People Work (Tyler)

Learning to work with people is not a subject that is learned in a class. It cannot be "taught" necessarily. Working with people is "learned" in a few different ways. One of the most common ways is through innate ability to work with people. The term, "a people person" exists because there are simply people that know how to work with people. They have always had the ability to deal with people and their issues and know how to handle them. This is not an ability that they were taught in a class. They simply just reacted on their instincts. However, not everyone has this ability. It is a difficult thing to learn, but it can be learned. Mostly it is learned through experience. It is impossible to learn how to work with people if you are never around people. So the first way of learning to work with people is actually working with people. The important step in this process is choosing where to expose yourself to people and deciding how to present yourself. Because you will make mistakes while trying to learn how to work with people. You will offend people and people will offend you. It is a process that you must work through, however. When you offend someone, you will learn what you said or did and learn not to do it again or at least you will learn to do it in a more tactful manner. There you go, first lesson learned. Its the school of experience. If someone offends you, you will begin to understand why and make sure it doesn't happen to you again. Second lesson learned. These lessons will just continue to be learned as you spend more time working with and around people. You can read books about it in order to externally experience working with people. But, it isn't until you truly work with living and breathing creatures that you know how to truly work with people. If I was a senior pastor asking professors for students that know how to work with people, I would be asking professors for students that seem to be around the most people a lot of the time. People with people and social skills will know how to work in a staff and make a staff work with others. It is an important principle that is simply learned in experience.