My posts are pretty much all about team building and team building games, themes of leadership training and employee involvement and engagement. I was sitting here between thoughts and the twitter feed flashed by and the question above came into my mind:
Why DOES Godzilla, (our manager-leader), want to smush the many positive and creative ideas of Bambi, the worker?
My thinking on the reality of the situation comes across in my short animated presentation I call Godzilla Meets Bambi and which appears on my YouTube site. It happens and we all know it happens. I poke fun at the smushing, and write about it as dis-engagement or worse, but it is a most serious situation.
Godzilla Meets Bambi – a cartoon video of how organizational motivation gets smushed: www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOZk6UOii6M
The many surveys out there talk about the importance of employee engagement and how many Mission Statements have the phrase, “Our people are our most important assets” or something along those lines?
But why? Why does a manager feel like it is more important to quash new ideas than take the time to listen and to allow people to act on their ideas for improvement? Some of it is probably related to organizational power and ego issues. Some of it is the press for time and productivity and the lack of time for meetings other than the downloading of information that is required. Little time or focus seems available, even though the leadership is always talking about having a motivated workforce and having a focus on quality and productivity.
But there must be more to it, than that, isn’t there? This is about self-esteem and motivation and organizational improvement. It is about leadership and engagement. And there are impacts on costs, employee turnover, training needs and costs, etc. The skill of facilitation and brainstorming is pretty much known and fairly easy. Teamwork skill sets are common.
But reported behavior says that smushing is more common than encouragement, when it comes to employee ideas.
WHY can’t we simply get together on all this? Why can’t we remove the roadblocks that prevent employees from being engaged and involved in making their workplaces better? We know that engagement improves productivity and all that.
Good luck out there. Have some fun, too!
Need some tools? Check out Square Wheels and our many team building games at our website, www.performancemanagementcompany.com
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.
You can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com
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Learn more about Scott at his LinkedIn site.
Also published on Medium.
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