We often with Motivational Maps find that when we talk about them to potential clients and prospects they often comment that they ‘know about that’. ‘That’ meaning the Maps themselves; of course they often know nothing about the Maps but they do know about personality tests and psychometrical profiling tools and the assumption is that these things are all one and the same. It’s a mistake that’s easy to make: after all, you go on-line, answer a bunch of questions and get a report, right?
Unfortunately, so very wrong; but the situation is even worse when I tell you that Motivational Maps are not even in competition with personality and psychometric tools because it does something fundamentally different; yet alas it is in competition with them because at the end of the day most organizations can only afford to use one tool – the cost for one thing and the learning curve for another – and so in a real competitive sense Motivational Maps is the ‘same as’ these other products.
But given this background, why am I insisting that Maps are so different, and why should any organization consider switching to Maps from their old product? There are three compelling reasons and the first is very simple: namely, we must insist, the Maps are doing – describing, measuring, monitoring, maximizing – something quite different from personality and behaviours. They provide feedback on motivation and although one’s personality contributes to one’s motivational profile, it is not the same thing. One key difference that needs to be borne in mind is this: your personality is more or less fixed, it does not change. But your motivators do. The implications of this for any organization are profound. The first being that personality tools are ‘static’ whereas the Maps are ‘dynamic’ – they change over time and in a way this is more like people really are: they do change, for various reasons, and we need to be aware of these changes, these shifts in their energies and its directions.
Second, and following from the first point, is that because Map profiles do change that means that they pre-empt stereotyping. You are never just one or even three motivators, because next time you do the Map that profile may have changed. This is exactly the reverse of the personality tool; its validity is very much geared to it providing the same result each time the same person does it. And of course this means that you get that ‘pigeon-holing’ (stereotyping ) that so frequently accompanies people when they have had the test and get back into the office: everything they do suddenly being accounted for by their profile. This ultimately demeans people and also starts creating a hierarchy of ‘good’ profile types versus the lesser ones – that’s why you’re in ‘admin’, dear!
However, perhaps the most important thing of all is the third reason and this is less obvious. But once you realize that the stereotyping creates hierarchies, you begin to see that personality and psychometric tools are essentially top-down in their nature. ‘We’ understand your personality now, so we can control you now; and we can recruit just as we want with the added benefit of feeling more certain we can control you then, too!
Motivational Maps, on the other hand, is a bottom-up tool. Yes, management uses it, but can only use it by feeding the desires and wants of the member of staff AND by being attentive to shifts in that member of staff’s profile. We are not saying of course that a wholly bottom-up approach to management is THE solution; but it is clear that there is not enough of it about. If organizations want to find and release creativity and potential in their staff, then the bottom-up approach is the way to go. And Maps are quintessentially built on that premise.
Thus it is that organisations need to realise that not all these tools are the same, and where a budget is limited – and you want staff to get their mojo back – Maps is probably the best product on the market.
The Mapping Motivation Series 