Put yourself in her place and ask, what would I want of me? It can pay, says Nigel Nicholson

Guardian Unlimited Work

An amateur folk singer friend of mine once wrote a refrain that went, 'It's hard easy work'. The song was about the struggles of a stay-at-home mother, but the sentiment could just as easily apply to management.

Let's put it another way. Why is managing so hard when the skills are absolutely generic? Managing other people, organising resources, making and executing plans are all things that every human adult being does regularly, and you could say they were what we are designed to do. Indeed, it is an often-heard truism that running a household and raising children should be seen as a good preparation for being an executive, so much do the skills overlap. In fact, if you can organise your kids and partner, and keep the home running smoothly, you're doing better than many divisional line managers.

So what's the manager's problem? Managing members of your family is hardly a piece of cake, but at least we can express our feelings more or less freely, we have deep shared interests with the other parties, and if we get into a fight, there are frequent opportunities to repair relationships (even if we screw them up, too).

In the office, where we face the restraints of the 'rational' order of business life, it's a different game. We are mostly very careful about showing our emotions and generally act as though everything we do is intentional. But in both home and work there is a general human incapacity that is the cause of many of the prob lems we confront in trying to manage other people. This is the extreme difficulty we find in 'de-centring', or understanding what the world looks like from another human being's perspective. Mastery of it is what sets apart the really good manager from the rest. It is difficult enough in intimate relationships, but it is especially hard in business settings, where so many of the critical interactions are heavily restrained by our roles in a formal hierarchy.

This is illustrated in a simple exercise I conduct on an interpersonal skills programme at London Business School. I ask the assembled managers to write down two adjectives, one good and one bad, that characterise their boss. The list starts to fill the whiteboard: 'My boss is approachable but weak'. 'My boss is professional but detached'. The pantheon of traits generated covers just about every point of the psychological compass, if you keep going.

When we have filled the board, I ask them to reflect on what they see on the list. First, they are likely to point out the enormous variety of ways individuals can be good and bad bosses. Next, they note that many negatives are the flipsides of the positives: 'My boss is a creative but chaotic.' 'My boss is charismatic but a bully.' Their observations continue to flow until suddenly, the penny drops and one bright spark inevitably pipes up with the big insight: 'This could be us.'

I ask them, if I went to your subordinates and conducted the same exercise would the whiteboard fill up with much the same list? Heads nod ruefully.

Superficially, the problem seems to be one of how we use language. Negative attributes such as 'bully', 'lazy',' 'inconsistent' and the like are almost exclusively used about a third party. They are used to a second party only when we want to pick a fight with them, and even more rarely to the first party, ourselves - for example when it is publicly expedient to dump on ourselves, when we are suffering some major setback, or if we are feeling depressed.

Most of the time, we care more about our own feelings than those of others. And it is deeply instrumental for us to hold positive self-images, which inevitably means seeing ourselves as the aggrieved, rather than the aggrieving, party. This is a profoundly ingrained part of our psychology which involves self-protection and self-control.

Its disadvantage is that it gets us into all kinds of dysfunctional office behaviour: e-rage, lousy appraisal meetings and insensitive decision-making. It can cause major disasters such as merger failures, where it is the flaw that prevents people from joining with others with a different corporate world view to forge a new business.

The de-centring deficiency underlies most of the unreasonable, self-centred conflict we see daily in our streets and offices.

What's the remedy? We can never completely share another person's experience, but it is possible to get much closer to their perspective than we are usually motivated to do.

But this is truly 'hard easy work': it takes a major effort of will and imagination. Here is the simple but difficult key: To manage our subordinates effectively, we must think what must it be like for them, as the people they are, to have us, as we are, as their boss? What would I want of me if I were them?

Apply the converse logic and you have the trick of how to manage your boss. What must it be like for them, as the kind of person they are, to have someone like me as a subordinate? If I were them, what would I like me, as their subordinate, to do?

Thinking this through often brings surprising answers. Managers may conclude that they should spend more time being informal with subordinates and talking about what's on their minds; being clearer about their plans and giving subordinates more say about how things are done.

In the reverse position, you might be moved to act differently to your boss. Even though she drives you crazy 80 per cent of the time, you could consider what it might do to her for you to sayyou appreciate what she does in the remaining 20 per cent.

The more we loosen the rigidities of hierarchy and formal roles, the easier it gets to de-centre. The more we work alongside each other interchangeably, the more readily we can share perspectives.

Nigel Nicholson is Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School, and author of 'Managing the Human Animal' (published by Texere, Textile Education and Research in Europe).