New risk: 'Territory bias' can be $1M mistake.

Here's a warning for managers who assign sales or service territories to employees: Never make assumptions about who can best serve your customers on the basis of race, national origin or other protected characteristics.

If you assign sales territories based even in part on territory demographics that mirror your employee's protected characteristics, you may end up losing a discrimination lawsuit. That's particularly true if one territory ends up being less lucrative for the employee than another.

Advice: The best way to approach territory assignments is to ask employees their preferences while fully disclosing potential earnings in territories based on past results. Then assign territories based on seniority, past sales or other factors unrelated to the salesperson's personal characteristics.

Occasionally double-check to make sure you're distributing work fairly and without regard to the race of the employee--or the population being served.

Recent case: The EEOC launched an investigation into an Illinois alcohol beverage...