A.I.M. - All Inclusive Management - a child's perspective

You are familiar with the verse "and a child shall lead them".  I spent the weekend with my grandchild.  She  gave me several porcelain dolls as Christmas gifts.  There was quite a variety - small, large, brunettes, blondes, etc. 

One of the conversations we had (she is 7 going on 31) was a "mean girls" story.  It seems she is being harassed by one of the "popular" girls in her classroom.  One day the girl is nice, the next day mean. 

You know someone like that at work.  Suffering from either a low self-esteem or having been belittled as children, "mean folks" project the negative behavior when they are older.  We have created an entire section of the Human Resource department entitled "diversity" to ensure the proper behavior for our ever-changing environment.  Rather than focus on differences, we must focus on our similarities.

We placed all the dolls on my hotel bed and I asked her to sort the dolls as many ways as she could focusing on the things that the dolls had in common.  Some of the ones she came up with are pictured below.  There were more, I just wanted to give examples.

the group



wearing blue dresses

brunettes

blondes

wearing white shoes

on pedestals

both sides of the spectrum

wearing hats

Creating the scenarios and the dialogue made her feel better and more prepared for the next time she had to deal with the "mean girl".  If you have boys, use cars or trucks to create the same opportunity for understanding all-inclusive.mangement skills.

It is important to know for all of our uniqueness, there are more things that make us the same.  Those are the characteristics we need to focus on when dealing with people and understanding interpersonal management styles.