DO UNTO OTHERS… how?

As a corporate behavioral specialist, Art Schoeck has some advice for managers and employees who want to improve relations: Forget the Golden Rule.

“The Golden Rule is totally wrong,” says Schoeck, founder and CEO of Data Dome, a clearinghouse for assessment tools. “You don’t treat people the way you want to be treated. You have to treat them the way they want to be treated.

Such straightforward advice has helped to make Schoeck an award-winning trainer and sought-after speaker for companies such as BellSouth, Hewlett-Packard, and Marriott International.

“We help companies analyze their positions, assess their people, and then apply their people the best way,” says Schoeck, a member of the One Ninety One Club in Atlanta.

In the past 15 years, Schoeck has spoken to nearly 18,000 executives and managers through his workshops, which touch on everything from preferred communications styles to helping companies increase productivity.

“The employee and company both have to have a win,” he says.

The top corporate mistake Schoeck says he sees is that managers “hire people like themselves.”

The former restaurateur also embodies the good advice he tends to offer others. As he puts it: “It’s not just what you’re good at. It’s what you like to do.”

Reproduced from Janet Mefferd, Do Unto Others, Private Clubs, March/April 2007 issue, page 88. Photography by Marc Climie.

Note: We have gotten some feedback on this. To clarify, there is nothing wrong with an ethics of action based on treating others as you would yourself prefer to be treated.

However, in terms of behavioral styles and communications, the way that you prefer to be treated may not bear much resemblance to the way someone with a different style would prefer to be treated.

For example, a low S has a quick pace. If they communicate with a high S at the pace they prefer, a high S will feel rushed – causing stress. When you understand what the positions in the four quadrants really mean, you can adapt your behavior to treat others more as they themselves prefer to be treated rather than projecting your own behavioral preferences.

We have found that it is not unusual for people to make value judgments based on behavioral style differences. For this reason, too, the distinction is valuable.

There is an implicit ethic in specifically adapting your style in order to better communicate with someone else: It can be a way of paying attention to – and honoring – their differences from you.

Ultimately, though, an understanding of behavioral styles equips you with a neutral language for understanding behavioral differences among us. Whether you use that insight for good or ill is another question (and that is when the original version of “The Golden Rule” applies once again!).

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