects of stress on
the grand scale arising from pressure, pace
and fluctuations of modern life.

3. Dilemmas of a Manager Counsellor

When an independent counsellor is helping a client there is
no conflict of interest, because once the contract between
the two is agreed, the process is designed to satisfy only the
interests of the client.
It is important for organization's counsellor, manager or
anybody, to recognize that employers have a legitimate
concern with performance. There will be an emphasis on
action-positive change and measurable results. The root of
the difficulties, which managers and supervisors may
experience, can be traced to certain ambiguities in the
situation of the manager acting as counsellor. Most of the
times, managers are not willing to take up the role of a
counsellor for a number of reasons:
1. They fear that their assessing/controlling role will be
undermined (damaged).
2. They believe that the subordinates will exploit a show of
sympathy on their part.
3. They think that being sympathetic with a person means they
cannot make any further demands on him or her.
4. According to some of them their job description doesn't
include social work.
5. Some managers are reluctant to spend time as counsellors.

 Leadership and management are both said to hinge on the desire

and ability to make other people successful. The skills of counselling
are subset of the skills of leadership. They may not be deployed
everyday but one timely intervention by the respected boss or
colleague can make a difference to the individual and he might
learn a valuable lesson which will stay with him for the rest of his life
and will also help him to make progress. Still there are certain role
conflicts experienced by the managers when they are playing the
role of a counsellor in an organization. Few of these are:
A. Different Priorities
First, managers and supervisors carry a natural responsibility to
evaluate, control and improve performance. The company's
objectives demand it; the way they carry it out is part of what they
themselves are assessed on. Such pressures, from above and below,
make middle management one of the most stressed groups in an
organization. The calm listening, the reassurance and basic
compassion of the counsellor are difficult to come by. The manager
cannot refrain from making decisions, from passing judgment.
The manager and the counsellor may easily have different priorities.
A manager may need to confront where the relative independent
counsellor can afford to wait for the person to confront himself. The
counsellor can perhaps afford to accept any one of the three
solutions to a problem, but the manager may have to insist on only
one. He or she may have to insist on one particular result, one
outcome, however much freedom the individual is given to choose
the means. The counsellor can usually be more relaxed about goals
as well as means.

 The gulf between the two perspectives may

sometimes seem too wide to bridge. One might
say that the counsellor works for the client, the
employee works for the manager-counsellor.
But this is to overdraw the difference in
perspective. All sorts of people in authority
have the same situation, the same dilemma.
Likewise the manager may play now one and
then the other role. What has often been
missing from the manager's own education is
training in counselling. But the last thing it is
intended to do is to shackle managers in their
main duty, i.e., to manage. It is intended to
show how they may do both at different times
and incidentally enhance their authority as
managers.

B. Difference in Power
People often come to a manager because there is
something or other he can do for them; there is
something in his gift, so to speak. It is not necessary
that they might always be seeking counselling. They
might be interested in something as simple as can
they or can they not extend their sick leave, have a
raise, go on flexi time, change their client-base, and
postpone a deadline.
From the typical counsellor's point of view this may
be an enviable(lucky) position. The independent
counsellor usually does not have the executive
power to bring about a change in the situation,
which will be beneficial to the client. Managers
sometimes do. They can sometimes nip a problem
in the bud simply by doing something.
Another major difference between the power of a
manager and a counsellor is that the manager has
the power to decide when to counsel and when not.

C. Owning the Problem

Another major problem is that the employee does not
start by owning the problem. Perhaps it is the new
generation of operatives who don't have the mechanical
know-how to look after their own machines. He doesn't
see that his own expertise came through experience, by
being allowed to try things, by being shown, by
experimenting, by learning.
The manager's first task would be to make him
understand that it is his problem and not someone
else's. Counselling is a delicate enough process. The
need first to convince someone that they have a
problem is even more so. This is typically the case with
performance issues.
The redundancy ( job loss) counsellor too may face the
same paradox. He or she is easily seen as the agent of
the organization, which has given the person their
problem, and can be the natural recipient of the welter
of feelings which are involved such as, panic,
resentment, bewilderment, and grief.

D. Conflicting Views on Confidentiality

The reason most often given by employees why
they are reluctant to accept counselling from
anybody in the organization, even where there is
no line relationship, is that they cannot be sure
that what they reveal will not in some way
prejudice their employment, either now or in the
future.
Managers in their turn may want to refuse
confidences because they are not sure they could
maintain an unprejudiced personal attitude or an
uncontaminated judgment of the individual from
the company's point of view. Quite reasonably
they may be afraid of having their hands tied,
wittingly or unwittingly, by an employee's
openness about a personal problem.

E. Ambiguity in the Situation

The individual manager might be a caring
person, but company culture, policy or
procedures are geared in such a way that
he or she might be restricted from the
outset in terms of the help they may
offer.
Such people may hesitate to get involved
where the only response open to them is
a kind of impotent sympathy which would
leave them feeling all the more
frustrated.

F. Ambivalence Towards Counselling ( mixed

feelings)
This is a more fundamental factor, which makes
some people frankly unwilling to be involved in
the counselling role. They may hide behind a
protest about the kind of ambiguities just
discussed but in fact it is more a question of
personal ambivalence than role ambiguity. This
may be for a variety of reasons:
1.Some people simply do not have a natural
sympathy, warmth or caring for others.
2.Some would rather describe themselves as
'pragmatic', by which they mean they don't let
their feelings affect their performances.
3.Some nourish the conviction that people (i.e.
other people) are basically lazy or inept.
4.Some
see
counselling
as
encouraging
malingerers( ill pretending) rather than building
trust and loyalty.

G. Ambivalence in Good Listening

There is another kind of ambivalence, which is rooted, in the
genuine difficulty of good listening.
One aspect of it is the struggle anyone will experience when
his or her own emotions or values are engaged by what
someone is saying. Most of us can really only pay attention to
one thing at a time. If our own vested interests are being
challenged (however unknowingly) by the other person, we do
not normally keep the focus of our attention on what they are
actually saying. Good listeningfor whatever purpose, be it
counselling, negotiating or managingneeds to become
second nature if we are not to become entangled in our own
reactions.
A second and related aspect of this genuine difficulty in
listening is that for many people there is something inherently
competitive about talking. If someone tells me they nearly
went under a bus, what is the most common reaction? I want
to tell them the same thing happened to me. Most people
don't listen for long before they start to itch to get in their own
similar experiences.
There may be something here, something even more basic in
many people, which is a reluctance to listen, from the belief
that if they listen they may be forced to agree, that if they see
the other's point of view they may have to give up their own.