June 13, 2006

How Do You See Your Employees?

When you meet someone for the first time… it’s natural to make instant judgments about their gender, age, race, etc.

But do you go further and make certain assumptions based on those initial perceptions?

For example, “he looks to be in his 50s… therefore he’s probably married, with a mortgage, kids in college…”

We all do it. But unless your job is to appeal to mass groups of people, I suggest you try not to, and instead focus on each person you meet or deal with as an individual.

You see, generalizing and categorizing may be the only option for politicians and marketers. They aim to “sell” their ideas or products to large groups of people and have no way of cost-effectively understanding their customers as individuals.

But when it comes to managing people, I urge you to THROW AWAY ALL THE ADVICE on how to manage categories of people - whether it’s generations (e.g. “baby boomers”, “generation X”, generation Y”), males, females, races, cultures or other categories.

By all means respect someone’s culture, but don’t let your own preconceptions cloud how you deal with them.

Let them “tell” you - through what they say and do - who they are and what they value, believe, like, dislike, etc.

In fact, it’s ironic that we often generalize and categorize people in order to understand them better… when the most effective way to understand someone is NOT to generalize or categorize, but to focus on them as an INDIVIDUAL.

And the funny thing is… when you tend to treat people as individuals… people tend to treat YOU as an individual.

You’ll discover many more benefits of “treating people as individuals” when you get your hands on a copy of my employee motivation and management system, the How To Manage People System.