INTRODUCTION

Teachers’ talent has consolidated itself as one of the most important variables for educational organizations in post-pandemic scenarios, which is why it has received a lot of importance and focus, because of its effects on the workplace due to the confinement. This trend has become the core of interpretations of psychological and social post-pandemic conditions within educative institutions. Although, there are many solutions presented in the educational literature for teachers who are emotionally struggling (Darling-Hammond & Hyler, 2020; MacIntyre et al, 2020; ^{Reimers & Schleicher, 2020)}, the pandemic evidenced, as a prevailing problem the paucity of preparedness by the political policy and educational leaders (Villa et al, 2020).

In the field of human resource management, studies conducted by ^{Cristol and Gimbert (2020)} and ^{Hadar et al., (2020)} in Teachers Self-Awareness, evidenced organizational realities constituting themselves as an important source of influence on institutions competitiveness. These conditions influence organizations operation and survival when faced with critical circumstances such as the one experienced in 2020/21 because of COVID-19, which affected the work of millions of people worldwide. Recent ILO data discuss the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on the labor market, revealing its devastating effects on people in the informal economy and on hundreds of millions of enterprises worldwide (ILO, 2020). On the education side, most countries have ordered nation – or region – wide school closures, meaning that an estimated 90% of students across the globe (almost 1.6 billion) had their education greatly disrupted and/or were out of school (^{Donohue & Miller, 2020}; ^{Giannini et al., 2020)}.

Under this perspective, documents from OECD and UNESCO emphasize social-emotional competencies as necessary for coping with such conditions. In the same way, Castro, Pavas, García, and Vargas (2013) and ^{Pike et al. (2005)}, attribute an essential role to an organization’s intangible assets such as individuals’ knowledge, values, skills, and attitudes. The forgoing deserves special attention and are the most important resources to be considered by leaders to enhance capabilities to achieve organizational objectives and the like (Collins, 2020; ^{Mejía & Jaramillo, 2006}; ^{Díaz, 2007}; ^{Cabrales, 2009)}. As human beings, whose imprint should be a permanent spiritual and intellectual growth, immersed in a competitive context, and the catastrophic scenario left by the 2020/21 pandemic, we must be aware of the specific characteristics of each teacher and their capabilities to develop them and thus turn the stay at classroom into a space of resilience (^{Walker, 2002}; Kuntz, Näswall, & Malinen, 2016) and mutual enrichment. Similarly, if today’s leader is not interested in getting to know their team in-depth, they will not be able to manage their talents and refine the organization’s strategic interests, preventing them from projecting themselves and their team’s permanence.

Developing teaching skills that promote self-esteem and self-confidence has become vital to the world of education as a result of the specifics of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the artificial intelligence, and the technology replacing teachers. This has led humanity to a dizzying pace of trade expansion, whose first symptoms of saturation due to growth in inequality and poverty have begun to cause protests and discontent in the second decade of the 21st century (Piketty, 2019), and that after the 2020/21 pandemic they will come with more force and violence due to the conditions of unemployment and poverty that it’s leaving. Based on these postulates, today’s principal needs to know how to accomplish and lead both their potential and that of the individuals who make up their teaching team to create a less stressful working life and bring their institution up to well-being standards that will enable them to lead their colleagues toward innovation and motivation, in new post-pandemic scenarios.

Following this argumentative line, in the first part of the article, we discuss the individual-centered management approaches that give a more human perspective. Secondly, how the human condition constitutes three dimensions: Self- knowledge–self-awareness, awareness of finitude, and Self-Transcendence, which must be considered in teaching management. Then we resume the psychological model of human potential development framework by ^{Aspinwall and Staudinger (2003)} and the model of happiness or meaningful life from ^{Seligman’s (2003)}. We also analyzed how they can be developed to optimize labor circumstances, improve profiles, and manage teachers with optimism and resilience, considering the critical circumstances that are emerging in the whole world because of COVID-19.

INDIVIDUAL-CENTERED MANAGEMENT APPROACHES

In the post-pandemic setting, it is necessary that the leader becomes a strategist who visualizes the internal and new external context, analyzes the environment, forecasts, sizes their teaching team’s capabilities up, and lays out the objectives that will maintain the institution in the context of the looming economic crisis and avoiding dropping out of their students. This paper frames the COVID-19 outbreak as a case of VUCA¹ that grants the opportunity to examine whether our leaders provide teachers with these social-emotional competencies that are necessary for coping with such circumstances (^{Hadar et al., 2020}). To this end, they must get their team to understand that their actions have an end and a new purpose and transmitting that they are valued in the critical era of teaching labor being replaced by technology. Additionally, they must always be in a good mood and motivated in the face of uncertainty (^{Daft, 2008}), even with stress derived from the possibility of non-continuity in the institution.

In recent years, new strategic direction models have been arising in educational institutions that have enabled, in some way, handling market competition generated by the entry of multiple platforms and disruptive educational agents and greater interference from technology that competes with human intelligence. This has forced educational organizations to be more efficient at achieving, managing, and developing strategic plans, and in terms of human resources, improve their capacity to feel, think, and manage their knowledge and social-emotional competencies. Additionally, it is widely known that in the education sector the capacity of schools and universities to recruit, develop, and retain top talent is stunningly low compared with other knowledge sectors (^{Curtis & Wurtzel, 2010}). On the other hand, mentioned by ^{Senge (2006)}, smart organizations are those whose competitive advantage is the possibility of learning continuously and at a faster rate than their competitors, for which they develop their collaborators’ potential and learn through them. Currently, it is also widely acknowledged that intangible assets are a key driver of innovation and organizational value in educational organizations (Alafawaire &Tarik, 2021; ^{Bounfour, 2003)}.

Due to the pandemic and the mediation of classes through video platforms, the interconnectedness of the world, the complexity, the dynamism, and the use of social networks and other technological means grew, and the work of the classroom became increasingly linked to the self-learning capacity of students. This made educational institutions review their own ability to learn and not be left behind in the face of untimely changes. “The organizations that will become relevant in the future will be those that discover how to take advantage of people’s optimism and learning capacity throughout all levels of an organization” (^{Senge, 2006}, p.12). In this way, an institution’s leader has a high responsibility to teachers and students, as they hold the potential to assert the working groups in Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), he must lead a change focused on the people’s well-being and on re-learning processes to retrain them in returning to the classrooms. To return to a post-pandemic learning world, leaders will need to learn how to model and engage their teachers in the SEL skills (^{Cristol & Gimbert, 2020}). An outcome is to create a more caring learning environment to deal with the trauma they experienced (Katz et al, 2020; ^{Reimers & Schleicher, 2020)} and become better prepared to handle future circumstances.

According to ^{Reimers & Schleicher (2020)} in OECD document: A framework to guide an education response to the COVID-19 Pandemic of 2020, it is important to support education leaders at various levels of educational governance, in public and private educational organizations, in formulating adaptive, coherent, effective and equitable education responses to a crisis that has significantly disrupted educational opportunities globally. To return to normal conditions in classrooms in the critical post-pandemic scenario, it is necessary to create a climate conducive to relearning and to motivate teachers and employees by developing their SEL skills and abilities. In fact, it is the effective management of available resources, tangible, and intangible, that determines differences in human resource performance (Alafawaire &Tarik, 2021).

SELF-KNOWLEDGE–SELF-AWARENESS

Working under hard circumstances like the ones presented during the pandemic, is enabled by developing three dimensions that constitute human being: Self-knowledge – self-awareness, awareness of finitude, and Self-Transcendence (^{Vago & Silbersweig, 2012}; ^{Cabrales, 2009)}. These capabilities that are required for coping with changing conditions are associated with the concepts of resilience and social-emotional competencies (^{Hadar et al., 2020)}. Hence, the importance of highlighting this trilogy that constitutes humans as one of the most relevant factors in teachers management, which together with professional training and work experience, determine the skills to face the critical factors of the post-pandemic scenarios, framed by stress, unemployment, and the replacement of teaching labor by technology.

Self-awareness (^{Hadar et al., 2020}) is given in a first instance in the physical body, in the corporeality, since it is the object with which one is present and based on which, life in the workspaces develops. Managers who think from self-awareness, who reflect on their function, capabilities, and potential in the institution and who develop the skills of self-learning and self-control, have the option of improving themselves continuously, being self-motivating, optimistic, and thus improving the organization where they work. Similarly, they can also develop skills to learn and apply the managerial and executive processes for information management, for knowledge acquisition, and processes involved in the treatment of novel situations that allow them to perform satisfactorily in the work environment (^{Church, 1997}). All this can be achieved when the brain is forced to think in a structured way, since there is control over the mind and it is forced to focus on a wave of creativity and new ideas, while the decision to learn is made, to committedly insert oneself in the chaotic, turbulent, and rapidly changing environments in which we live has become the “new normal”, and engage in the task of proposing creative solutions that allow them to project themselves in crisis scenarios.

As mentioned by ^{Church (1997)}, there are individual differences in the construct of managerial self-awareness (MSA), operationalized as a congruence between self and direct reporting behavioral ratings.

Results based on several different approaches to measuring ratings agreement indicated that HPs were significantly more managerially self-aware compared with AVs. This relationship was consistent regardless of data source, organization, or method of assessing managerial performance. (p. 281).

^{Goleman (1994)} defined “emotional intelligence” as the ability to perceive, understand, reason, and manage one’s own and others’ emotions. For their part, ^{Cherniss and Adler (2000)} define emotional intelligence in their book Promoting Emotional Intelligence in Organizations as the ability to correctly identify and understand one’s own emotions and their reaction in others. They also allude to the ability to regulate these emotions to use them in decision-making, which in the context of the post-pandemic and under the circumstances of fear and stress that persist, require from leaders a high knowledge of themselves and the consequences of their decisions.

That is why one of the main foundations of educational institutions is the identification of emotions, their apprehension, influence, and the impact they generate on the members of the school. Social-emotional competencies within the discourse of teacher education appear as necessary in stressful periods (Acharya, Jin, and Collins 2018; Bai et al. 2020). This leads us to a superior instance referred to as emotional self-awareness (Iriarte, Alonso, & Sabino, 2006), as much as its mastery allows us to recognize the emotions when they emerge (ability to exercise control), be aware of how they work (seek emotional adequacy), as well as the consequences (adaptive dimensions) (Barahona, Sánchez, & Urchaga, 2014).

Now, how does the principal identify their own emotions and those of their teachers and students? What mechanisms do they use to reach that place where emotions are identified and processed? Self-awareness represents a type of fundamental knowledge in this phase of intelligence since it allows a level of deep discernment capable of identifying one’s own and others’ emotions and using them to benefit the institution.

According to ^{Smith (2007)}, self-awareness is a process that begins since childhood, it means “realizing” who I am, how I am, and my environment. It is the capacity of recognizing the lacks, skills, values, hopes, emotions, attitudes, and managing them to vindicate the human side in the organization. Consciousness is understood as “the emergence of the subject’s reflective thinking about himself, about his operations, about his actions” (^{Morin, 1986}, p. 134).

At the same time, it provides conscious knowledge of a person’s responsibilities, of the implications of their decisions, and of the capacity to create positive environments that are conducive to success in the face of work difficulties and the moment of despair that humanity is experiencing because of the consequences of COVID-19.

Self-knowledge aims to strengthen the leader against situations or contexts that generate job instability that may arise. From it, derives what ^{Seligman (2003)} refers to as the second level of happiness: the committed life, that proposes as the essential motivation of human behavior.

Teaching resources must be valued, as people are a source of competitive advantage when they improve an institution’s efficiency. The value increases when teachers find ways to motivate their students and provide something unique in their classes (Snell, Morris, & Bholander, 2014), when they are led to develop a set of skills, abilities, training, and enriching work experience in which they can feel that their effort has meaning and that they are resilient, in other words, that they develop the capacity to adapt and survive when faced with such a disturbing factor as the pandemic, possibly resulting in the institution going bankrupt. The ability to work in a team, to solve problems creatively, to listen, and to focus the discussion on the problem makes them valuable.

As intrapersonal (Gardner, 1993) and emotional (^{Goleman, 1994}) intelligence develops self-awareness and control over thoughts increases, self- control enables leaders to master their impulses under any circumstance, optimize energy consumption, and make good decisions. ^{Senge (2006)} mentions the concept of personal mastery as the term used to describe the discipline necessary for leaders to achieve personal growth, learn and master themselves so that their leadership is facilitated, and they can achieve the desired goals. Some of the new values of today’s leaders, such as self-control, resilience, are understood as the ability to control personal emotions and avoid negative reactions to provocations, opposition, or hostility from others, or when working under constant stressful conditions (^{Alles, 2007}). These are concepts that require strict discipline and deep knowledge of oneself that ultimately leads to personal mastery. The educational manager of today must leave the human resources administration and begin to manage teaching talent to get to have well-trained and motivated teachers, a good working environment, and therefore their objectives and mission can be fulfilled (^{Behrstock, 2010}).

AWARENESS OF FINITUDE AND WORK

The pandemic of 2020/21 has made humanity see the fragility of life, the thin thread from which its stay on Earth hangs. It has reminded it of its finiteness, and more consciously, that life becomes meaningful when the closeness of death is felt. Although it seems paradoxical, another dimension of the human condition to consider when managing teams of teachers and based on which new forms of participation in the joint solution of problems can be implemented, is the reflection and consciousness of death or finitude. The coronavirus pandemic threatens the health, the future, and the lives of people. Therefore, it can accentuate the perception of the fragility and finitude of life (Rupprecht, et al., 2021).

The first moments of reflection on the meaning of existence arose based on the consciousness of death; because there is a future that the subject will not be a part of, the present takes on meaning and value since each instant can be the last, each second is unrepeatable.

From its very beginning, the pandemic of 2020/21 has been accentuating the unpredictability and fragility of life. The VUCA world is that of a society that now fears death and remembers the inescapable events of pain. Hopefully, the loss of fear of talking about the end of days helps us to understand and love life even more. In fact, contrary to what is expected, the consciousness of finitude is not only consciousness of the transience of what exists or of the banality of earthly concerns, but also the revelation that this unappealable brevity urges us to seek the meaning and happiness that fulfill us, and the indescribable discovery that tells us that life is a gift (^{Roig, 2003}).

On the other hand, reflection understood as the global contemplation of the situation/problem and its implications in the personal dimension, allows us to elucidate that the present is constituted by the things that we have and that someday will disappear, creating partial deaths of friendships, students, illnesses, classrooms, and workplaces.

Death is “lived” permanently, and teachers do not realize that they live in an increasingly complicated job market in which their work is being increasingly replaced by technology (^{Selwyn, 2019}). According to an investigation by Ideland (2020) the Chinese company Squirrel AI Learning, “runs approximately 2000 after- school centers and has over a million students registered. Students learn through an adaptive learning platform that aims to develop students’ knowledge better, faster, and more precisely than human teachers can ever do” (p. 33). Then, what is the role of the teacher in this new scenario in which he should not lecture? Will the pandemic and the consolidation of learning and communication platforms and video classes, begin to consecrate the replacement of the teacher by technology? (Hillman, Rensfeldt, & Ivarsson, 2020). This aspect was accentuated in the pandemic when thousands of teachers lost their jobs or took on more students than usual in the remote mode since the contracts of part-time teachers were suspended. According to ^{El TIEMPO (2021)}, almost 5,000 teachers were left unemployed due to the pandemic in Colombia.

Both concepts of work and life are closely associated and dissociated as they lead to some positions that assert that work is the worst circumstance of human beings, but when faced with the fear of losing it, it becomes relevant again. In the pandemic, those of us who keep our jobs feel calm in the face of the threat that was presented in other economic sectors in which thousands of workers were unemployed. The possibility of losing it in such chaotic circumstances, made us see how important it is for our lives, but also that not everything can be work.

This interpretation takes on great importance because work occupies an essential part of life and this life unfolds in a human mortal body that works. Now, when working from home has finally taken on the importance it deserves, we think, at a basic physical level, that being in the school is unnecessary, but which does not cease to characterize corporeality as fundamental. According to González (2006), in the case of human work, this release of transforming energy has two meanings: a transcendent one that means that it produces an effect outside the agent, and another immanent one that causes the action in the same agent.

When working in the schoolroom, the “raw material” (our students) and the environment are transformed, but above all, teachers transform themselves. They get involved in the working community, the “proletariat” that somehow vindicates them as productive entities, which wear out and deteriorate on a path that each day brings them closer to death. There is no job that does not deteriorate and that deteriorates when releasing energy. In the case of teaching work, this release of energy transcends and becomes learning for the students, and still leads teachers to exhaustion, to finitude, even if they do not realize it. Teaching work, therefore, would express to the greatest extent our humanity, our condition as transcendent beings that leave a mark, as finite beings that create value.

In the last few years, teaching work was largely replaced by technological applications (^{Selwyn, 2019}; Ideland, 2020). With the pandemic, the transcendent sense of work connected us with humanity, since we worked not only to acquire daily sustenance and modify the minds of our students, but also to be part of that community that wanted to continue living and learning; we teach because we believe there will be a future. The teacher’s role will not be replaced by any sophisticated technology. There are still needed by students to form character, tolerance, and the value of goodness. The teacher is also able to foster empathy and bring out imagination and creativity. (Wahyu, Hermanto & Pramono, 2019).

But what are these other higher and more meaningful activities? Self- awareness, Self-Transcendence, and self-knowledge would allow human beings to work in a world without work for everyone, in which employment is occupied by insensitive machines that work without rest and in which the closure of the sources of work, will not allow that longed-for liberation of humanity. Being aware of the end of processes, of the death of jobs, allows humans to rise to those higher and more meaningful causes. The pandemic has succeeded in raising awareness of finitude and conceiving of the ephemeral durability of human life and work.

SELF-TRANSCENDENCE

Self-Transcendence is another dimension of the Human Condition (^{Cloninger & Cloninger, 2022}; ^{Cabrales, 2009)} and is linked to the concept of the consciousness of finitude since it occurs insofar as Man knows he is mortal. It is an immanent condition of the human race and is necessary to implement Social-emotional competencies in stressful periods. ^{Neff (1993)} mentioned Self- Transcendence within the fundamental needs of the human person, in addition to survival, security, emotions, understanding, creativity, identity, freedom, participation, leisure, and recreation. From the perspective of ^{Derrida (1993)}, Transcendence refers to the trust placed on the other so that in a supplementary and responsible way, they undertake their work and, at the same time, support the work of others, which becomes more relevant considering we work with students, human beings in continuous expectation. ^{Cloninger & Cloninger (2022)} “refers the Auto-transcendence to the awareness of being and inseparable and unconditional participant in something greater that one’s individual self, such a community, humanity, nature, the universe or the Divine” (p. 205)

Studies conducted by ^{Wang et al. (2021)}, in the teaching profession have suggested that these dimensions can contribute to better teacher engagement and improved performance outcomes. Self-Transcendence then reiterates the importance of human acts at work and their implications on others and educational institutions. In the immanent sense of work (^Marx,1971), human labor, in addition to converting raw material into merchandise, also produces transformations in the human being. So, the transcendent sense is also evidenced when one works to leave a legacy in our students, do things well, and work knowing that one is doing one’s best in each assigned task.

The recognition and development of the three dimensions are fundamental elements to consider when motivating and managing human teaching talent in contemporary institutions. The idea of managing the human condition to manage teachers’ talent aims to equate competitiveness with collaboration and combine the post-pandemic scenarios with a less hegemonic model, less insensitive to the planet and human beings themselves. Recognizing the three dimensions of the human condition allows us to be better employees and managers, as well as enhance human development in the school in the critical scenarios that await humanity.

POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY IN HUMAN TALENT MANAGEMENT: OPTIMISM

According to ^{Rotman (2013)}, robots, automation, and software are capable of replacing people, since their application is already known in car manufacturing, call centers, or as a travel agent, among other fields. According to ^{Villa (2020)}, millions of people have lost their jobs during the pandemic, and robots and Artificial Intelligence are replacing them faster than ever; to the extent that, the pandemic led businessmen to discover that they did not really need so many people and that machines could not only replace them but even do a better job.

Even if many jobs that require people will disappear due to the gradual increase of ICTs and with this, society must adapt to changes as it has done throughout history. This adaptation occurs by recognizing the human dimensions in the organization and in the classroom, improving skills, and with the emergence of new work scenarios that currently do not exist, but that will require skills intrinsically linked to the human condition. “Moreover, research suggests that, rather than replacing teachers, existing and emerging technologies will help them do their jobs better and more efficiently”. (Bryant, et al., 2020, p. 2).

As described throughout the text, one of the most important things in an institution is its internal customers or employees (Pike, et al., 2005), since, beyond infrastructure, name, or reputation and academic productivity, these people and teachers are the ones who give an institution its true worth and who determine whether it grows or stagnates. For these reasons, among many others, from a leader’s point of view, his team is what matters the most.

As mentioned, some of the factors of positive psychology (^{Seligman, 2003}), such as optimism and resilience, contribute to human development within organizations in these post-pandemic catastrophic scenarios. “Positive psychological principles and subsequently positive organizational behavior (POB) have become increasingly prevalent in the workplace in recent years.” (Ramlall, Kahtani, & Damanhouri, 2014, p. 149). Thus, optimistic principals can become proactive leaders who manage within their institution’s personal growth and that of the organization itself, all based on managing human potential (^{Luthans, 2007)}.

The first relationship that is established with the term human potential arises when considering it as a personality characteristic. It seems to be an innate condition of leaders and inaccessible to other mortals, evidenced in optimism and resilience associated with the three human dimensions. Human potential is defined by ^{Aspinwall and Staudinger (2003)} as the strength to remain firm when faced with setbacks in an uncertain world, the flexibility that has reserves that allow people to bend without breaking when facing fierce winds, it is the capacity to maintain the balance and remain unscathed on the surface from destiny’s blows.

^{Aspinwall and Staudinger (2003)} define human potential as “the ability to flexibly apply as many different resources as necessary to solve a problem or work toward a goal” (p.127). This potential arises from exercising optimism and the three human dimensions aforesaid. “Positively oriented human resource strengths and psychological capacities that can be measured, developed, and effectively managed for performance improvement in today’s workplace” (^{Luthans & Church, 2002}, p. 59). These allow the principal to focus his efforts on intelligent problem-solving. Leaders who are aware of their potential and the type of strategy that needs to be applied in each action, take advantage of that moment’s conditions and deploy all their Social-emotional competencies and abilities in the pursuit of a specific goal.

On the other hand, optimism is a condition that allows visualizing the present and the future with hope and positivism and empowers the will to face adversity with integrity, a consciousness of triumph, or to undertake unattainable tasks. According to ^{Seligman (2003)}, optimism, as an inherent aspect of human nature, converges with empirical investigations of optimism as an individual difference to show that optimism can be a highly beneficial psychological characteristic linked to good mood, perseverance, achievement, and physical health. Optimism also enables us to escape depression and difficult moments that sometimes occur in an economic environment in crisis and under circumstances never seen, such as the conditions in which the world economy has been left after the global pandemic of 2020/21 since it is expressed in the ability to plan proactively and force external and internal elements to direct them toward the desired order.

This condition is not exclusively about “thinking positively” and hoping that things will work out miraculously. According to ^{Aspinwall and Staudinger (2003)}, optimism is conceptualized in terms of generalized positive expectations, in other words, it is based on the construction of events that will unfold favorably because one works on them with professionalism and courage. This construction of events undoubtedly occurs from the basis of its conception in the imagination, nourished by everyday achievements, and from how the future is visualized based on what is currently constructed. In that order of ideas, future events must be the object of apprehension by the individual based on the current palpable reality and must have the capacity to occupy an ordered space in the mind of who is leading.

Ultimately, these must be apprehended repeatedly by the consciousness, until they are visualized as attainable achievements. Sometimes, it is complicated to achieve the proposed goals because there are exogenous factors that influence their development. Working step-by-step on set goals to obtain gradual achievements is also recommended, so that if the expected outcome is not achieved, some sort of positive or negative achievement will still be achieved, from which, in any case, benefits are obtained.

Widespread positive expectations are being built up now, and they are being set in motion tenaciously. From some approaches, it is believed that the benefits of optimism lie primarily in its links with the fact of insisting on the pursuit of goals (Carver & Scherier, 1990). This implies that not necessarily in all cases the objectives are achieved, but sometimes, it is enough to pursue them, work on achieving them so that when they are already aligned with the train of progress, they generate empowerment over the circumstances and end with good results.

Optimists are those who see their future favorably and who will therefore continue to strive to achieve their goals. These types of approaches are likely to yield good results most of the time, but they will also entail certain responsibilities if the tendency to evaluate our projects favorably predisposes us to avoid objective information about the risks that may arise in the environment or to devote continuous efforts in achieving unachievable goals. One way to understand how optimists navigate through these risks, is to study the prospective relationship of optimism with the processing of negative information and efforts to solve solvable or unsolvable problems. These analyses have found that optimism is associated with greater (rather than lesser) attention to relevant negative information about oneself and that optimists, when presented with insurmountable problems, are quicker to get rid of them if any alternative task is available. (^{ASPINWALL & STAUDINGER, 2003}, p. 136)

We end by relating optimism to some of the management skills that ^{Alles (2007)} cites in her Dictionary of Behaviors:

CONCLUSIONS

The human potential development as an essential attribute and role of an organization’s intangible assets is of great importance when managing human talent. It implies considering it as a variable in permanent expansion and without limitations. It also requires developing it, making the team’s members realize that they have one or several talents and that they can lead them to optimal development in critical situations. A self-aware leader discusses the topic of the value of stimulating the intellect, in other words, awakening the imagination and thoughts of followers, and stimulating their capacity to identify and solve problems with creativity. Managing human talent implies encouraging people to like to think because sometimes organizations like it when someone thinks for them.

Everyone has a specific talent for a certain type of activity, sometimes they know it and sometimes they do not, sometimes they lose it and recover it. Developing the human potential in a post-pandemic organization consists, to a large extent, in managing new talent through an inexhaustible process in which the work team is made to see that, to a large extent, their fulfillment as people and the organization’s future depends on them. Hence, it is a matter of empowering the teachers with the ability to think, of making them see that their development depends largely on their self-awareness, empowered and in control attitude over reason that inexorably forces them to produce and solve problems with creativity and optimism.

At the organizational level, the conditions of the team’s culture that support and sustain an effective joint decision, in addition to fostering innovation within the company, becomes an important element in promoting human potential through the forces of interpersonal relationships such as optimism, compassion, cooperation, tolerance, understanding, and forgiveness, which are so necessary in the critical scenario of unemployment and economic crisis brought on by the 2020/21 pandemic.

It is evident that the reduction in human labor in manufacturing operations, transportation, banking, supermarkets, etc., will increase gradually and there will be less paid work for the growing population (^{Cabrales, 2012}; ^{Rifkin, 2004}). So: in what performance areas should human beings exercise their obsolete physical strength? What will it be used for, if for three hundred years machines have been replacing them more efficiently in these tasks? And now that machines think for themselves, are more effective, less expensive, and less problematic: what are people going to do to generate income? As a response to the foregoing and with the reflections left by the lockdown, we revisit ^{Arendt (1998)} and those higher and significant activities for whose causes man would deserve to be freed from the burden of work, those sublime causes linked to the human dimension that the lockdown due to the 2020/21 pandemic, has made the world notice, causes for which, and despite the lessons left by the crisis, man is still not prepared for.

Considering the foregoing, the spectrum of research that is opening up in these disciplines that seek to merge the human condition and the development of human potential with the organizational sphere is broad. It is a call, so that from the development of the dimensions mentioned in the organizations and in life itself, for people to be better human beings every day, more committed to the fight against inequality, poverty, and to the planet’s conservation. Managing people in organizations based on the human dimensions allows the team to get to know each other, integrate, and give each other feedback based on their experiences. It helps them set mistrust, envy, and bad times caused by overwork aside, to focus on developing their skills, and bring instances of innovation to the organization that allows them to reinvent themselves amid crisis scenarios that ensue.