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.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 9th, 2006 at 12:41 pm and is filed under Business info, Communication, Culture, Leadership, Motivation, Retention. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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