Taylors, SC – (5/10/12) Performance Management Company is supporting collaboration with its customers by offering them an opportunity to “name their own price” for the Square Wheels Facilitation Toolkit. This complete training package normally sells for $34.95 and contains:

• A Facilitation Guide with instructions for use
• A PowerPoint Presentation containing 64 slides, notes, quotes plus illustrations / cartoons
• A variety of ready-to-use handouts for generating involvement and engagement including:
• –a Worksheet for mind mapping ideas generated by the main Square Wheels concept
• –a Round Wheels Worksheet for identifying ideas and opportunities for improvement
• –a Key Learning Points Summary Handout of Square Wheels themes for implementation
• The “Teaching the Caterpillar to Fly” article by Scott Simmerman, focusing on managing and leading change for organizations and individuals

Based on the Square Wheels One illustration that is a proven, powerful tool for promoting a participative learning approach, it allows people to “step back from the wagon” and disclose their views about how things are really working, engage each other in a creative discovery process and use the diversity of ideas and perspective to generate thinking, innovation and communications. It’s a great facilitation tool for leadership development skills, employee engagement, team building and motivation.

Dr. Scott Simmerman, creator of the Square Wheels illustration series, believes that “Nobody ever washes a rental car” and that people become more engaged and motivated if they feel a sense of ownership in the journey forward. Therefore, Scott hopes that by your setting the price for this Toolkit, you’ll enjoy a keener sense of ownership/motivation for its use.

You’ll find the Square Wheels Facilitation Toolkit (an Asian version is also available with some of the illustrations more “Oriental” in appearance) on our website at www.PerformanceManagementCompany.com or go there directly with this link. The location of the shopping cart page for this is http://www.performancemanagementcompany.com/Square_Wheels_Facilitation_Toolkit_p/10.htm

Scott J. Simmerman, Ph.D., is Managing Partner of Performance Management Company and has presented his Square Wheels Illustrations series for Organizational Improvement and Team Building Games such as “The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine” in 38 countries. The products are available at www.performancemanagementcompany.com

Hope somebody likes this idea. My goal is to get people to first TRY using Square Wheels and then come back for more of our stuff. We think we have really great and simple tools for engagement and performance improvement.

Firstly, I am not a fan of most outdoor types of activities. Generally, the links to the business improvement issues — why companies are actually spending money and time with managers and employees — are sometimes quite vague. Sure, those are fun and people like to solve problems. But it takes a good facilitator to bring out the discussions and not all the facilitators are all that good.

I attended one such event as a participant and was there at a college with a bunch of my Leadership Greenville colleagues (a program supported by the Chamber of Commerce). Being collaborative and facilitative in my general style, I applied these skills in discussions about solving the task at hand. The “session leader” decided I was helping too much and told me that I HAD to be silent and could not talk. (Yeah, and imagine when I was allowed to talk in the debriefing! One of the questions I asked of her was about her business experience. Turns out that she had never actually had a job. And she is the leader of this group? Really?)

Another such program on collaboration turned into a mass group competition, where the VP of the group was timing the different problem solving activities and comparing different groups to the others. We actually had a really competitive volleyball competition, too, and during the awards ceremony, all the Losers actually BOO’d the winners in front of the company’s executive VP. And this was a team building event where they spent 10s of thousands of dollars! — I still have my trophy on my bookshelf as a reminder.

My outdoor deliveries include a session where the sun came out and totally washed out the images on the screen so no one could see what was happening and a different event where the temperature in the very large tent went to 100 degrees and the big electric fans blew all the papers off the tabletops (so we taped them down) and were so noisy that the debriefing was impossible. And this is the short-version of all the things that went wrong…

Another event had it rain for an hour right after we put the maps and things on the tables. We quickly recollected all the soluble stuff and then, when the rain stopped, we had each table select what it required from our “Organized Pile of Materials” and take them outside to the tables (that the hotel staff helped us dry off with a massive number of room towels).

YES, my games CAN be delivered as outside activities. But I actually cannot remember a single time when something did not go wrong and force us to make a major adjustment in our delivery. And I cannot imagine doing a large group, outside, with any kind of controllable learning outcomes. Here is one we did for 500 people:

If my client is paying big bucks to get people to the venue, feed them, house them and all that, and they are renting a room for lunch or dinner, why the heck not simply deliver the exercise inside under controlled temperature and lighting and audio/video and avoid all the disasters?

Lastly, I do not consider golf, bowling or firewalking to be very good team building activities. Baseball is okay, maybe, since everyone can play and bat and all that. But volleyball requires too much skill and the skill differences between people can be way too large. And how many times do I have to pass balls around or deal with a bucket on a string or hold hands with other people to solve a problem, anyway…

Have fun out there!

But this seems to be a new group, rookies in the organizational collaboration and team building arena who have the chance to get things started right. And THAT is really neat!

(Has it really been that long since the average organization has conducted any team building events? Really?)

So, we have been discussing doing team building events with managers and staff and working with slightly larger groups than a training class.

And I have been able to put my Coaching Hat on, and my Event Planner Hat, and offer up some ideas for optimizing impacts. Three of these contacts were going to run large groups (250, 100-200-500 and 1,100 (really!) and I shared some of my learned Best Practices for maximizing impact.

Basically, that approach involves getting all the Most Senior Managers into one room for 3/4 of a day. The session starts with a normal delivery of The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine, debriefed along the normal lines of collaboration and teamwork and planning. But then, the debriefing shifts to asking about the kinds of behaviors they would like to see from the people at the large event. That is always interesting, and the focus is on the shared mission and vision and generating alignment to goals, objectives and expectations.

Then, we TRAIN this group of Most Senior Managers to be able to support the delivery of the exercise. This group serves as the Provisioners and the Co-Expedition Leaders, operating in the environment where, “The Goal is to mine as much gold as we can.”  Oops — that should read “WE.”

The exercise is about getting help along with information and on collaborating and sharing information and resources to optimize results. But what these leaders see are people choosing NOT to get available planning information, to compete rather than collaborate among tabletops and to choose to not get help from the leaders who are there to help!

By having these real Senior Managers in this game delivery role, it is a great learning lesson on how to implement change and support high performance. One cannot simply TALK about it, they have to behave consistently and congruently. While a few of the teams will have precisely what they need to perform at a high level, those same teams will often choose NOT to collaborate, to thus “win” the game at the cost of negatively impacting overall organizational results.

Anyway, it is really neat to see these kinds of large events start happening again, since they can be powerful events to engage people in change and improvement and to lead them out of the current “engagement doldrums” that we seem to find ourselves.

Have some FUN out there yourself!

Scott

The book is about a couple of assassins who are also molecular biologists and run an exterminating business. They are on the run from a cartel boss who is spending millions of money to have them, well, “exterminated.” To get funding for their ecological idea of using bugs to kill bugs, they hook up with DARPA to genetically design some assassin bugs to fight terrorism. The DARPA guy is an end-of-days type who uses the bugs to attack Hollywood stars and bring forth Jesus.

As it rolls forward, there are slews of right wing Christians literally fighting each other over their differences in beliefs, a good-guy CIA type, a Catholic priest, a teenager and her mom and a bunch of honest and dishonest media types.

It is very entertaining, twisting and turning. Reminds me of one of my other favorite books,  Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins.

The Exterminators, by Bill Fitzhugh. 2011.  (http://billfitzhugh.com/ )

Science, religion, guns, drugs, CIA, DARPA, broadcasters of all types, Hollywood, deaths by lethal bug bites

– I mean, what is not to like??

Here are 90 seconds of me talking about how to motivate people:

http://employeeengagement.ning.com/video/interviewing-dr-scott-simmerman-in-changing-times-how-do-we

It is always neat to see someone else pick up on my themes and put their ideas together. They spin things differently than I would sometimes, which always gets me to think of alternatives and frameworks. Guess that is how creativity works…

They put it on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9vesahH05k
and they strung together some good illustrations, including The View at The Front and The View at The Back, two of the persistent audience favorites. The basic  idea is that the Round Wheels are already in the wagon, but the Square Wheels represent how things really work in most organizations. Companies are so invested in how they do things — now — that they cannot seem to make the simple changes to involve and engage their own people in the issues and opportunities that represent small incremental improvements for the future.

"The View at the Front" IS different than "The View at the Back"of the wagon. Wouldn't you agree?

Everyone says that these initiatives of getting people involved are not Rocket Science and I would agree. Seems pretty simple to me and this worked pretty darn well when I managed 126 retail stores a long time ago. People had lots of good ideas and the key was to identify, evaluate and implement.

Guess this would be my only “rocket science” cartoon:

Couldn't help myself, but Square Wheels on the Starship Enterprise actually make sense...

Funny, but people have always said that Square Wheels are great for cooking hot dogs, for controlling on very steep downhills and for helicopters. The Starship Enterprise and its sister ships could also benefit with them, I guess. Ya think?

Then, I have a phone conversation with someone and I cycle right back to the beginning, and I start talking about how simple and straightforward it can be to involve people because they want to solve problems and improve their workplace, given all the time then spend there… And THEN, I realize how much fun this all is and how wonderful the approach I have taken for the past 20 years really works.

Okay. The Situation:

The people are demotivated and unengaged (lots of statistics). And the theme of building some teamwork is suggested by the boss’ boss. Only there is no budget and no time. And no support from Training. “Just get it done!” we are told…

Okay. Pay $35 and get a toolkit containing worksheets and cartoons and instructions on how to use a simple cartoon to generate discussion of issues and ideas about what is not working and what could work better.

It looks like this:

Ask: “How might this represent how most organizations really work?”

Then you can pretty much let things flow undirected. Let people think and consider, let them play with the ideas at hand and the issues and opportunities. We’ve figured out a lot of different ideas and frameworks for facilitation and structuring the resulting issues and opportunities, with handouts like, “What are some Square Wheels we deal with” and “What are some Round Wheel ideas to fix this Square Wheel” and stuff like that.

But a few colored marking pens and some easel pad paper are pretty much all you need to generate the gap between the way things are and the way they should be and to generate the teamwork and energy and focus needed for most people in most organizations to be motivated to close the gap

Heck, you can even select one person who has natural leadership skills and just let them self-direct the group in rolling downhill and forward.

I read these articles about how difficult it is to engage people in the workplace and how people are resistant to change and how to motivate people and all that. All it does is make things SEEM really complicated and confusing.

I will bet you can do all that with just the cartoon above. Ya think?

Oh, almost forgot. The above is how things work in MOST places. Here is how things tend to work in Asia:

I’ve been using this phrase for dozens of years, since it elegantly and simply illustrates a very real opportunity for significant increases in employee engagement, organizational improvement, performance improvement and so many other aspects of improving organizational results.

It’s a really great anchoring statement and I have used it many times as the title of a presentation. But it also generates confusing reactions in some people.

It’s a metaphor! It is not a statement for Generally Accepted Accounting Principles or some Rule of Life. And it is funny — I have actually had people raise their hands in seminars to explain that they have actually washed a rental car in the past. Once in a while, they admit to being WAY overly compulsive and obsessed. More generally, they illustrate my key point…

The point is one of ownership — people do not take care of things they do not own. I can often illustrate this by asking participants if they have ever owned a rental property. Some of the tenants were exceptional and left the place better than before they rented it. But most share my experience: tenants at a house I owned nearly burned down the house with a chimney fire, pretty-much destroyed the wood floors, punched holes in the walls and left nail holes in nearly every wall. The rose garden and the camilla tree were gone, with the former used as for parking and the latter just destroyed (by motor oil dumped around it, apparently).

Ownership – If you own something, you tend to take better care of it. That is all I mean. Let me illustrate.

If someone in the workplace comes up with an idea and presents it to the manager and the managers enables them to try it, they most likely will, right? But, if the boss comes up and says, “Let’s now do things this way,” the general response will be for people to resist the change and generate reasons why it won’t work, right?

Statistics say that most executives believe that the most difficult aspect of any organizational improvement initiative is employee resistance.

Nothing corners better, handles bumps and speedbumps, treats potholes and curbs with disdain, accelerates faster and breaks harder than a rental car. (right?)

Who owns the idea? Not the employee, right? So, why wouldn’t they resist the idea? After all, they need to change, learn to do something differently than they have been doing it, have a higher risk of failure and will probably see a drop in their productivity in the short term. What’s to like about all that?

And there is another paradox at work, as shown below:

Leaders will resist changes they feel are done TO them.

On consulting projects in the past, ideas that I helped the workers implement were often resisted by the managers, who felt that things were not under control or moving too fast or similar. This happened less and less as my experience improved and I could generate a level of their involvement that would balance the issues of resistance on both sides of the wagon.

I’ve expanded on the issue of ownership elsewhere in my blogs such as here on innovation and here on leading meetings.

There are lots of ways we can do things differently to better involve and engage people in our needed improvement initiatives. But pushing and pulling is not the best of strategies. Sitting, talking, explaining and asking is often a much more effective way to get things rolling…

Put the wagon up on wheels for a while and consider alternative ideas generated by everyone.

Have some fun out there, too.

In the “Keeping Things Simple – Involving and Engaging” blog, I shared a cartoon called Trial and Error:

Take a moment and look at the cartoon and react to what you see before moving on, if you will.

Okay.

When I show this illustration to managers and ask for their reactions, the ratio I get is about 8 : 1. In other words, eight themes focused on the negative and what they did wrong for every one good thing they might see. Mothers usually call this “constructive criticism,” but I am not sure what good purpose it serves to continually point out what people are doing wrong, “even if it is for your own good.” as we so often hear as kids and teenagers (and workers, in so many instances!).

I think we, as managers, are trained to look for business improvement opportunities and to look for things we can improve. That is fine. well and good and serve solid business purposes. But when this gets expressed to our “teenagers” as Non-Support, we cannot expect others to just go along with that. Most people do NOT like the taste of castor oil, even if it IS for our own good!

What managers tend to do looks like this:

We embed the good with the blame and the people are more likely to run over the top of the hill and hide than come back to the wagon and continue to make improvements. Sure, their first attempt was pretty quirky and maybe they missed an idea or two about how they could get things done better.

But they also added a horse to the situation — more horsepower, as it were. And YOU probably have not considered whether this might actually work. What if the next step simply looked like this:

Allow people to do things and celebrate their successes.

Improvement is a continuous process, one that requires celebration of what is accomplished and continued reflection on possibilities and potential shifts in resource utilization. One might thing that there is a train in their future?

For the FUN of It!

And, I could get into my own convoluted pedagogical diatribe and gobbledygook on all things, I prefer to keep it simple and straightforward.

How do we involve, engage, and motivate to generate innovation and workplace performance improvement? Here would be my four key suggestions:

1. Ask, Ask, Ask, Ask, Ask, and Ask
2. Listen and listen and listen
3. Let things happen! Get out of the way!
4. Provide resources and support.

One asks, in my model of the world, with a visual image and some moments of silence. Ask them how this illustration might represent how things really work in most organizations:

Allow people to think about how things work...

You will find a variety of ideas about facilitation of conversations and idea generation in other writings in these blog posts. Basically, give them some silent time and then allow tables of 4 to 6 people to talk.

What will happen is that they will eventually to talking about the Square Wheels they deal with and the Round Wheels that already exist. And the reality is that once something is labeled a “Square Wheel,” people will want to fix it. So, this simple activity will set up 2, 3 and 4 on the list IF YOU WILL STAY OUT OF THE WAY AND NOT MEDDLE WITH THEM.

Most people in most workplaces have a (realistic) view and history that management is more the Party of No than the people who will enable them to actually make improvements and get things done. Is this because I have a biased view of supervisors, managers and executives. NO. (Well, partly). My view is based on survey after employee survey over the past 30 years — Big Ones done on thousands of people in dozens of countries and little ones done informally within workgroups using only pencil and paper.

Most surveys show that managers manage — they control and direct (and inhibit).

I was once involved with a Mission Statement for a large public utility and the Executives were asking if this phrase was a good one to include:

“We manage with uncompromising integrity.”

Well, the supervisors took one look at the above and quickly said, “No way.” They rewrote it to read,

“We manipulate with inflexible righteousness.”

So, my advice is to support where needed with resources, time, money, etc. but to get the heck out of the way and let the people play with the ideas until they can put them into an effective solution. It may take some trial and error (and look something like this:

Trial and Error. Do something and then step back from the wagon to see if there is something else that might be done...

If you are meddling, you will probably toss a Blame Frame around the above picture and generate defensiveness and an unwillingness to risk going forward. Blame Frames are really common in most organizations, and really easy to apply to innovations.

It is like the old Six Phases of a Typical Project Management Initiative:

1. Enthusiasm
2. Disillusionment
3. Panic
4. Search for the Guilty
5. Punishment of the Innocent
6. Praise and Honor for the Non-Participants