We are all prone to assumptions. Our assumptions are based on how we interpret the world combined with deep societal and environmental prejudices. Those assumptions are part of our MAP and can interfere with our work. (Yes, assumptions shape all of your world, but this blog deals specifically with the workplace.)

In short, assumptions can really mess up your ability to manage today’s diverse workforce; not the diversity of race and gender, but rather diversity in MAP.

Mental homogeny can lead to a downward spiral in the corporate world, killing the innovation that’s often sparked by disagreements and “sibling rivalries,” driving out creative minds and promoting boredom.

Mental homogeny is the bastion of lazy managers (it’s self-propagating, too, since managers frequently hire in their own image)—lazy, because it takes little talent and less effort to manage a homogenous group.

Hiring diversity takes courage, because it requires you to hire and manage people with whom you aren’t particularly comfortable.

Learning to do it well offers huge payoffs for both your company, through increased creativity, innovation, productivity, competitiveness, and a broader perspective; and yourself, in greater satisfaction, enhanced opportunities, and increased earning power.

Managing all diversity, mental and otherwise, requires MAP that encompasses either excessive amounts of tolerance and patience, or award-winning acting skills and a championship poker face.

My own MAP prefers the first option, but I’ve known managers who succeeded with the second—although it seemed to me that they had to work a lot harder to do it.

To learn more about how assumptions ruin communications read MAP the spin on your AMS (Assumption, Manipulation, Self-fulfilling prophesy).

Enjoy life, this is not a rehearsal.

That’s right, folks, this isn’t a practice session for the next act.

And if you’re not quite sure how to apply it check back to Rules 1 and 2

Have a wonderful weekend—and, depending where you are, stay dry, stay warm, have fun.

Morale is a funny thing—what lifts one person up can bring another low. So, what’s a manager to do?

Know your persons, not just your people!

Sure, you know your people as a group, and you know each person’s name and a little about them, but what you really need to know is their MAP.

Without, at the least, a general understanding of each person’s MAP it’s much harder to successfully communicate and motivate your people.

Since MAP is a combination of a person’s mindset, attitude and philosophy, it’s most easily understood through accurate observation. That means no assumptions and no filtering their MAP through your MAP.

The trick to learning about MAP is to learn to be a sponge, i.e., absorb all that’s happening—reaction, body language, facial expressions, comments, the subtle nuances—without evaluating, interpreting, adjusting, or any other subjective function.

Remember, the effort here is to learn about the MAP, not change, influence or judge it.

Start your learning by partitioning your mind so that a small segment acts as a camcorder, recording both audio and video as you move through your world. It runs on automatic, needs no adjustment, and has unlimited memory.

Often, you’ll learn subconsciously just by recording events and won’t need to watch every segment. Conscious watching is more often used to solve communication problems, resolve a specific situation, or as a super-fast way to integrate a new player into your group.

Conscious watching requires quiet time to absorb the information, so try using the period between going to bed and falling asleep to replay the “recordings.” Study them to absorb the various subtle reactions to different stimuli, but no judging. It’s the same process that happens from watching actors in different roles, you get to know the obvious, as well as the subtle, ways they communicate their thoughts and feelings—in other words, you learn to “read” them.

You learn your person’s MAP by objectively seeing both the stimuli and the reaction to it as a “third party,” as opposed to the subjective learning that happens when you are involved.

Practice this and soon you’ll know your persons as well as you know your people.

Pretty much everything about compensation today focuses on “pay for performance,” although sometimes it seems that the higher one goes in business the less connection between the two. Compensation in media is another arena that makes one wonder; as do celebrities and professional sports.

Even when the person compensated can be said to have done a superlative job, the numbers still boggle the mind.

But, jaded as I am, the projected annual numbers I saw today for Wall Street seem completely out of whack. The most highly compensated folks on the Street aren’t offering brilliant (or not) strategy to the heads of the largest corporations, instead they’re playing the market for their employers with company money.

The worst run business still employs people and produces something; entertainers at least entertain, as do athletes, but the highest earners on the Street spend their days pushing money around. They produce nothing, employee nobody, and on the whole, contribute little to anyone other than themselves.

Obviously, there are many exceptions to this comment, one of the most prominent being Paul Tudor Jones, founder of the Robin Hood Foundation.

Another exception is a client of mine, KG Charles-Harris, who was a very successful M&A guy. He says that one day he realized that he wasn’t satisfied and that he really wanted to build something lasting. So he put his money where his mouth was and invested in, and became CEO, of Emanio, Inc.

Considering this year’s M&A activity I asked KG if he missed it. His response? “Not at all – I like what I do and the team I’m working with. It has been a very painful road to get to where I am. I’m glad that I’m working in a more nurturing environment.”

One more thing. I’m proud to make the first public announcement of the M3 Foundation, an organization dedicated to changing the future of Black boys in this country (Did I mention that KG likes challenge?), and want to thank KG for allowing me to be a small part of it.

I’ve commented several times in the past that “stuff” in cyberspace will never go away, and, more recently, that expunged court records often aren’t [expunged] and confidential information does get leaked.

Companies are moving from background checks prior to hiring to continuous checks during employment, using products such as Verified Person.

Screening and reference checks are needed, but consider this comment posted recently on the Business Week article cited above.

“Nickname: nate
Review: I’m currently unemployed. I have a felony conviction for larceny from when I was 18. I am now in my thirties, and still this haunts me. I am not even able to be employed in the field I went to college for, due to the non-hiring of felons policy. I strongly believe there should be a limit on the amount of time these checks go back. How many people can say they are the same person now as they were in their teens? Or 15 years ago for that matter? I am over qualified for most of the jobs I apply for, yet I remain unemployable. You can’t imagine how frustrating it can be. I agree with background checks but do not agree with the no-felons rule that my state (Florida) has. Any advice or comments: acanathan@hotmail.com Thank you, sincerely Nathan (Date reviewed: Sep 29, 2006 8:05 PM)”

How many did similar things, but weren’t caught? How would like your employment opportunities to be based on what you did sometime in your past? And, on a totally philosophical note, of what value are prisons and education when “paying your debt to society” and education do nothing to erase previous actions?

Even if one grants the need for such ubiquitous checking I have real qualms.

First, the checking is dominantly done via the web and the information in criminal, credit, and other databases is notoriously old and/or inaccurate, especially in these days of identity theft,

Secondly, it seems that both background checks and in-depth reference checks start diminishing as the level (not quantity) of hiring goes up, i.e., backgrounds are more critically checked for low level workers than for senior management.

Third, what effects, short and long-term, will this attitude have on companies’ ability to attract and retain their talent?

Finally, I really wonder just how often any of this, especially continuous checking, is applied to the company’s top brass?

I’ve received a number of calls telling me, politely and otherwise, that I didn’t know what I was talking about in the final sentence of Retention? Not at the top; that, in fact, it is CEO performance alone, not Wall Street, that impacts tenure.

It’s hard to do anything other than argue beliefs without stats and studies to back one up, and neither side had them.

Aha! Now I do.

“Analyst’s Report: You’re Fired
Wall Street analysts are crunching careers as well as numbers. If half of those covering a company downgrade its stock–say, from “buy” to “hold”–the odds increase nearly 50% that the CEO will be spending more time with the family within six months. And if just one analyst drops coverage of a company, the chance that its chief will be gone within a year goes up almost 40%.

That finding comes from research conducted recently by Margarethe Wiersema, a management professor at the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management at Rice University, and Mark Washburn of the University of California at Irvine, who studied Fortune 500 companies from 1996 to 2000. The “analyst effect,” they say, went beyond the impact of bad performance: The study controlled for the effects of dropping revenues and profits.

The results may resonate with those concerned about the high CEO turnover these days. (So far this year, 1,112 chiefs have left their posts.) “Our findings suggest that boards are not focused enough on fundamentals and too focused on Wall Street,” Wiersema says.”
By Nanette Byrnes, Business Week, 11.13.06

I, for one, am not surprised, and I’m sure many of you aren’t, either.

In a follow-up to yesterday’s post, check out Accenture’s idea for aiding Native Americans—and themselves. An idea conceived by personal self-interest, driven by corporate self-interest, and enthusiastically received by group self-interest.

Sure, it’s an experiment, will require lots of hard work, and probably be refined along the way, but isn’t that the path of every ever discovery made?

I was never thrilled when Sun Tzu’s Art of War became the basis for much of management during the eighties and nineties, so I was delighted by a Business Week article on a new trend in management based on the Bhagavad Gita.

I found it interesting (and heartening) that one part of this philosophy expands on what a brilliant manager told me over 20 years ago. He said that the best managers make their decisions first for the sake of their company, second for the sake of their group and third for the sake of themselves—certainly not the attitude we’ve been seeing over nearly a decade of senior manager greed.

We [RampUp Solutions] have always maintained that business is akin to three legged stool, with employees, investors and customers being the legs, and that if one leg is longer, or more robust at the cost of another, the stool won’t be sturdy and is likely to tip over. The Bhagavad Gita goes a step further believing “that companies should take a holistic approach to business—one that takes into account the needs of shareholders, employees, customers, society, and the environment.”

Three cheers! I’m all for that. I’ve always believed that it would be business, and business-style approaches, not politicians (who never put anything before themselves) that would successfully attack serious problems, such as global warming, the environment, health, etc.

I’ve also always said that the motivation to make this happen would be vested corporate self-interest and, to me, that’s just fine. (I agree with Ann Rand on the subject of altruism.) And guess what? It’s working big-time at companies such as Caterpillar.

Today, the value of retaining employees and customers, instead of constantly replacing them, is considered vital to a company’s health. It’s a concept that’s evangelized by executive coaches, consultants and academics for a host of reasons, most importantly, raising productivity and sparking innovation.

Retention is hot everywhere except the corner office where, to date, 1,112 CEOs have left. Some retired; and some are being ousted for playing financial games, most recently with stock options, but a large number just couldn’t move a multi-thousand person company from zero to 60 within their first 100 days.

Retirement is understandable and greed deserves everything it gets, but the Street’s impatience is the largest contributing factor to the destruction of American business. As Paul R. Charron, soon-to-retire CEO of Liz Claiborne Inc., says, “The market has a very short attention span. It’s easier to criticize than to construct.”

And there you have it. The 212-year-old force that was instrumental in building the most powerful industrial nation on the planet could be just as instrumental in presiding at its demise.