Month: December 2013

In this post, I wax philosophic about a suicidal Russian poet and depression and share some thoughts on workplace motivation and issues of involvement. It starts out tough but, hopefully, you’ll find the ending more uplifting.

———

Sergei Yesenin 1922 Sergei Yesenin was a lyrical Russian poet around the turn of the last century, who wrote about the depression and difficulty he saw in the world around him. He might be the best known of all the Russian poets based on a couple of websites. I saw this reference to him in a poem in a novel I read this week:

The moon will float up into the sky,

dropping the oars into the water.

As ever, Russia will get by,

and dance and weep in every quarter

and that got me looking up information in Wikipedia and TheInkBrain, which has an extensive biography. His last poem, “Goodbye my friend, goodbye,” was written at age 30 and done in his own blood just before he committed suicide in 1925. They are beautiful but often sad writings and the view of the world of which he writes is engaging– he starts with writings about love and the meaning of life while his latter works take on a much less positive view of the world around him. Depressing and hopeless…

But no longer wake me up at sunrise,
As you used to do eight years ago.
Do not waken dreams no longer precious,
Hope never fulfilled do not excite.

Somehow, my thoughts around this led to my thinking about the new, involved and enthusiastic employee who is often found to succumb to the dreary realities of so many workplaces and whose motivation and energy eventually tends to norm downward — regression to the mean, the average of that workplace. For me, it is about the existing opportunities that are there to be realized and what might be possible versus the sad reality of what too often happens for so many people in the workplace in that they don’t continue to feel involved and motivated. We can do things differently; we can make better choices.

One of the biggest challenges we face as managers in organizations is the mental health of our people and their ability and desire to work in teams and to be productive and innovative. If they simply drift toward their perceived reality of few real opportunities for personal improvement, we will not see the impact that I think we want. Lots of people have difficulties working and being involved and engaged in the day-to-day opportunities, based on many studies done around issues of engagement and motivation. Why do we keep doing things the same way?

In a relatively recent study, The Ken Blanchard Company found that while 70% of employees wanted to converse with their manager about their goals and tasks, only 28% of leaders actually tended to have those kinds of conversations with their people. This same study also found that more than 80% of leaders don’t listen to their employees, something that we have read in the literature since, well, the turn of the century! Some things just do not seem to change. The study found that 64% of employees want to use meeting time with their bosses to solve workplace problems while 19% report that they rarely or never have those conversations. Sixty four percent wish they could talk with the boss about problems with colleagues but only 8% actually do.

Is it that there is simply no time to listen? Are people afraid? Is the depression of ideals and morale just that pathetic in the workplace today? Do we not have all the technology we need such as smart phones, email, texting and other kinds of communications? Or is it that managers just do not really care about people and performance. I am befuddled. I see the world operating like this day after day and year after year and decade after decade:

Can’t we just talk about things? The Round Wheels are already in that wagon! Every time and always. Let’s choose to do things differently in 2014 and make a big difference in people and performance.

Why bother? Lots of reasons including these business ones: Sirota Research found that high-morale companies greatly outperformed their industry competitors in 2012 when considering year-over-year stock market returns. Sirota found that companies with high morale (those with scores at the 75th percentile or higher who ask “overall satisfaction with their company” on their annual employee attitude surveys) had stronger year-over-year stock performance than their industry counterparts.

High-morale companies averaged a 15.1% improvement in their stock price while their matched industry comparisons averaged only a 4.1% year-over-year improvement (a difference of 11 percentage points or 368%!) Moderate-morale companies (companies scoring between the 25th and 75th percentiles on employee attitude surveys) matched their industry counterparts with only a 0.8 percentage point difference, and the low-morale companies were 166% (or 13 percentage points) lower than their industry counterparts.

“We’re Not So Bad” is apparently not so good, either!

There is also an interesting post on worker-owned businesses (link is here) and it says, in part, that even without transitioning to a co-operative structure, we can learn from democratic workplaces and adopt the way they function. The author adds her thoughts to a recent article by David Brodwin in US News and World Report that made the case for why more employee-owned businesses are needed. Brodwin compared cooperatives and top-tier professional firms run by partnerships, stating that each type of business is more accountable, resilient, and flexible. The number of these worker-owned business in the United States is growing around 6% per year and now account for about 12% of the private sector workforce.

So, some changes are occurring in organizational structures that support more employee involvement and ownership. Since we can each choose to do things differently, maybe that poem used to start this article should become:

People can fly high in the sky,
And cause great ripples in the water.
Companies can do more than get by,
And see so many impacts every quarter.

—

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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Scott’s blog on Poems and Quips on Workplace Improvement is here.

Year End Message – Make it Work!

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On December 21, 2013

In employee motivation

A friend dropped me a nice note about our team building and a proposal we have going and I joked about the Happy New Year Thing so I thought to capture a graphic image to include in some of those casual end of year notes to people. Then, I thought to include it here and wish you well in all things.

So, DO have a fun year out there and get things done.

For the FUN of It!

Connect with Scott on Google+ – you can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

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Scott’s blog on Poems and Quips on Workplace Improvement is here.

Bad Dream and Reframing – Improving one's outlook on things

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On December 17, 2013

In Brain and Behavior, employee motivation, manager as motivator

I had written this down on a scrap of paper:

“I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space were it not that I have bad dreams.”

I had no idea as to where it was from, but guessed that the water drop marks on the paper might have indicated that I had written this down while sitting in a hot bath, reading and listening to music, which I try to do a couple of times a week.

Maybe it was from a Pearl Jam or Counting Crows or Led Zeppelin song or something like that, since they write good lyrics. So I went online and looked up song lyrics and part of the quote and found that the group Scuba has a rock and roll song called, King of Infinite Space (and you can hear a 30 second preview). I also found that Dream Machine used that lyric in Lilac Time, but they are not on my music list.

So, I did a general search and found a really surprising source:

Act 2, Scene 2 of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet

ROSENCRANTZ
Why then, your ambition makes it one. ‘Tis too narrow for your mind.

HAMLET
O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

GUILDENSTERN
Which dreams indeed are ambition, for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.

HAMLET
A dream itself is but a shadow.

ROSENCRANTZ
Truly, and I hold ambition of so airy and light a quality that it is but a shadow’s shadow.

And THAT reminded me of The Shadow by T.S. Eliot:

“Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow”

That was always a good quote to use when talking about the implementation of ideas and the concept of Murphy and his various laws and corollaries.

You can find my blog on the origin of these Laws and thoughts on their relationships to organizational performance at this blog post of mine and at this post on reframing situational performance improvement.

Yeah, this post rambled a bit.

But I am guessing that it must be bad dreams or shadows or something, ya think?

Hope that all goes well for you,

For the FUN of It!

————

Connect with Scott on Google+ – you can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

Follow Scott’s posts on Pinterest: pinterest.com/scottsimmerman/
Scott’s blog on Poems and Quips on Workplace Improvement is here.

Perfect Play — How can an organization understand what it needs to accomplish to maximize success?

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On December 16, 2013

In Articles on Teamwork, Change Facilitation, collaboration, Continuous continuous improvement, employee motivation, Engagement, Facilitation, Feedback, manager as motivator, Performance Feedback, productivity improvement, workplace performance improvement

Thirty years of working with organizations may have taught me a couple of things. One is that a sense of teamwork is critical, along with a real understanding of the issues of alignment. Performance feedback is much more important than “reward systems” and extrinsic rewards. And there is no silver bullet about leadership — it is so much about clarity of expectations, required resources to support results, and an understanding of issues and opportunities.

What I want to do herein is to share some simple bullets that I feel link to the issues around optimizing performance. I also included a bunch of links to my other blog posts. My goal is to create one or two “Ah Ha!” moments and provide some ideas and maybe assist you in seeing how you might do one more things better or differently. The key is generating behavioral change and continuous improvement in how things are accomplished.

How does one even start… Let me begin with a key concept that seems to apply everywhere and that is on the framework of involvement and engagement:

Yes, Ownership! If we do not allow people to have a sense of real ownership, we simply cannot realistically expect them to take care of something. That would simply be illogical, as Mr. Spock might say.

The cartoon above actually represents a number of key points that I would like to make:

The hard part is getting the wagon to begin to roll downhill. We push that thing uphill a lot more frequently and involving and engaging and building a sense of momentum is often the hard part for getting things moving.
If the wagon puller is not expecting things to move faster than they have been moving, or they have not been actively involved in the design and implementation process, they will feel that things are being done TO them and most wagon pullers will resist that, even if it makes good sense to roll forward.
We roll along on those very common Square Wheels, which work but do not work smoothly. Square Wheels are Everywhere!
Our focus on pushing and pulling will often result in a sense of non-awareness of those Round Wheels that already exist within the wagon, those things that could simply be implemented if we had the time and the tools to do so.

So, one message for anyone leading anyone is pretty darn simple:

Simply stop, stand there, observe and consider. Get out of the way, if that will work. Involve and engage people. Ask for ideas. Talk about what is not working smoothly.

So, one thing that we offer customers is our Square Wheels facilitation toolkits, simple sets of instructions, powerpoint slides and worksheets that enable them to involve and engage people in discussions about what might be improved and how to get those ideas implemented. You can see some of the variety of offerings on our Square Wheels Facilitation Tools pages on the website. You can also read about these ideas on this blog.

In our flagship team building exercise, The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine, we give teams “sufficient but not excessive resources” along with a challenge to, “Mine as much gold as we can.” We provide them with an attractive vision of the future and a specific goal, immediate feedback about their decisions and the impacts, and allow them to implement their plan for play. Every team does well, but some do “more better” than the others. And we share with them a framework for Perfect Play, what they could have done to optimize results if they had made different choices.

Generally, teams mine between 4 and 9 days of gold. But they could have done better if they made different choices and involved leadership and collaborated more between the different teams:

They could have mined as many as 11 gold. And, as we debrief the game and discuss the decisions and the planning and the inter-table interactions, our goal is to reframe the play of the Dutchman Game into the play of teams in the workplace. We want to open people up to discussing what is motivating and demotivating and what they could choose do do differently.

This can involve discussions and personal choices, as well as team-based effectiveness and

I find that “Perfect Play” comes from repetition, from stepping back and looking objectively at what decisions were made, what was accomplished, and what alternatives were available. It comes from having great performance feedback and flow. It comes when people are involved and engaged. And, ideally, playing again and again and repeating the cycle over and over.

When I was working in quality improvement initiatives, we called it,

Good leaders and top teams are always looking to expand their knowledge and improve their performance and doing the same thing over and over simply produces the same result.

We think our tools and our approach are top-shelf. The materials are easy to use and the cartoons easily generate perspective and involvement. Our team building games are designed to generate the behaviors that link to real workplace performance opportunities and our games such as Collaboration Journey and Innovate & Implement are really easy to play for small groups.

We’ve been selling and supporting Lost Dutchman for 20 years now, with a really great reaction and long-term use by so many people worldwide.

Have FUN out there, and see what you can do to generate some Perfect Play in your organization.

Connect with Scott on Google+ – you can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

Follow Scott’s posts on Pinterest: pinterest.com/scottsimmerman/
Scott’s blog on Poems and Quips on Workplace Improvement is here.

Santa Creates Motivational Issues among The Reindeer! Seriously!!

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On December 13, 2013

In Change, employee motivation, Engagement, manager as motivator

It all started out this way:

On Dasher, On Dancer, On Prancer, On…uh..uh… stumbled Santa… GO!

HEY! yelled Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner and Blitzen, Santa’s not right!
He’s made a blunder; he always calls ALL of our names, but now not so!
Just let it go, insisted Dasher, Dancer and Prancer, don’t ruin this night!

So up and away they went, but 5 of the Reindeer weren’t feeling ‘Gung Ho.’
They’d lost their sense of teamwork and with that sunk their spirit to unite.
They all agreed that not hearing their names didn’t leave a very warm glow.
It’s as if we’re not as important as them and that’s a pretty rotten plight!

Meanwhile, Santa was so busy you wouldn’t think that he’d ever even know
that some of his Reindeer were disgruntled and creating a dispirited flight.
His sleigh was filled with kids’ gifts so he needed to keep his ducks in a row.
Yet, Ole St. Nick, being a sensitive guy, was fully aware that all wasn’t right.

During his drops from house to house, his Reindeer concerns began to grow.
Hmm, he thought, what’s going on here, could there maybe have been a fight?
Whatever it is, it’s put a Square Wheel in place and now we’re going way too slow.
What we need is to find a Round Wheel way of bringing the problem to light.

So Santa had them stop the sleigh to find out why their energy seemed so low.
They hemmed and hawed fearing he wouldn’t accept their reason with delight.
Then, at last, Vixen spoke up and gave Santa their whole story, blow by blow.
Good grief, cried Santa with quite a relief, you were all giving me quite a fright!

Apologies for making you feel disengaged when your names
from me didn’t flow!
As I age, my rusty memory often makes calling out your names harder to recite.
Each of you is equally important as without you here, this trip we’d have to forgo!
So, what say we join together and get on with this very special Christmas flight?

And then you could hear Santa reciting each Reindeer’s name with a Ho Ho Ho! All toys were delivered while Santa and all Reindeer remained Merry and Bright

Season’s Greetings, and may your 2014 be filled with lots of Round Wheels, for sure!

Note: Joan creates all these things every year. If you want to see some of the past year’s poems on Santa and performance, we can email them to you,

Connect with Scott on Google+ – you can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

Follow Scott’s posts on Pinterest: pinterest.com/scottsimmerman/
Scott’s blog on Poems and Quips on Workplace Improvement is here.

A really neat set of inspirational cartoons…

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On December 12, 2013

In Change, employee motivation, empowerment, Engagement, intrinsic motivation

StumbleUpon sent me this a couple of days ago and I just got the chance to look at it. Pretty amazing, actually. It is a series of inspirational comics illustrating the works of people like Robert Frost, Neil Degrasse Tyson, Hunter Thompson and others and is REALLY well done.

This is an unauthorized screenshot of the one around Robert Frost’s writings:

You can click on the image or go to this page – http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1KspPi

It was done by ZenPencils — zenpencils.com – Zen Pencils adapts inspirational quotes into cartoons. The site is illustrated by Gavin Aung Than and it updates with a new comic every week.

Truly awesome stuff. Check it out!

Connect with Scott on Google+ – you can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

Follow Scott’s posts on Pinterest: pinterest.com/scottsimmerman/
Scott’s blog on Poems and Quips on Workplace Improvement is here.

The Origin of Engagement in the breakdown of Appraisal and Control

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On December 3, 2013

In dis-un-engagement, employee motivation, Engagement, Facilitation, motivational team building exercises, Statistics on workplaces, Team work

Simply put:

We need stop doing such a lousy job
of motivating people in the workplace.

Stats show 85% of employees report their morale declines significantly after spending 6 months on the job (from Sirota Survey Intelligence) and 49% of workers say they constantly have their antennae out for new job opportunities — even when they are happy in their current position. Few feel their current employer is giving them a fair deal in terms of advancement opportunities (Kelly survey).

In a recent Forum Corp. survey, only 8% of employees report that they trust their leaders “to a great extent.” But in that very same survey, 96% of employees say that it is, “extremely important to have a manager they can trust.”

I expand on a lot of issues of workplace motivation in this two-part post,

Workplace Motivation – “I Quit! Nevermind. Whatever…”
(Part One) (Part Two)

The data is clear. People are not involved and engaged in the workplace and these people, their managers, the customers and the company all pay a price for that un-engagement.

Solutions for this are pretty much everywhere. Improving leadership and its alignment to core values and an expressed mission and vision — one that is real and congruent to their behavior — is a good place to start. Improving teamwork and collaboration in the workplace is another good place to begin to re-engage people.

Here is a short 6-minute video on the engagement network
that frames up some obvious solutions.

Removal of the perceived roadblocks to good performance is basic and straightforward and you can read some of my ideas about managing that here.

There are some thoughts here on sharing praise and managing performance feedback, including a link to my Feedback Analysis Checklist. (Click here to see that blog post) and there is a long, two-part series of articles that get into a lot of ideas and information and statistics on managing performance here.

What we need to do is understand that passion and trust are critical factors in workplace motivation and that our traditional approach of performance appraisal and performance evaluation simply puts the worker and the manager into an adversarial kind of environment. The typical “reward systems” that are installed by HR and supported by the executive team are not working and will not work, serving very often to simply put the people into competition, which more often sub-optimizes the overall group performance a lot more than it motivates the top performers.

Best practices already exist in the organization, but developing the teamwork to help install them throughout the workplace cannot be done with competition as the driving force. The ideas for improvement already exist, but we cannot make improvements if we keep working like this:

We need to do things differently
or we will continue to get the same results!

The change needs to be at the interface of the worker and the supervisor. All that other stuff is nice, but it is the manager that needs to change their behavior. We also can build on the natural tendency of people to work together on shared goals and desired outcomes. People are competitive, but teamwork does occur naturally.

We must put the power into the hands of the supervisor, not in the hands of some remote and well-intentioned HR Control Group that has little in common with the workers and supervisors and who do not share the same expectations, desired outcomes and goals, or rewards for good performance. Performance Appraisal and Evaluation — even if you improve it — will not do much to improve workplace performance. Simply because:

Fear is the Mindkiller (from the Dune books) — competition produces winners and lots more losers and no one likes to lose.
Trust is the residue of promises fulfilled. (Frank Navran)
Nobody ever washes a rental car. Ownership and hands-on involvement are critical factors in success.

Get them involved and engaged with you in your workplace improvement efforts and focus HR on human capital improvement, not performance appraisal and so-called incentive motivation.

PMC has great tools for facilitating engagement and involvement and for building teams and teamwork, tools that work for supervisors interested in the improvement of workplace performance and motivating people. It is not rocket science — it is straightforward, simple and simply continuous…

For the FUN of It!

Connect with Scott on Google+ – you can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

Follow Scott’s posts on Pinterest: pinterest.com/scottsimmerman/
Scott’s blog on Poems and Quips on Workplace Improvement is here.

Common Traps when Debriefing – some ideas from Roger Greenaway

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On December 2, 2013

In business team building exercises, Change, Change Facilitation, Engagement, experiential learning, Facilitation, The Search for The Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine

Roger Greenaway is a superb facilitator. Even though we have never met, we run in similar loops and his work is commonly referred to by my customers and other people in this business of learning. He and I have had some good correspondence on ideas and his work — regardless of your skills — is useful.

You can find his website here, and I wanted to write about one of his posts because I think it is really solid and related to what we do with our team building games and what we might do better.

Roger sees some of the common traps as these:

1. Apologising for holding a review
2. Asking ‘What did you learn?’ at the start of a review
3. Speeding: expecting instant thoughtful responses
4. Trivialising: expecting brief answers to big questions
5. Controlling the whole review process, or trying hard to do so
6. Keeping the whole group together for every review process
7. Filling up flipcharts
8. Strongly favouring one learning style
9. Assuming that everyone had much the same experience
10. Welcoming certainty
11. Talking too much as a facilitator

and he details his thinking on this page on his website.

I wanted to reframe one of these because it is common to my suggested debriefing around game play in The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine and are commonly used in most game debriefings. Roger’s #2 problem is one of the ones that I disagree with (2. Asking ‘What did you learn?’ at the start of a review).

Roger suggests that there is an Unintentional Message, that:

“The learning has already happened – so don’t expect to learn anything new in this review.” Just four words (“What did you learn?”) transform an opportunity for new learning into a memory test.

Avoid trap 2 Follow a sequence that is designed to generate learning from experience during the review. For example:

Start by asking for descriptions of what happened and of what people were doing. (Consider how selective you want these accounts to be, and whether you want participants to focus on particular themes or perspectives.)
Ask yourself (or the group) whether visual aids would assist their reflection and communication (eg pictures, diagrams, photos, video or re-enactments of key moments).
Encourage participants to look out for different versions of events and experiences. Such curiosity helps to bring out new learning.
Notice how much description is ‘external’ (equivalent to CCTV footage) and how much reveals ‘internal’ worlds of feelings, reasons, intentions etc. Recognise that a lot of learning will arise from bringing out new information – both external and internal.

If you also want the group to recap what they have already learned, try to do so in a way that does not interfere with their expectations of new learning arising during the review process.

My thinking is that this is the BEST way to start the debriefing and learning part of an experiential learning session anchored to a game.

I will suggest that this simple question of, “What did you learn from your experience,” done as a tabletop open discussion really allows our players to discuss the game from an ending perspective, that it allows them to discuss the decisions that they made that led to the different outcomes that they got.

One of my goals is to get that experience fully anchored in their thinking and to get the play of the game up front, so that we can discuss it and “put it in the back and move forward.”

Since it is done at a tabletop among teammates who shared an emotional experience, it has been my experience that the group is able to talk about information that was accepted and rejected, advice and help that they could have received early in the game, etc.

It was my experience in debriefing the exercise early on that the players would continue to talk about the play of the game as we tried to move ahead in our discussions of the choices they could make for improving the workplace, that the game was getting in the way of the learning… By allowing them to discuss their shared experience and decisions first, we could get that out of the way and move on.

I then repackage this same question and get them to focus on the learning as it relates to their organization, the desired outcomes for the session and the issues and opportunities they see for change and improvement. I want to use the behaviors of the game to link to the behaviors in the workplace.

Reading Roger’s thoughts on this is interesting and gives me pause. Maybe there are other ways of accomplishing the same kinds of things. My thinking was to spend a bit of time on this and NOT allow a long and divergent discussion of the game, but to move quickly toward choices and links to the workplace.

You can see an overview of The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine here.

Your thoughts?

Connect with Scott on Google+ – you can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

Follow Scott’s posts on Pinterest: pinterest.com/scottsimmerman/
Scott’s blog on Poems and Quips on Workplace Improvement is here.

Ideas on People and Performance, Team Building, Motivation and Innovation

Month: December 2013

What does a Russian Lyrical Poet have to do with Workplace Motivation and Engagement?

Year End Message – Make it Work!

Bad Dream and Reframing – Improving one's outlook on things

“Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow”

Perfect Play — How can an organization understand what it needs to accomplish to maximize success?

Santa Creates Motivational Issues among The Reindeer! Seriously!!

A really neat set of inspirational cartoons…

The Origin of Engagement in the breakdown of Appraisal and Control

We need stop doing such a lousy job
of motivating people in the workplace.

Common Traps when Debriefing – some ideas from Roger Greenaway

Month: December 2013

“Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow”

We need stop doing such a lousy job of motivating people in the workplace.

“Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow”

We need stop doing such a lousy job
of motivating people in the workplace.