[MUSIC] Welcome to this course, A Practical Guide to Managing People at Work. Management is everywhere. When we think of managers, we may imagine smartly dressed men and women, working in large corporate organizations. But management takes place in all sorts of situations. On fishing ships battered by gales, in rock bands on tour, in small shops in remote locations, in meetings held online, in professional sports teams, in street gangs, and in homes, like yours. In fact, in virtually any situation in which two or more people need to coordinate and organize their activities, some form of management can be found. In this course, we're going to concentrate on the management of people at work. This is a large and complex topic about which many books have been written and thousands of academic articles published. Here, we cannot hope to cover in depth all of the topics relevant to the management of people at work, instead we'll focus on some key areas. In a few moments, I will outline these key areas and explain how the course will work. But before that, I want to say something about how we have chosen the materials in this course. If you look in a bookshop or browse online, you will find many books on management. Generally, they're written about people with first hand experience of managing people, and each book tries to distill a set of ideas, opinions, and beliefs about effective people management. In many cases, the ideas in these books are based on the personal experiences and the personal knowledge of the author and the people that have spoken to over the years. The ideas tend not to be based on scientific evidence. The disadvantage of such new approach to educating people about management is that we simply don't know whether the ideas expressed by the authors are sound and helpful. That they will lead to the positive outcomes that the authors say they will. Instead we have to take the author's word for it. We have to assume that the author is right. Even though it represents no evidence or no more than a little anecdotal evidence that what they have to offer would actually work, be effective, lead to the successful management of people at work. In this course, we take a quite different approach. We're not going to explain our own ideas about effective management. Instead, we're going to present to you ideas which have grown out of many years of careful scientific research. When people hear that they're going to learn about the findings of scientific research that often imagined that it would be very dry and very dull. We don't think that you will find this course dry or dull at all though. Research is exciting. With it, we discover new things, develop fresh ways of thinking and change the world in all sorts of positive ways. But the fact that research is exciting is not the most important thing about it. A more important thing about research is that it allows us to base our ideas, beliefs, and action on evidence rather than mere opinions. This course, the one you have chosen to study here, is evidence based. Why? Well, imagine that two people have decided to buy a car. They're each going to drive the car they choose for thousands of miles across the country. One of them goes into the car showroom around the corner. He likes red and he decides to buy the first red car he sees. The car salesman is delighted. What an easy sale. The second man also intended to go on the long road trip decides on a different approach. He searches the internet for reviews on cars including reviews from previous owners. He focuses on areas which he thinks will be particularly important such as comfort, safety, fuel efficiency, and reliability. If he can buy a car in his favorite color, well, that'll be great, but it's not the main thing. He wants evidence that the car he buys is going to do the job he wants it to. So who do you think is the most likely to be happy with their purchase on the long road trip ahead? The man who buys the first red car he sees or the man who bases his choice of car on the careful collection of evidence? I suspect you know the correct answer. The idea of an evidence based approach to management is founded on the same idea. If you want to know what works when it comes to managing people, it's best to base your ideas on evidence. And the better the evidence, the more confident you can be that the ideas are good ones. Fortunately, a huge amount of evidence has been accumulated on the management of people at work. For example, which of the following is more likely to allow someone to select the job applicant who will perform best at work. A test of their mental ability or a test of their personality? Why not have a guess. Is it mental ability test or test of personality that are most effective in predicting who it is that will perform their job best. Well, in fact there is a huge amount of research published in high-quality academic journals, which allows us to draw a conclusion about this one, simple issue. The answer is that, in general, tests of mental ability are more likely to predict people who will perform their job well, than tests of personality. Now, this isn't my opinion. It isn't the opinion of some management guru. It is a conclusion based on the results of hundreds of carefully conducted studies, involving tens of thousands of participants. It is evidence based. So you will find that the material in this course is evidence based. This means that you can be confident that the information which we provide you is not based on anecdotes, personal experience, or the experiences of a small group of people. Instead it is based on many years of painstaking scientific research. [MUSIC]
