How do you achieve the empathy in your collaborators? Personal Maps can help you.

In 2014 I had the opportunity to work in a company that from the point of view of M.30 is a company that is managed under the management style M2.0 although there were more moments of management 1.0. The boss’s contact with his employees is very low or zero, the fact of observing the classical boss’s office with large, elegant spaces, well furnished, executive refrigerator, private bathroom and his door remaining shut rather than opening, leaves much to be said, generating a deep feeling of abandonment and insignificance towards his staff.

The simplicity with which I was presented to this new team of professionals: This is Rodolfo Suárez who will be the new member of the department..., he has experience in..., very basic or very traditional in my opinion. I wondered if a better or different way didn’t exist to integrate new members of the team to other employees and managers.

This unease led me to investigate and discover for the first time the existence of the M3.0 movement in the reading of the Personal Maps chapter.

If you are a leader who has been assigned a new work team and are not sufficiently known, you can use this technique initially to reduce the distance between you and other employees, this has a very positive impact on improving communication and collaboration.

Personal Maps is not the only practice that helps you to approach your employees and get to know them, in Jurgen Apello's book Managing for Happiness: Games, Tools, and Practices to Motivate Any Team he talks about others such as:

• Management by walking around
• Management by sitting down
• Management by Skyping around
• The Observer Effect
• The Close Proximity Principle
• Proximity Management
• Great Conversation Topics and Chit Chat

How did I experiment?
From my experience we apply it to make context, break the ice and establish a relationship of trust at the first moment with the new team members to which we will do a Coaching session or welcome a new staff to the office where I currently work.

Andrés Bello Catholic University Students personal Maps

They liked the activity because it expanded the information they did not know about their classmates; this improved their integration, collaboration and communication as students with the teachers. It also served as an ice breaker for facilitator to interact with the public.

Another method used is to make a welcome session for the new talent where everyone who works we make a wheel, where the new employee is in the center, each one will start asking questions to assemble the personal map of the new employee in a collaborative way, then the former employees will share their personal maps with the new staff so that the new employee will get to know more and open conversations about common things and establish a strong relationship of trust from the start.

If you set out to study and delve into personal maps, you can take advantage of this technique to discover other aspects, for example, what things motivate your people, and what things they share in common.

What I learned? 

By creating a personal map of your employees and presenting it in public, you are doing an act of leadership, remember that the knowledge worker today expects to feel valued as professionals and as people by their managers, that inspire and excite them.

I have seen in other articles how other practitioners of M3.0 have put into practice the mojito method in relation to this game for example.

Using modeling clay and the psychology of color more information in this link

Or use the Lego Serious Play Method instead of drawings, do it with Legos to create representative models, connecting the mind with the hands.

More details about Personal Maps

• Management is 5% instruction, 95% communication
• Personal Maps in 3D