Category Archives: Uncategorized

Military Team Building Games – some thoughts on alternatives

Posted on February 17, 2013 | Leave a comment

Good Governance, rather than autocratic leadership, is one of the keys to creating value and improvement for organizations and society.

Organizations of all types are looking for tools to help improve collaboration and teamwork and they sometimes are looking toward military models of operations, since we tend to view SEAL groups as highly organized and effective. Thus, many view the use of some kind of “military model of leadership” as a tool to improve performance in their own organizations.

And remember back in 1986 when everyone was going toward “Top Gun” kinds of training programs and employee improvement actions because of the popularity of the Tom Cruise movie and the apparent thrill of flying a jet fighter? Ah, if organizations could only work like that! Zoom Zoom! They were printing Top Gun Baseball caps for everyone, it seemed. (But if you actually remember the movie, the leadership and congruence among the teams sure was not that smooth and everything was a competition, which sometimes nearly got people killed. There was constant conflict and often a lack of coordination, Boss-driven compliance, demotions and all that…)

I am sometimes asked how our teambuilding and collaboration products can be used for a Military Team Building Game or similarly themed-exercise, either as a game with a military theme or one that can be used by a military unit to teach practical leadership and teamwork lessons. And there are a bunch of anchor points to generating good results and impacts.

Some of my client colleagues who do these kinds of team building events in various military organizations all say pretty much the same thing. Russ, for example, said, “The only thing I have to say is that military has the same issues as civilian, local focus, lots of distractions, different risk levels,…. Nothing jumps out as specific or different for Military applications.”

The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine remains my flagship product and one that we are proud to offer to clients of all types, profit and non-profit, who are interested in generating more engagement and collaboration across organizational barriers. The focus is on the overall result of the group, not any one team. And the applications toward idealized Military Efficiency are pretty straightforward.

My personal beliefs are that an exercise themed on a military team building would tend to be too focused on competition / violence, something that might not sit well with a female audience or one that an objector might find distasteful. My “Military Might!” exercise, for example, is one that my son and I designed initially for his high school Air Force ROTC organization to teach the criticality of planning and attention to detail. As Corps Commander, Jeff needed to improve how things worked and improve attention to detail, as in taking inventories and similar functions. But Might! game is about planning to kill terrorists – and I am reframing the design to become an oil exploration exercise with many of the same learning points; just a different message medium.

So far as generating compliance because or ordering people to do things, it is common that people commanded may not complain, they may simply do. But the distaste for being told will remain. And compliance does not generate a lot of desired outcomes in general.

And the basic theme of a “military game” may generate unanticipated consequences*. I have a friend who still suffers from PTSD from his activities in Vietnam. He remains an out-patient in the VA hospital and attends group therapy. If he were one of the players of a military-style game, he would have fun, but there would be a residue left behind from such an event and it would probably trigger a lot of negative memories and emotions. The problem is that one can never really predict what will trigger what in other people…

* (My lawyer friends say that nothing is actually “unanticipated” but that due diligence would discover the unexpected problem and prevent it from ever occurring! “Saying” that it is unanticipated does not remove one from the responsibility for the unintended consequences…)

A colleague in the DC area and who regularly delivers programs for military leadership development and communications courses had this to say about military-themed team building and leadership training in general (in blue):

For decades there’s been a huge emphasis on collaboration information sharing across units and services (between Army, Air Force, Marines, Navy). Collaboration is an important and real issue today between these groups, not to mention between our security services like Homeland, NSA, FBI, CIA and local police forces. There remain a wide variety of teamwork and communications issues that directly impact public safety.

The phrase “joint operations” is used frequently (a similar phrase is “going purple”). This is about reducing the historic inter-service rivalries, and increasing effectiveness through the concept of one, joint fighting force. This kind of military team building exercise can also show up on the local level. It is also related to Emergency Preparedness, where interdepartmental and turf issues can show themselves clearly.

[As an aside here, my personal observations of such joint operations at a local high school among the fire, police, state police, EMS and Public Health Services was so inefficient and ineffective to be almost comical. A big laugh for me came when one of the demolition guys took a great deal of time and space to set off his “explosion” to mark the beginning of the terror-response activity. It was a real “guy moment,” in my view and had nothing to do with the exercise other than the fun he had blowing stuff up! Heck, they had difficulty choosing the radio channel to use for communications among the divisions!]

Dutchman also contributes to understanding these concepts and their power.

- Today’s military and government agencies face a variety of pressures to be more nimble, fluid, change on the fly as conditions change.

- And today’s military members fill roles they haven’t played before, in place like Iraq and Afghanistan – nation builder, mentor, friend, teacher, diplomat, as well as warrior.

Interdepartmental Collaboration is not good

Joint military teamwork can look something like this

Those are a lot of different roles, so feeling part of a team and developing one’s leadership and collaboration skills is a critical component of any developmental initiative. Getting groups to work together across natural competitive lines is a powerful tool to implementing new missions and visions and optimizing results.

So, to the extent that Lost Dutchman helps people see the importance of what I mentioned, in the above, it can help you convince folks in the military of its utility for them.

(You can see more of Russ’ thinking about things here: www.russlinden.wordpress.com)

We think that we have an excellent leadership development exercise in The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine. It links to the real issues of aligning people to a shared mission and vision and it supports collaboration, even when teams choose to compete. And while it is not a military team building game, it accomplishes all of those things that such a design would need without resorting to attacking others or creating damage or some such thing.

Dutchman is about leadership and collaboration and sharing goals and objectives. It is about optimizing results with limited resources, planning and gaining strategic information that is critical for overall success of the team and the group.

Our many user testimonials say that Dutchman is a great team building game – see some of them here at our other blog

Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization improvement tools. Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced presenter and consultant.  Connect with Scott on Google+ - you can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

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Posted in Uncategorized, Corporate Team Building Games, Articles on Teamwork, team building exercises, team motivation, Leadership Development Game, business team building exercises, executive team building exercises, team building exercises for the workplace, team building event ideas, large group team building events

Tagged Military Team Building Game

People, Leadership, Engagement and Implementation – Best Practices

Posted on February 15, 2013 | Leave a comment

Robin Speculand and I go way back — I do not want to count the years. He is in Singapore and we have collaborated and shared ideas from our different perspectives for a long time. More recently, however, we have been drifting closer and closer and his recent work is aligning more and more with my thinking about people and performance.

Robin is a leader in the issues surrounding Strategy Implementation. Like me, he runs a tight ship and a small leading-edge company. I publish a lot more of my ideas and he publishes books and gives presentations. And his recent work is such that I take the initiative of re-publishing some of it before he has even published anything!

His recent work is titled, Implementation Best Practices from High Performing Leaders and it is based on his surveys and presentations and consulting. So, knowing that we start from the same place in our thinking of how organizations need to align themselves to implementing improvement, I thought to get a jump on things and publish some excerpts here before he even has it on his implementation website!

Robin’s model incorporates eight different segments, what are called People, Biz Case, Communicate, Measure, Culture, Process, Reinforce and Review. What he does in his paper is list some of the key traits and competencies that the outstanding leaders incorporate into their strategy implementation and improvement frameworks. It is a highly readable document so I read and reacted and summarized some of the content with a few bullets:

Without people engagement, implementation will fail.
Within the culture, leaders must identify the right activities to build awareness.
Leaders do not implement strategy, their people do.
There needs to be an understanding of what needs to change and why.
Successful implementation is about continued, visible support, Leaders don’t implement it, they oversee it.
While strategy is designed at the top of the organization chart, it gets implemented from the ground-up.
People resist change done TO them, not change in which they are participants.
Getting off to a good start is a lot better than trying to recover from a bad one.
Every organization’s culture is different and therefore their implementation is unique.
Strategy cannot be implemented if it cannot be understood and it cannot be understood if it cannot be explained.
Translating strategy into the business means examining what needs to change in the way people do their work.
When leaders don’t synergize between the strategy and processes, staff members end up continuing to work the old way, using old systems, structures, and processes that is extremely frustrating, annoying and even demoralizing. All the while they are expected to deliver different results!
It is not just any staff members who are part of a redesign team but it must be your top performers, as they are the ones who really know how the process works. The hands-on people know, the staff think they know.
The leaders are responsible for giving staff members the ability to implement, both real and perceived. They must create time, for example, by eliminating work that is no longer value added; provide budget to support the new strategy; create the space for individuals to discuss and reflect on the implementation; make it socially acceptable to participate and encourage individuals to break old habits and adopt new ones.
Individuals pay attention to what their immediate boss pays attention to. Leaders must ask, “What have you done this week to implement the strategy?” in order to expect people to do things differently.

Robin and I are working together on a few things around improving organizational effectiveness and I hope that my ideas and frameworks will help Robin make his tools even more effective. He has been using my Square Wheels cartoons for “spot color” in some of his programs and presentations and he has been using my team building game, The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine for some of his executive awareness work.

My goal is to package up my new game, The Search for The Treasures of Gobekli Tepe, as more of an executive development exercise with a solid anchor to the strategy implementation side of things so that we can use Dutchman more for the implementation rollout and the Square Wheels for the specific tools to use to improve communications between the supervisors and workers, something to improve engagement.

Dutchman works and it is nice to have Robin as a friend and colleague who supports my work.

I am hoping that we can help organizations generate a lot more Dis-Un-Engagement / Engagimentation in the workplace and do a lot less of the Godzilla Meets Bambi kind of reactivity.

At some point, Robin will get all this work up and online. I will update then.

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Thoughts on Millennials, Workplace Aging, Conflict, and Innovation

Posted on February 11, 2013 | 2 Comments

Three different articles this morning got me thinking about the workplace. One was by Lisa Woods about ideas to manage conflict in the workplace. It is posted up in her Managing Americans blog at this location and was referenced in a LinkedIn posting. It focuses on positive ways to look at and deal with conflict as it occurs.

The second piece was about the aging workforce. It referenced a book called The 2020 Workplace, which is about how the workplace will look. It is by Jeanne Meister and Karie Willyerd. The basic point is that our aging workforce will push 5 different generations of workers into the workforce soon.

I also recently posted on the issues of team performance, collaboration and managing workforce age diversity in my blog. In it I focused on some ASTD research about how people are choosing not to retire and how that is impacting the workplace, which is actually getting OLDER rather than younger as people deal with the economic uncertainties of our times. (Read this blog article here.)

It says, in part:

And. according to a new survey by the Conference Board, two-thirds of workers between the ages of 45 and 60 are now planning to DELAY their retirement and work longer. That’s a 20-point jump from 2010 – when only 42% of workers had plans to put off their retirement. Job losses, low salaries, and declining home values are some of the main reason why Americans can no longer stick to their retirement plans and plan to keep working.

The new workplace will apparently have 5 tribes, each bringing their own technical and cultural perspectives and each with its own worldview. These groups will have to co-exist and also collaborate in order for companies to generate desired outcomes and results. Think about the elderly customer who calls into customer service and gets the young kid, or the young kid that calls in and gets one of us Oldsters to handle their problem. There are all sorts of opportunities for mismatching and poor communications. The Millennials may see their co-workers as simply elderly:

While the older workers may not appreciate all that the younger workers represent:

Getting the younger workers to get up to speed on how things work may be an interesting challenge, since many workplaces have traditional ways of structuring and managing transactions.

“Traditionalists” are probably a bit more resistant to new technologies — teaching my mom how to use a cell phone has been interesting. Using the remote control is sometimes even a challenge when the one-button push gets out of synch and some devices are going on while others are going off! Coaching over the phone is fun. So, imagine the Traditionalist calling in and being told they need to give their pin number and access their account online in a conversation with a person who has been online and had a iPhone since they were two.

While the younger workers feel like so much is old-fashioned and not up to modern standards, some questions may arise as to whether we are using the newest of technologies:

Similar issues arise as systems and process get upgraded and no longer work like they used to. Some of the older workers may simply feel pressed to adapt to new technologies that are uncomfortable, so there may be some issues of resistance:

To make progress we need to consider workplace conflict a GOOD thing. It generates discomfort with the way things are now and also helps generate “considered alternatives,” things that might be done differently if we choose to do so. But, if an alternative is not considered, it cannot be implemented — it is good to have people thinking out of the boxes we are in… Conflict supports that, for sure.

Having a workplace in some level of conflict is what generates creativity and innovation and forces changes in how things work.

At the same time, a clarity of mission and vision, alignment of measurements and feedback systems to support the generation of desired results, plus sufficient non-direction and the ability to build intrinsic reward mechanisms is important.

We cannot just bring new workers into the workplace and set them free to do what they do. After all, they have no idea as to how we got to where we are and what our history looks like. We have, in so many workplaces, a long history of successes.

And we have a management team that has helped to bring us to our current point. Consider that good, but that it also represents a solid opportunity for a lot of organizational and leadership development. We need some new tools and some new approaches to getting things done.

The reality that there will be FIVE generations of workers in the workplace by 2020 is mind-boggling, and that the workplace will actually keep AGING as people keep working instead of retiring (all sorts of drivers). I posted up some thoughts and statistics about this before: (http://performancemanagementcompanyblog.com/2013/02/04/on-performance-teamwork-millennials-and-collaboration/ ).

So, let’t look to drive MORE conflict and chaos, but let’s make for some effective conflict managements to help direct the focus and energies in our workplaces. We do that by being tight on missions and goals and purposes but being a little looser on processes and procedures. And keep people throwing mud at the wire fence — it is the only way to see what might work.

Conflict is good. Manage it well.

And let’s figure out how to get there from here!

Our Square Wheels toolkits and our team building games offer some powerful, bombproof and inexpensive ways to improve teamwork and impact organizational effectiveness. Talk is cheap, but directed focus on issues and opportunities is effective in generating alignment and collaboration.

For the FUN of It!

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Posted in Articles on Teamwork, Change Facilitation, collaboration, employee motivation, Engagement, Facilitation, innovation, manager as motivator, Uncategorized

Tagged Leading and motivating Millennials

“Nothing Made Sense, and neither did EVERYTHING Else!”

Posted on December 11, 2012 | Leave a comment

Doing a wide variety of leadership and team building sessions all over the world for the past 30+ years, one of the most useful anchor points I have is that I do NOT know all the answers and should not be expected to. Heck, I should be able to even end sentences with prepositions and use dangling participles if that were the case.

Early on, though, I thought I needed to show my expertise, and have an answer for all things, but that is simply ludicrous.

I will share my opinions and thoughts when asked, but I also try to couch things in the framework that those are just thoughts and opinions… It is one of the reasons why I use my Square Wheels cartoons — they allow me to ask others for their thoughts and ideas. Yeah, I do have some anchor points and perspective, and I do use a variety of facilitation and organizational development frameworks and concepts.

SWs One - How Things Work

One reality is this one -
“A Desk is a Dangerous Place from which to view the world.“

I got that quote from a book of Jean Le Carre. I remember reading that in one of his hardback books and immediately writing it down. When trying to find it, however, it becomes impossible and I often think that others are simply repeating my reference as opposed to finding it on their own. But it is useful and it anchored the series of cartoons that I use to illustrate this concept:

IDEAS ARE GOOD. It is just that not every idea is a good idea. And one should not just go out implementing them without doing a little conversation, investigation and testing (“One Less Bump per Revolution” is one of my more favorite session punchlines!). I use this series pretty neatly in many of my leadership sessions. “A Desk IS a Dangerous Place from which to view the world.“

Another quote I use often is the one that titles this writing:

“Nothing Made Sense, and Neither did Anything Else!“

I thought I read that one dozens of years ago in Joseph Heller’s book, “Catch 22.” Funny thing is that if you do go online, you will see LOTS of references to the quote, many linked to me, but many on the different quote pages that refer to the phrase coming from Catch 22. On this page, for example, the first 25 quotes are all ripped off directly from my website writings — they were shared on a page a long time ago. Heck, they even kept some of the ones that I attributed to myself! ( http://creativemovesbpo.weebly.com/quotes.html ) — they call themselves “creative moves” but they shoulda maybe named the page, “outright theft. com” — same thing with this guy: vncnrajesh@gmail.com and at http://rajeshn.com/. Ah well…

I just searched again, thinking that some things DO change and found the quote on page 18 of Heller’s sequel to Catch 22 – “Closing Time.” I must have read it there and simply got confused. The link to that page is here. And the whole quote is embedded in a longish paragraph that goes:

“…Men earned millions producing nothing more substantial than changes in ownership. The cold war was over and there was still no peace on earth. Nothing made sense and neither did everything else. People did things without knowing why and then tried to find out.”

Ah: “Nothing made sense and neither did EVERYTHING else.” I had it wrong all these years (and will probably keep using it my way!). And I wonder how many years it will take for my wrong attribution to get corrected. I think it might never happen with the “Truth in Internet” reality…

My next Quote Quest is to find if Tom Peters really said,

“If we’re not getting more better faster than they are getting more better faster, than we’re getting less better or more worse.“

My quote of Tom Peters’ quote is on the above referenced sites that have taken quotes from my site, with no reference to having done that, in addition to others that attribute my quoting him to him. No chance of finding if it was actually his, and I heard that in another consultant’s presentation maybe 20 years ago…

If you go to those websites mentioned, you can see a lot of the quotes that I use. They did a good job of lifting them from my site. But at least they are not (yet) stealing my cartoons.

For the FUN of It!

Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization improvement tools like Square Wheels. Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced presenter and international consultant.
Connect with Scott on Google+ -
Reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

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Posted in Change Facilitation, employee motivation, manager as motivator, Uncategorized

Tagged leadership quotes

Simple thoughts on Extrinsic Motivation

Posted on December 3, 2012 | Leave a comment

Sometimes, I am not sure what triggers the motivation for me to pop into here and write up a blog. This one was triggered from “the holiday spirit” + some advertising on TV + a new LinkedIn discussion post on a similar topic + some of my own diabolical thinking and critical reflection.

This one is about motivating people through extrinsic rewards. Or, more about how that stuff actually demotivates people.

Extrinsic Motivation. What might make it effective? When might it not be effective and why? We really do know a lot about rewards, reinforcement and behavior and extrinsic rewards can control behavior in many ways — but some of them are somewhat surprising.

One is struck by all the ads on TV that suggest that viewers of football games and other TV shows will simply go out and buy someone a Lexus as a surprise gift for Christmas. I mean, really? Just hit the auto store and get that new car for a person who might be your wife or girlfriend simply because it IS Christmas (add theme of Jingle Bells here). (And you see the same kinds of ads for diamonds and other expensive jewelry — you are not a worthy person unless you spend lots of money on that other person on an extravagant or useless gift.)

Small Rant – Diamonds are always presented as a “very worthwhile investment.” one that holds its value. The gift that keeps on giving and that kind of thing. It is CARBON, people, and labs now can churn out truly flawless chunks of clear carbon (or colored clear carbon effortlessly)! The industry even suggests you give up 3 months of salary to get a “representative stone” for your marriage. Three months for a rock of carbon? Four years of car payments to demonstrate you are worthy? (Yeah, I rant…But how many people make money when they resell those things?)

Behind those ads, there must be some kind of hidden behavioral motivator that would cause one to want to buy a new expensive luxury car — I mean, most of us are not at all that altruistic, are we? So, what behaviors of that other person are you trying to motivate by getting that expensive gift?

There exists an extensive literature on BF Skinner’s concepts around the development of Superstitious Behavior, finding that a reinforcer following some random behavior will tend to make that random behavior get repeated. So, if the wife is washing dishes on Christmas morning when you say, “Honey, look out front!”, getting her a new car will reinforce her washing dishes… (More likely, she is sitting on the couch — remember, you made this choice of timing!)

A reality is that not all extrinsic rewards are rewarding to all people. That is one of the problems with using the to improve organizational performance. Generally, only the top performers actually get the rewards. And it is even worse than that. Bersin, in its “State of Employee Recognition in 2012″ survey, reports that nearly 75% of organizations have a recognition program – despite the fact that only 58% of employees think that their organizations have one.

Obviously, corporate programs, which represent 1% of total payroll on such extrinsic programs, are not getting much bang for the buck. But remember that it is the “winners” of these programs who get selected to be supervisors and the winners of those jobs get to be managers and the winners among them become their bosses. Gee, winners are the managers and who makes the decisions to keep these programs to reward the winners in place?

Why not simply focus on the bottom 80% of all the people, many of whom are disengaged and un-involved.

I share some statistics and thoughts on involving and engaging the mass of workers through something I am calling “engagimentation.” It is a program on Dis-Un-Engagement. It builds on teamwork and on involvement and can help to generate intrinsic motivation, which is much more effective.

You can download a pretty detailed article on engagimentation and motivation by clicking here: I Quit! Nevermind. Whatever…

You can read a bit more on the situation there. Personally, I think that the best motivators are not extrinsic and are not given to employees with a goal of improving results of some kind. Why? Because they don’t always work. For an example, let me illustrate with a puppy. I mean, is this a cutie or what?

So, here is the deal: Make a comment on this article and I will find one of these little puppy guys at a nearby animal shelter and give it to you, free. I will reward your comment with a dog that you can take care of for the next 10 to 15 years! What could be better than that? And this particular one is a Saint Bernard, a lovely little guy who will get bigger and bigger (and bigger). If I cannot find you one of those, I am sure that there are some Great Danes and other ones that you would surely enjoy in your place of abode.

I mean, would this not be a great motivator one could give to everyone who had good performance?

(Me, I do not want a puppy at the moment! One cat is more than enough!)

Get a reasonable gift for those you love during this holiday season. And remember that you wife probably does NOT want a new electric drill or leaf blower.

And when you think about rewarding workplace behavior with extrinsic rewards, recognize that “not everyone wants a puppy” and that you just may be rewarding behavior that you do not really want to re-occur. You give someone a cash award after they return from a sick day and you may be rewarding them not to come in to work! Or, your timing is such that they just told a customer to go away, so you might be rewarding that…

Better to look for intrinsic ways to reward performance.

Oh, if you like this post, you could buy me a new Lexus. Ya think?

For the FUN of It!

Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization improvement tools. Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced presenter and consultant and owner of Catie the Cat.
Connect with Scott on Google+ – you can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

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Posted in employee engagement, employee motivation, Engagement, Feedback, intrinsic motivation, manager as motivator, motivation in the workplace, Performance Feedback, productivity improvement, Uncategorized

Tagged motivation, people and performance, team motivation, workplace engagement, workplace motivation

Big Company Team Building Events

Posted on October 31, 2012 | Leave a comment

This is about what Big Companies do for team building events. It is also about Big Events for companies, I guess.

People at Onlinemba.com came across my blog while researching Team Building and sent me a link to one of their articles. It’s title is, “How the Top Companies Take On Team Building” and I like the way it starts, since I pretty much agree with this:

Few corporate-culture business phrases are as potentially groan-inducing as “team building.” Visions of cheesy performances and “inspiring” activities like coal walking and trust falls immediately spring to mind.

I’ve posted up before on some of the more ridiculous or hard to link so-called team activities such as fire walking — maybe there are some positive individual impacts from that but I just do not see the team aspects unless we get into the discussion about peer pressure forcing people to do things that they don’t really want to do. (Sorry, I meant “encouragement” instead of coercion or force in the above…)

Heck, even Dave Berry weighed in on Burger King’s toasty experience with that activity — see my blog post on that here.

But the article mentioned above is a pretty good one. It talks about some different activities that DO have positive organizational impacts, many of which are not costly. Some are a bit off the wall, like hiring a comedy troupe to come in and cause people to laugh. I have actually seen that backfire but that is a whole ‘nother conversation. And they talk about doing Personality Tests as a team building exercise — I guess that could work but it does not sound like a lot of laughs. Maybe they could let the comedy troupe do the testing?

Me, I will just stick with offering games such as The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine that are fun, controllable, inexpensive and actually link directly to workplace collaboration and performance improvement. We know that it has a lot of long-term impacts on participants and gets everyone involved and engaged. AND, it can be used for very large groups of 200 or even more.

For the FUN of It!

Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization improvement tools. Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced presenter and consultant.
Connect with Scott on Google+ – you can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

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Posted in Uncategorized, Corporate Team Building Games, Articles on Teamwork, team building exercises, collaboration, Leadership Development Game, motivational team building exercises, executive team building exercises, team building exercises for the workplace, team building event ideas

Motivation and Dis-Un-Engagement

Posted on October 31, 2012 | Leave a comment

I got engaged in a discussion on LinkedIn, on a discussion page for HR professionals, where the question focused on, “How one can keep an employee motivated.”

The comments, again from HR people, focused on motivating employees through appreciation and recognition, having “a good environment,” having good morale where motivation, environment, management and employee relations affect things – and also having monetary benefits, having a speech to inspire them (and that they cannot always be motivated), and that they should be happy to work for your company (I am not sure if the latter meant that they should he happy to have a job or that they should be happy while working for your company).

The contributors also thought that one should also analyze each person personally and be sure that the employee is properly placed according to their strengths and expertise and that they should be assigned, “challenging work that would keep the passion burning.”

Lastly, I thought that this was also an interesting comment:

“Motivation sparks from self. A self-motivated person enjoys everything in life. Other people can just inspire the person. A person who enjoys his or her work can only stay motivated. Money, appreciation, recognition, environment along with work & personal life balance are some factors which helps only after the person is self-motivated. Its my personal view.“

All this is fine well and good. And it makes sense. BUT, will any of these thoughts actually impact work and productivity or quality or anything? My response was as follows:

There is a really great short video by Dan Pink on the theme of defining INTRINSIC motivation — it is animated and 11 minutes long and you can see it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

So, motivation is one thing that is actually pretty well understood. The issue is that organizations tend to focus much more on EXTRINSIC (applied) motivators rather than create a workplace that is engaging. Much of this comes from the work of BF Skinner on animals during the 60s and 70s and those who followed him (like me). It got into schedules of reward and all sorts of things, including superstitious behavior (blowing on the dice to roll a 7, for example).

People like Alfie Kohn (Punished by Rewards, etc.) showed many of the downsides, but businesses today spend about 1% of revenues on such extrinsically driven “reward systems” that half of the employees do not even know exist. Obviously, there are mixed levels of effectiveness.

A better approach is to focus on improving the workplace to do a better job of NOT de-motivating workers. Much of my recent writings have been on themes like Dis-Un-Engagement and Dis-Un-Empowerment, focused on getting “leadership” involved to do more to REMOVE those things that workers and work teams find de-motivating.

This kind of initiative can help generate alignment and teamwork and motivation and engagement / involvement to make things better for each and all.

The research shows that people are not engaged, in general. Spending money on a survey that tells you that you have a problem seems a bit foolish — if I were to ask four or five people the same questions, the dis-engagement would be obvious (either theirs or that of others they work with).

A LOT of this stuff ain’t Rocket Science and HR ain’t gonna fix it.

Some things need to be accomplished locally, at the interface of worker and manager; only there will improvements be made. (The exception might be if the feedback and measurement system were changed, since that helps drive behavior. Feedback drives results.)

YOU simply cannot MOTIVATE ME or anyone else. People motivate themselves and offering some “reward” for improvement is going to be a very short-term solution for maybe half of the workers.

As a joke, I could also offer them 10 cents if they were to reply, just to see if I could make my point!

A lot of people think that this is how things work in the workplace, insofar as motivating people for performance:

Needless to say, it might work in the former case until people want and expect even more, and it will certainly work in the latter (until the boss turns his or her back). The latter also generates Compliance, which translates to “very average” performance and there is no motivation to excel.

What we need to do is to remove the things that the people see as getting in the way of them excelling. Almost everyone WANTS to succeed. Let them.

Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization improvement tools. Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced presenter and consultant.
Connect with Scott on Google+ – you can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

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Posted in collaboration, employee engagement, employee engagement, intrinsic motivation, motivation in the workplace, ownership involvement, team motivation, Uncategorized

Are Square Wheels better than Round Ones?

Posted on September 25, 2012 | Leave a comment

We have been playing with the concept of Square Wheels as a descriptive tool for organizational improvement since 1993. And, we routinely find that the Square Wheels represent things that thump and bump along for most people, such as dealing with companies like Charter Communications (over and over, thump thump… I wish they would fix the problem I first reported in June!) and with company automated call directors when you call in (“Please listen to this entire message, since our system has recently changed…”) and all that…

When we present Square Wheels One, we commonly get LOTS of examples of what might be happening. I’ve actually collected over 300 different responses to the illustration, many of which I have reported elsewhere and in powerpoint slides and in other media. Often, they represent problems in making smooth forward progress:

(unknown source)

BUT, wooden Square Wheels are not always problematic for everyone or in all situations. Sometimes, a Square Wheel represents a better solution:

It is better for cooking hot dogs than rubber tires
It works better for helicopters
It is better to use Square Wheels when descending steep hills
They are easier to stand on if you have to look far forward
They represent better opportunities for improvement

And, yes, SQUARE Wheels are better for shooting cannons.

But generally, most people would agree that implementing Round Wheels in the workplace is a far better idea than continuing to frustrate people with the constant thumping and bumping of the Square ones. Giving people a chance to implement solutions is intrinsically motivating, especially when they do this in small teams and get the recognition from others in the organization about the positive impacts of those improvements.

Have fun out there and get things done!

Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization improvement tools. Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced presenter and consultant.
Connect with Scott on Google+ – you can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

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Herding Cats and Building Teamwork – some funny videos!

Posted on September 21, 2012 | Leave a comment

Years ago, Al Breland showed me a clip of the EDS commercial that used Warren Bennis’ theme (his book of 1997) that managing is a lot like herding cats in a really funny commercial. So, when a new customer used that phrase in our discussion about building improvement and collaboration and shared focus on moving things together, I laughed and referenced the video on YouTube.

You can see it here – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_MaJDK3VNE

When it comes to how groups really operate, the Herding Cats analogy is a really good one. Most top performers tend to like to do things their own way, which is one of the reasons that they tend to be top performers! And, in exercises like The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine, it is obvious that teams of people like to make their own decisions and choices and that leadership can only influence them, not control what they do.

(I have often likened play of Lost Dutchman like what occurred in the movie, Far and Away, where it depicts the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889. You can see a clip of this also on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxaJY8UZxn4. Yeeeee Haaaaaaa!!!!!)

What we do with Lost Dutchman and our other exercise is get participants to have some fun, make some choices, and behave. We then link the behavior to the desired outcomes of the session and get people talking about the need for clarity, the impact of leadership and collaboration, required resources to succeed and similar issues that may be perceived to occur in most organizations. This gives that management team an opportunity to address those perceptions, ask for commitment, and get things done more effectively.

You can find a full history of how EDS’ Herding Cats advertisement was constructed by checking out this site — theinspirationroom.com — where you can also see the video about The Running of The Squirrels, which is also a hoot!

Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization improvement tools. Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced presenter and consultant.
Connect with Scott on Google+ – you can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

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Posted in Uncategorized

Thinking and the Brain – Why we need simple tools

Posted on August 23, 2012 | Leave a comment

I have been thinking about thinking lately, which is sometimes a dangerous thing to do, and wondering why things are not easier and simpler. But there are paradoxes everywhere… As a funny example, there is a thread in one of my LinkedIn groups about why managers are stingy with praise and a couple of my more lengthy posts are about thinking patterns and even genetic biases toward criticism as it drives continuous improvement. I think you can get to that thread by clicking here.

Anyway, I thought it got pretty funny, ironic and paradoxical that people would be criticizing other people’s comments, thoughts and suggestions in a thread about why people do not give more praise. I mean, should we not be giving some praise to those people sharing ideas??? Ah, the irony…

But a StumbleUpon email I got sent me to a Wikipedia page that pretty much shocked and amazed me with its list of behavioral complexities when it comes to how people think. It is, a List of Cognitive Biases that you can find here.

A quick look will give you a better insight into why we cannot get much agreement about anything and how we really need some simple tools to generate organizational alignment, ideas for improvement and the agreement on implementation strategies or pretty much ideas for ANY agreement.

Here are only the “A’s” and “B’s” in that list, with their definitions and links, which will give you a better idea of the complexity of all this:

Ambiguity effect – the tendency to avoid options for which missing information makes the probability seem “unknown.”^[6]
Anchoring – the tendency to rely too heavily, or “anchor,” on a past reference or on one trait or piece of information when making decisions (also called “insufficient adjustment”).
Attentional Bias – the tendency of emotionally dominant stimuli in one’s environment to preferentially draw and hold attention and to neglect relevant data when making judgments of a correlation or association.
Availability heuristic – estimating what is more likely by what is more available in memory, which is biased toward vivid, unusual, or emotionally charged examples.
Availability cascade – a self-reinforcing process in which a collective belief gains more and more plausibility through its increasing repetition in public discourse (or “repeat something long enough and it will become true”).
Backfire effect – when people react to disconfirming evidence by strengthening their beliefs.^[7]
Bandwagon effect – the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink and herd behavior.
Barnum effect - the observation that individuals will give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people.
Base rate neglect or Base rate fallacy – the tendency to base judgments on specifics, ignoring general statistical information.^[8]
Belief bias – an effect where someone’s evaluation of the logical strength of an argument is biased by the believability of the conclusion.^[9]
Bias blind spot – the tendency to see oneself as less biased than other people, or to be able to identify more cognitive biases in others than in oneself.^[10]

And this is but one of four sections:

Decision-making, belief and behavioral biases
Social biases
Memory errors and biases
Common theoretical causes of some cognitive biases

Obviously, this “information processing” of simple ideas is not really all that simple. There are tremendous differences in how people process information and assuming that “What you say is what they get” is really way off target — anything you say will go through that person’s own filters, some of which are listed on that Wikipedia page.

What you say is NOT what they get!
People process your ideas in their own way.

More than anything else, this points me toward the simple reality that we need to use simple images and ideas and generate discussions among people before we try to move anything forward. Nobody ever washes a rental car, and allowing them to build a sense of ownership / involvement is key to generating change and improvement.

The simple cartoon approach I have been suggesting for 20 years is one that allows them to apply their different individual information sorting patterns onto the ideas of a small group of people. Those could focus on what is wrong, what possibilities exist, what ideas they have for change and implementation and these discussions are more likely to generate a sense of ownership involvement, engagement and employee commitment than the simple and common approach of telling them what to do and holding them accountable for doing it.

Otherwise, I think we are just throwing mud at the wire fence and hoping that some of it will stick somewhere. One can normally expect rain…

Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization improvement tools. Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced presenter and consultant.
Connect with Scott on Google+ – you can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Category Archives: Uncategorized

Military Team Building Games – some thoughts on alternatives

People, Leadership, Engagement and Implementation – Best Practices

Thoughts on Millennials, Workplace Aging, Conflict, and Innovation

“Nothing Made Sense, and neither did EVERYTHING Else!”

Simple thoughts on Extrinsic Motivation

Big Company Team Building Events

Motivation and Dis-Un-Engagement

Are Square Wheels better than Round Ones?

Herding Cats and Building Teamwork – some funny videos!

Thinking and the Brain – Why we need simple tools

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