TRANSACTIONAL ANALYSIS FOR MANAGERS

 TA can be immensely useful for anybody who needs to work with people (and who doesn’t!). In fact, those who deal with organisational development may find TA an invaluable tool.

As a manager, I can use it to understand and structure my clients' aims and goals. Then I can sit with the clients and build a strategy on how we can achieve those targets given the specific parameters and ground realities that govern the organisation's daily functioning. In particular, TA is very useful when I want to encourage effective communication techniques and eliminate interpersonal conduct and behaviour that is detrimental to the orgaisation's health.

If I understand the way people interact with each other; if I can evaluate why they behave a certain way; if I can address a certain behavior or tone of voice with the correct response from my end in terms of conduct and paralanguage, I can manage people better and can regulate the work environment and experience to the benefit of my organizational goals.

I can encourage and improve relations between my subordinates with my knowledge of TA. I can judge when to take a Critical Parent Stance and then consciously change it to Adult when I see that my subordinate is beginning to reply from the Negative Adapted Child ego state by becoming rebellious or turning too compliant.

Sometimes, I may want to use my Nurturing Parent Ego State in team-building so that my subordinates can release their Free Child Ego State and feel a sense of job satisfaction.

I can use TA to facilitate team building, understand group dynamics, resolve personality conflicts and generally make the work-environment more comfortable and productive for my most important resource—my employees. I can also use TA in negotiations with other companies, or with my superiors or subordinates. I can use my knowledge of TA to lead, to motivate, to persuade and convince.

I can use TA in meetings and brain-storming sessions—the possibilities of the utility of Transactional Analysis for the manager are endless and limited only by the manager’s imagination!