Month: July 2014

I am a serious guy when it comes to people and performance, which is why I lean toward using games and cartoons. They are simply More Effective than, well, being SERIOUS!

So, let me take a serious poke at people and performance by using a cartoon and you tell me whether I nail it for you, or not.

Let’s say that work looks like this:

How? Why? Where? What?

Some thoughts (and I know that you can come up with more of them):

We have a wagon rolling on Square Wheels. These wheels work but they do not work smoothly.
We have people pushing the wagon forward but they probably cannot see where there are going nor what they are really doing.
We got a wagon puller, just out of training, using a white horse. All supervisors have white hats and ride white horses, right?
We have Round Wheels in the wagon. It is not like a better idea does not already exist, it is just that the wagon puller may not be aware of it or have a clue as to how to implement it.
We have no idea about communications at the back, between the back and the front, or any other things that might be happening.
We have a puzzled guy just standing there and not apparently doing anything. He could represent senior management. He might be a consultant. He could be from Accounting or Human Resources!

Most of those involved are sincerely interested in getting their jobs done. But it is commonly found that they do not feel like they are part of a high performance team.

WHY are we doing this and why are we doing this this way? Because maybe:

this approach to doing things represents the way things have always been done around here.
this way represents the reason the guy on the horse is ON the horse, that a good idea of moving from triangular to square was rewarded!
this represents a huge improvement over how we used to do things — dragging the wagon was, well, a real drag!

HOW will we make improvements? I think that is very simply a matter of everyone taking a look at things and maybe thinking that some alternative just might exist. Is there a budget? Can the wagon pushers and puller actually have the time to stop and fix anything?

WHERE the heck are these people going with these wheels? Are they for internal processes or has some customer ordered them to use on their wagons? Or, are those wheels going to be installed on the new 747 cargo planes another customer is acquiring, something that will have all sorts of implications and ramifications.

And where might some of those Round Wheels actually be used to benefit our own people and our own performance.

WHAT we need to do seems pretty clear. Step back from the wagon and take a couple of seconds to see if the fog of work clears.

WHO? YOU!

And if not You, Who?
And if not Now, When?
IF IT IS TO BE
IT IS UP TO ME.

We sell simple toolkits and interactive team building games to drive increased motivation for change and improvement.

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

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

Square Wheels are a trademark of Performance Management Company
LEGO® is a trademark of the The LEGO Group

Asking Key Questions to Generate Intrinsic Motivation and Engagement

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On July 23, 2014

In Change Facilitation, employee motivation, Engagement, Facilitation, innovation, Innovation Implementation, intrinsic motivation, manager as motivator, Team work, workplace performance improvement

If you are a regular reader of my blogs, you know that we write extensively on issues of teamwork, involvement, innovation and implementation. And we try to focus a lot on the issue of the interaction between the hands-on workers and their supervisors, since all the work gets done by the former and all the management of the working environment gets done by the latter.

This interface is a key one. It is influenced by all the other things up and about, but it is really that supervisor that controls most things, including the alignment of the workplace to the missions and goals of the organization, providing the feedback about performance to the people. It is the supervisor who controls the recognition and support for individuals and who handles the ideas that workers have for potential improvements.

For the past 20 years, we have been using the Square Wheels metaphor to better understand the environment and the interactions among the players. Workers push and Leaders pull. Things do not work smoothly and there are better ideas that could be implemented. Workers are more apt to understand many of those ideas but involvement of the leadership is critical to their implementation. Doing things the same way will generate the same result.

We use line-art illustrations for our workshops and toolkits, since the simplicity lends itself to higher effectiveness. The cartoons work as a Rorschach Test and people project their ideas onto the cartoons. (I will add abstracts of other blog posts at the end of this blog to support this thinking.)

A few months back, I started a conversation with Hakan Forss and we started playing with LEGO to help illustrate some of the ideas. So, a main Square Wheels image about how organizations really work now looks something like this, for blogging purposes:

The reality is that the Round Wheels already exist as cargo of the wagon. The more of these IN the wagon, the more difficult it is to move forward; the message here is that unused and unimplemented ideas will bog down an organization, making even regular progress more difficult. And the related issue is the ROPE, which tends to isolate and insulate the wagon puller from the reality of the journey forward and which makes communication difficult.

Don’t Just DO Something, Stand There!

Occasionally, stop and take the time to involve and engage everyone in ideas for improvement and in alignment to the missions, visions, goals and objectives, since we know that those are critical aspects for generating motivation and engagement.

This morning, I generated 6 simple Posters that are anchored to the key questions we need to ask in order to keep things rolling forward. If you like them, I can generate a powerpoint set that you can use to facilitate some discussions around issues and opportunities.

(My plans are to connect each of these illustrations here to a one-page descriptive post in my poems blog, where I will expand on the idea and offer some tips. I have not yet done that, but I will… Right now, they will open the main home page of that blog. Soon, they will connect to their individual pages as I develop the thinking…)

Who, What, Where, When, How and Why are generally the performance coaching questions we ask people (and ourselves). Asking them in a group will build better teamwork on creative innovation processes (lots of tools for this kind of thing) and will generate the peer support needed for generating ownership involvement and implementation of change.

Nobody Ever Washes A Rental Car!

We cannot expect people to be involved and engaged without a sense of ownership of the ideas and active participation in the implementation and testing of new ideas. People want to help polish the wagon and make things work better. But they are often risk-averse and want to get recognition for their efforts and ideas.

The supervisor is the only one who can manage the situation. PMC offers some simple tools for these processes of team building and organizational improvement.

Annotated Abstracts of some supporting posts by Scott Simmerman

Square Wheels? What the heck are those engagement tools about… An overview of the tools with links do slideshare and YouTube resources about the tools. Plus connections to my thinking on managing and leading change.

Facilitation? Me, a Facilitator? Me, a MOTIVATOR? — Simple thoughts on manager as motivator and as a facilitator of ideas. An overview of a simple and bombproof approach to involvement and discussion as to why anyone can use our engagement tools.

Positive Possibilities — Square Wheels for Performance Improvement — a more detailed overview of how people think and how the cartoons help people frame their ideas. Some very simple ideas for facilitation.

Square Wheels — NOT some simple model of organizational performance — a somewhat detailed overview of how the illustrations work to involve and engage people, with typical reactions and responses to illustrate the depth of thinking that can occur.

Square Wheels go Thump. Round Wheels already exist. A quick overview of some of the main themes of the Square Wheels approach, illustrated.

Elephants, Line Managers and Workplace Engagement – My thoughts on why managers are the ONLY people who can involve and engage and motivate the people in the workplace, and how task interference is getting in the way of generating organizational improvements in most organizations.

I trust that you might find some of these tools to be of interest and that our approach to motivation makes sense. It is not extrinsic rewards that will drive positive long-term organizational performance but the continuous involvement and engagement of the people doing their work.

You might also find this article on Presenteeism to be of interest,

For the FUN of It!

 Connect with Scott on Google+

You can also reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

Follow Scott’s posts on Pinterest: pinterest.com/scottsimmerman/
Scott’s blog on People and Performance is here.

Square Wheels® are a trademark of Performance Management Company
LEGO® is a trademark of the The LEGO Group

Trust is Revealed by implementing Round Wheels

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On July 22, 2014

In Articles on Teamwork, Change Facilitation, employee motivation, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator, Trust Building

Dan Rockwell had a really great blog this morning, one that I wanted to reframe and reanchor and repurpose into a short piece on engagement and motivation. I will excerpt some of the key points I saw but I refer you to his complete blog that you can see here:

As Dan said, handled well, problem solving can have the following benefits to the organization:

Strengthen connections.
Intensify focus.
Enhance vulnerability.
Fuel urgency.
Clarify responsibility.
Increase opportunity.
Instigate growth.
Disrupt status quo.
Extend skills.
Develop character.
Amplify self-reflection.
Grow capacity.

Poorly handled, problems distract, defeat, and, eventually destroy. And a lot of the result is influenced by the history of the previous transactions between people and management. If the manager has a history of acting trustworthy and being honest and open and dependable, the reactions can be much different that if a low level of trust exists.

My Poster on this looks like this:

How do your people react to the “What” question? Do they see you honestly involved and engaged in discussing their ideas or do they simply see you reacting as if you are being bothered?

Trust is revealed in the way that you handle problems. And remember that today is yesterday tomorrow, so you can always choose to start the process of building trust and rapport with your teams. See Dan’s article for some additional ideas about dealing with the issues. My work here is done! (grin)

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.

Square Wheels are a trademark of Performance Management Company
LEGO® is a trademark of the The LEGO Group

Keeping It Stupidly Simple – Thoughts on Teams and Teamwork

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On July 21, 2014

In Change Facilitation, employee motivation, innovation, Innovation Implementation, intrinsic motivation, manager as motivator, motivation in the workplace, Team work

In a recent LinkedIn thread on leadership, Bob Whipple posted up a short note on “4 Essential Elements for a High Performing Team.” Bob said:

There are four common denominators of high performing teams. When these elements are present, teams are almost guaranteed to be efficient and rewarding for the members. The elements are:

1. A common goal – so all members pull in the same direction
2. Trust – so members are not playing games with each other
3. Good leadership – so that the team is fully engaged
4. A Good Charter – so the consequences of social loafing are spelled out in advance

In my experience, most groups understand the need for the first three (although only a small percentage actually have all three), but the fourth element is often not in place. It is critical to have a Team Charter that spells out expectations and that all members agree on the consequences if a member does not pull his or her fair share of the load.

Pretty Darn Simple and to the point. The Rule of 80/20 and Occam’s Razor both focus on keeping things simple.

My post was actually the first one and very much supportive of Bob’s thinking, where I shared thoughts about how easy it is to form a team:

A lot is made about personal styles for personality or decision-making or astrological signs but the four bullets above will generate pretty solid teamwork. Sure, one can nuance things and add factors and frameworks, models and surveys and all sorts of other things that CAN be helpful.

But how many teams never get started because they have not been through the training programs or certified to be team leaders or (even) team members, as if HR is running the show? I mean, really?

Put a bunch of kids on a baseball diamond with a ball and a bat — heck, some of them might even have gloves — and they will start working together as a team. They may even FEEL like a team. They know the rules of play, share a goal, trust each other (more or less) to do their jobs of fielding and batting and come together a little better if one person serves as captain.

This team stuff ain’t rocket science, but so many sure try to make it an expensive and time-consuming proposition. Sure, we can make teams work better but let’s face it: with the incredible sorry state of engagement we see in today’s workplace, with 85% of employees saying their morale declines significantly after spending six months on the job (Source: Sirota Survey Intelligence March 2007), don’t you think that a little teamwork might help things just a little?

And ANY performance improvement is worth the cost of involving and engaging people in a shared mission with clear expectations and necessary resources.

Ben Simonton, who says a lot of really smart simple things, added:

But how does one do it like create trust or what are the actions that constitute good leadership?

The answer is simple – listen to what employees want and respond to their wants to their satisfaction or better even if it means telling them why they cannot have what they want. Only in this way can we make the corporate culture align to the values of employees.

But, as expected, the consultant gang among us starts posting up about all sorts of additional requirements for success including things like training in Emotional Intelligence (which should take a few weeks)

But what happens over time is that we begin, as they say in the South, “to pick fly shit out of the pepper.” The conversations begin to focus on narrow and even more narrower points, make the discussion overly complicated, add model after model after theory and personal experience to the discussion and muddy the water.

I tend to view things through a pretty simple lens and to me, a lot of potential organizational improvement and team building situations basically look something like this:

Am I that wrong about this view? Aren’t most leaders somewhat isolated and don’t most people have ideas that would make for workplace improvement?

Do we HAVE to make things complicated with models designed through rigorous testing by the best academic researchers in the world and published by HBR and the academic press in books we will never read before we simply ACT?

Give them a ball and let them go play!

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.

Square Wheels are a trademark of Performance Management Company
LEGO® is a trademark of the The LEGO Group

Quotes by James Madison about Liberty and Freedom

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On July 18, 2014

In Engagement, legacy, people and performance

I sometimes get political because I AM focused on people and performance, goals and expectations, measurement and feedback systems and things like that. For me, improving performance is about goals, feedback and reinforcement and the issues around human competence and motivation are important ones.

Government provides services to people and people provide support to government by their granting powers and electing people to represent them. But, like most behavioral systems, things can get corrupted and off-target and we can lose alignment, generating waste and poor performance.

James Madison had a lot of interesting observations about the government, freedoms and similar kinds of issues around the operation of our democracy. Thus, I do not consider it too much of a stretch to publish some of his quotes herein.

If you land here on this page from Google or some other search, please understand that this blog, with more than 400 articles, is about People and Performance, about teamwork and intrinsic motivation and communications. Please avail yourselves of the search box and type in a keyword and see if any of my writings appeal to you.

I run a small company that sells organizational improvement tools like Square Wheels toolkits focused on dis-un-engagement and managing and leading change as well as team building games focused on collaboration and alignment. All of these are simply tools to generate discussion about issues and opportunities.

James Madison (American 4th US President (1809-17), and Founding Father of his country. 1751-1836)

“The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted.”

“If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”

“The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.”

“It is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.”

“The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.”

“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny”

“We are right to take alarm at the first experiment upon our liberties.”

“Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpation”

“The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries.”

“The number, the industry, and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church from the state”

“Strongly guarded as is the separation between religion and government in the Constitution of the United States the danger of encroachment by Ecclesiastical Bodies, may be illustrated by precedents already furnished in their short history”

“In no instance have . . . the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people.”

“It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.”

“A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce, or a tragedy, or perhaps both.”

“The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.”

“History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments.”

Lastly, let me conclude with a quote from Thomas Jefferson:

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country. “

Yeah, and may we live in interesting times is that old Chinese curse…

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.

Some New Thoughts on Trust and Devils Advocate

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On July 17, 2014

In Change Facilitation, employee motivation, Facilitation, Involving and Engaging People, Organizational Development Tools, Team work

My plans are to develop a solid whitepaper on the benefits of challenging existing assumptions and challenging status quo, with the goal of finding solid ideas that merit implementation or to identify issues in generating innovation and process improvement. There is a LOT of data and a LOT of success stories around all this that I want to elaborate on and share.

So, the note-taking and quote-taking continue and I am waiting for the brain to say, “You got it, now go!” So far, no such auditory trigger has been pulled. So I muddle with the meddling. And I wanted to get something up on this useful topic.

What I AM doing is continuing the framing of the issue. I must keep the framework and tools really simple, because lots of data also suggest that supervisors and managers are way overloaded and functionally unable to add much new to their plate of responsibilities.

My thought is that facilitating this process with the Square Wheels tools makes really good sense, since the approach really does not require any significant facilitation skills training or other costly roadblocks. If the manager wants to do things, they can simply choose to do them.

My oft used quotes are that:

Trust is the residue of Promises Fulfilled. (Frank Navran)
The Round Wheels are already in your wagon. (Scott Simmerman)
A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world. (John LeCarre)
Nobody ever washes a rental car. (Scott Simmerman)

ALL of these lend themselves to the reality that the supervisor has to be the one to involve and engage their people in workplace improvement ideas in order to generate intrinsic motivation and process improvement, and the ideas already exist and people can develop a sense of ownership that will support their implementation.

So, I developed two simple Posters using my LEGO cartoons to help frame the issue. The issue is a simple one: Most workplaces have unengaged people simply doing the work of pushing their wagon and it needs to be acceptable for them to question the reality with management on occasion. This can generate new ideas as well as improve teamwork and intrinsic motivation for working.

But one HAS to stop pushing and pulling in order to have the mental time to even consider options.

The TRUST aspect of this comes from behavior. If you can make promises and commitments about implementing the ideas of the workers, if you can form empowered teams and allow them to operate in a way to make those improvements, you build the trust between you one wheel at a time. Approaching the workplace like this allows you that opportunity to act congruently, set clearer expectations about desired results and outcomes, and to give recognition for steps of improvement.

(Click here to see a supporting article on Trial and Error Thinking)

What we do with our Square Wheels toolkits is offer up a simple-to-use and very inexpensive toolkit for involving people and generating their thoughts around the Square Wheels (what is not working smoothly) and their Round Wheel ideas for possibilities for improvement.

Good ideas spin up easily from this approach and the materials themselves lend themselves to engagement and involvement, since the approach is to simply use the cartoons to ask for ideas.

If you want to improve engagement of people and improve performance, you cannot wait for HR to offer up some solutions. Get a grip on things by letting go of the rope.

Don’t Just DO Something, Stand There!

I will guarantee that these tools work for engagement and innovation and that they are simple to use. They come complete with all sorts of backup materials and there are dozens of blog posts within the PMC Blog that offer ideas for facilitation and framing,

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.

Square Wheels are a trademark of Performance Management Company
LEGO® is a trademark of the The LEGO Group

LEGO Team Building Exercises

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On July 11, 2014

In business team building exercises, collaboration, Corporate Team Building Games, experiential learning, Organizational Development Tools, team building exercises for the workplace

If you have been following my blogs, you would know that I am using LEGO to help impact organizational improvement and to reframe some of my Square Wheels ideas. I posted this one up today on my poems blog, for example:

The simple and basic theme is that we are rolling on Square Wheels but the round wheels already exist.

There are also a whole bunch of “posters” that I have anchored to various things, like this one on team building:

So, I roll down the road of continuing to illustrate some basic realities around communications, engagement, experiential learning and team alignment.

A friend asked me if I was aware of these LEGO being used for team building exercises and it reminded me of some of the exercises from my other website that were contributed to me 15+ years ago. You can find a long series of them by clicking on this link but I thought to post up a good example below:

Darin Ulmer’s “LEGO Communications Exercise”

Darin offered up this activity focused on collaboration and communications to viewers of my website. He indicated that the activity works best if participants return from the exercises’ suggested meetings unaware of the value or significance of the information they received because that lack of relevance tends to mirror the reality of so many workplaces.

Have at least 5 people at each table and have them chose who will go to each of five simultaneous meetings and set it up as follows:

“Often we go to meetings and we are asked to return to our direct reports and disseminate that information back to them. Between the meeting and the reporting many things can happen to the information that is to be shared. We are going to see how effectively you can communicate information that you learn in a meeting back to the people at your table.”

“The meetings contain extremely important information about the company’s vision. In order to build the best company possible, everyone will have to come back to the tables after the five-minute meetings to share what they have learned. Please go to your meetings now.”

Direct everyone to the rooms or area of the room where they can view the written guidelines listed below. It is best if they are out of earshot or even out of view of the other meetings. There should be at least one representative from each table at each meeting.

While everyone is meeting, place one bag containing all of the pieces to build the “Baja Buggy” (or similar kit / set of LEGO materials) on each table. Make sure you have enough kits for each table you have set up and that you have all of the pieces in the bag. (Nothing upsets teams more than being set up for failure so be sure that ALL the pieces are in the kit.)

Note: If you wish to push the need for collaboration between the groups and they are somewhat functional teams to begin with, you may with to give each table all of one particular piece in a plastic bag so that they have to go to the other tables to get missing pieces. This bartering can cause many issues about sharing of resources to arise. You also open the group up to set each other up for failure by choosing to withhold pieces from other groups. Your debriefing can focus on how interdepartmental competition is detrimental and creates lose-lose situations.

After 5 minutes, collect the written guidelines and ask everyone to return to their tables. Announce that:

“You have 20 minutes to build a better company. You have been given the vision and now it is time to act on that information. Be aware of the process that you go through to complete the vision so that you can share your experience with the other tables.”

You may wish to document the progress by teaching flow-charting and having someone at each table take responsibility for documenting the steps that a team follows. The flow-chart lesson could be at a sixth meeting for those people. It is important that they look for both effective and ineffective behaviors as learning examples.

After the 20 minute building time, ask everyone to stop and have each table show what they have built and relate to the other tables what process they went through to reach that vision. Debrief with the whole team afterward about what was important from the exercise to take back to the work place. (See debrief above)

Here is what is written on the sheets of paper at Meeting #1 (for the Baja Buggy set. Instructions would be different for other assembly packages):

The hood and the handlebar base are white. The base is two pieces and the handlebars are one.
The bullhorn sits on one wheel well peg behind the drivers four-peg seat and in front of the white roll bar.

What is written on the sheets of paper at Meeting #2:

The front is five pieces high with a bumper protruding (white/red/yellow/gray/white).
The front wheel wells are on top of the lights. The rear snaps directly to the body.

What is written on the sheets of paper at Meeting #3:

The rear is five pieces high with two hooks protruding (white/red/red/gray/white).
The front bumper and rear flag and walkie-talkie holders are gray.
The rear holders are below the body and the front bumper is next to the body.

What is written on the sheets of paper at Meeting #4:

The man with the yellow legs has a blue hat.
The rear axle does not touch the red body piece, but the front axle is centered below the red body piece and gray front bumper.

What is written on the sheets of paper at Meeting #5:

The lights are yellow. Two are on top of the front bumper and two are on the roll bar sides facing forward.
The bullhorn, walkie-talkie, tires, and the two pieces found above the rear axle and immediately behind the headlights are black.

You will make up your instructions based on the particular kits that you acquire. The nice thing is that all of these are reusable and that you can very easily link over to a variety of organizational improvement discussions because of the experiential and interactive nature of the activity itself.

You can find ones similar to this that I published back in 1998 at http://www.squarewheels.com/content/legotrdev.html

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 People and Performance is here.

Square Wheels are a trademark of Performance Management Company
LEGO® is a trademark of the The LEGO Group

A Compendium of Posts on Team Building Events and Design

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On July 11, 2014

In business team building exercises, Corporate Team Building Games, executive team building exercises, large group team building events, team building exercises for the workplace

This blog now contains around 500 posts, with many of these covering various aspects of designing group team building events and impacting experiential learning and development.

Some of these simply anchor to my team building exercise focused on collaboration and leadership – The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine. But many of them focus on the general issues around designing and delivering effective large group events focused on meeting desired outcomes and engaging and involving people for workplace improvement.

With this post, I wanted to generate a compendium of posts around some of the key issues faced when designing one of these expensive programs. Bring executives into one venue, housing and feeding them for a day or two, and bringing in presenters and doing all the logistical work to manage the venue can costs hundreds of thousands of dollars or more. Optimizing the design of the event for maximum impact and results simply makes good sense.

So, here are some resources and ideas for optimizing your successes:

• Large Group, Off-Site Team Building Event Ideas

Some thoughts on teamwork and alignment and choices you can make in the design of events to maximize desired outcomes. It is focused on experiential learning, and avoiding senior manager presentations where there are other alternatives for sharing that data.

• Having an Off-Site Company Meeting? Ideas for Success

This is probably the most detailed article in my blog around the general issues of meeting success for off-site company events. If offers up a number of bullets on structural factors for optimizing impacts and includes the writings of other experts.

• Thoughts on Hiring the Right Presenter for a large event

Look to find a presenter who can positively impact your people and your business, not a basketball coach, funster or politico, or choose an experiential exercise to involve and engage people in workplace performance improvement.

• Team Building and Collaboration for Performance Improvement – Large Event Management

This is a short post about involving and engaging the senior managers in the delivery of team building, so as to help build trust and ownership for organizational change and improvement.

• You CAN herd frogs! Thoughts on Strategy Implementation

Some thoughts around structuring the actions and activities to generate behavioral change after the program. A short activity you can do with groups plus some ideas for debriefing any large group activities.

• Implementing Changes after Team Building Events

Some thoughts on designing worksheets and approaches to collecting ideas for organizational performance post-session, focused on using Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine as the main tool for engagement.

• Team Building and Large Event Management Ideas

Some general thoughts on the use of simulations like Lost Dutchman with the idea that more and more companies are choosing to hold these meetings in 2014 than in the past few years

I trust that this compendium may be of benefit to you in your planning. If you have any questions about how you might package or reframe your large company event, call me and I will certainly share some ideas.

The goal is to generate involvement and alignment, and to generate some commitment toward doing things differently to impact results.

Lastly, remember this simple thought about involvement:

“Nobody ever washes a rental car.”

You need to do things in a way that generates ownership in order to expect any real commitment to change.

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 People and Performance is here.

Team Building Events with Large Groups – organizational improvement ideas

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On July 9, 2014

In Articles on Teamwork, business team building exercises, Corporate Team Building Games, executive team building exercises, large group team building events, motivational team building exercises, team building event ideas

We can improve the impact our expenditures of large teambuilding events if we carefully consider some success factors in generating ideas for innovation and implementation. Our tendency is to repeat what we have done before, and the goal of this article is to simply provide some new anchoring ideas for doing things differently and generating more impact.

There has been a great reduction in those “All Hands” kinds of meetings over the last 10 years. Once upon a time, one had to play a year ahead to find hotel ballroom space for meetings and make site visits and tour facilities; today, it is a lot less difficult. Being online makes all the difference and makes selection and programming communications really simple.

Back then, hotels were pretty arrogant about controlling all things and having complicated one-sided contracts for everything but today, one finds them a lot more flexible and interested in obtaining your business. Times change and their business has become a lot more competitive…

Herein are some key thoughts about making your company events more effective. And here are a couple of my older posts around some of these same issues and opportunities:

Here is an article about selecting a presenter who will involve and engage your people in an event that can actually change behavior and generate momentum for improvement. There are a lot of links in that to other articles and resources about organizing resources, also.

Here are some ideas about generating engagement and momentum for implementing change following a large group event

Here is an article about improving teamwork and collaboration in a large event

A post on some of the ISSUES with outdoor training types of events and some cautionary thoughts about anchoring to learning and change

Frankly, there seem to be a lot of strange and sometimes seemingly irrelevant things done in the name of team building and organizational development. The reality says that if you hang out at a large hotel and wander about the meeting area and you will see a lot of people sitting, just sitting there inactive when the doors are opened, as if they feel relieved that they successfully avoided things.

This observation is supporting the reality of Death By Powerpoint, or at least death by non-involvement and non-engagement. (One wonders why there are not required governmental warnings about deep vein thrombosis for sitting so long at some of these sessions!)

People at Onlinemba.com came across my blog while researching Team Building and sent me a link to one of their articles called, “How the Top Companies Take On Team Building:”

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.

Yeah, it seems that a LOT of people realize that we can choose to do things differently for our meetings. With technology, so much of that data-stuff that executives like to live-present can be handled in screenshares or webcasts. For the most part, they are not asking for ideas or suggestions but merely sharing data. Face-to-face is an expensive way to push data at people.

I’ve posted up before on some of the more ridiculous or hard to seriously consider team activities such as golf, paintball and the infamous fire walking — and I just saw a twitter post suggesting that “detoxing” could be done as a teamwork improvement activity. (Seriously!)

Maybe there are some positive individual impacts from doing those kinds of things but I just do not see the teambuilding 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 “encouraging” and not coercion or forcing people to do things in the above…)

Even comedic writer Dave Berry weighed in on Burger King’s toasty experience grilling their own managers with their firewalking activity — see my blog post on that here.

Many different activities DO have a variety of positive organizational impacts, and many of these are not costly. Some are a bit off the wall, like hiring a comedy troupe to come in and cause people to laugh at issues and reframe improvement opportunities (if they do not offend the senior managers too much!). And there are literally dozens of different online surveys and Personality Inventories with linkages to team behaviors. These can be framed as a team building exercise if there was more to it than simply discussions. Maybe they could let the comedy troupe do the personality testing?

In my way of thinking, I will simply continue to be designing and offering games such as The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine or Innovate & Implement 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.

Team building exercise, Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine

click here to read more about the Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine

In addition to selling the exercise to trainers and consultants, we also rent the exercise to people interested in an inexpensive, yet powerful large group event. If you click on the link below, you can find a clear explanation as to the frameworks for rental as well as our prices. It is inexpensive and powerful. Click here if you would like to see a few testimonials.

If you have any questions, please feel free to chat me up. I will offer my ideas and frameworks to 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.

Weed Killers, Bug Killers and Organizational Development

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On July 9, 2014

In Change, employee motivation, empowerment, Engagement, intrinsic motivation, Involving and Engaging People, Managing and leading change, people and performance, workplace performance improvement

We spend a LOT of money on weed control and bug killers for our yards and gardens. We spend tiny amounts on things to actually help plants grow and to improve the environment. That seems exactly what we do in our organizations. Some thoughts:

The statistics on the workplace continue to worry me as it relates to the health of a country, including but not limited to the United States; this certainly appears to be a global phenomenon. Results show that people are finding work less and less rewarding, both in terms of income that it generates as well as the personal rewards gained from doing a good job well and feeling appreciation for that accomplishment.

The data continue to suggest that high levels of engagement and personal development have big impacts on organizational performance results and stock prices. In an excellent blog by Barbara Kimmel, she shares the following graph of stock performance tied to one issue around people and performance: TRUST.

Click on the image to see the blog with stats and related information

There are similar solid statistical proofs for a wide variety of positive indicators of leadership and involvement and individual development / personal growth. Investing in people and performance has a positive impact on the bottom line and long-term success of organizations of all types.

Treating people well thus has a wide variety of positive impacts with only ONE seemingly negative issue: COST.

Yes, senior managers do seem to continually look at the cost of people to the organization and the cost of training and the cost of salaries and all that. Investments in people are on the wrong side of the financial analysis, IMHO. Nevermind the statistically solid reality that these kinds of investments can be easily linked to critical performance indicators. There is some apparent perceived risk in investing in people. So many organizations simply choose not to do so, or to do so half-heartedly.

When monies get tight, the first thing cut is almost always “training.” There is constant pressure to keep the costs of payroll low, to the point that people often cannot even take vacations because their job duties cannot be done by another. (See my article on vacation and time off and the issue of continued connectedness of today’s worker and manager.)

What happened to me yesterday pushed me to create this post. I was in one of the Big Box home fixing stores, the ones that carry lawn and garden materials, tools, paints, appliances, and all that other stuff. I was looking for some indoor plant fertilizer and some electrical tape.

What I found was a truly amazing quantity and selection of things like weed killer, fire ant killer, bug sprays, fungicides, grub killer granules and similar. There were 70 feet of aisle space focused on negative control of things, with all sorts of impacts on the biological environment.

There was a small — very small — shelf allotment of things to actually help plants grow. Somehow, this seems out of kilter, in that a healthy environment will generally serve to keep the weed problem small. Heck, I pick the crabgrass by hand in my yard, since I never let it get started. I use corn gluten as a pre-emergent to avoid poisoning my worms.

Can’t we manage our workplaces with less toxic substance
and do more to help our people grow?

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.

Square Wheels are a trademark of Performance Management Company
LEGO® is a trademark of the The LEGO Group

Engagement, Communications and Building Teams

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On July 2, 2014

In Change Facilitation, employee motivation, Engagement, Facilitation, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator

We talk about engagement, but it does not appear too often if one looks at the myriad of statistics and surveys about the workplace. My personal view is that too many supervisors have too much task interference to actually communicate well and build consensus on performance improvement and team-based initiatives.

Consultant friend Brian Remer posted up an excellent summary about powerful questions and improving how we communicate about issues of workplace improvement. You can read it here.

The thrust of his post is that we can ask better questions and positively impact thinking and decision making. It is his focus to improve teamwork and make discussions of issues and opportunities more straightforward.

“Powerful questions that focus on meaning also challenge mental models and basic assumptions. They bring people to a deeper level and encourage a more creative response to what could otherwise be a “complaint” or “blame” session.”

This is a short read, but a solid one, with a couple of illustrating graphics. The Architecture / Structure of the question is one dimension with the “How” and “What” questions being optimal for eliciting information. The Scope of the question is what frames the situation and the context of the discussion. The Meaning of the question revolves around the mental models of those involved.

Related to the above are the Intention and the Tone of how things are presented. This involves the issues of interactive history and trust as well as the style of the discussion leader. I am reminded of that old NLP quote,

“We judge ourselves by our intentions.
We judge others by their behavior.”

Closely related to Brian’s post is the writing of Dan Rockwell in his post about Leadership Sherlocking, where he also focuses on asking questions and the related issues of communication. You can find Dan’s article here and you can read my illustrated blog about my take on his ideas by clicking on the icon below.

There is a good bit of clear thinking out there when it comes to asking questions to involve and engage people. What is a bit frustrating is that more of our supervisory and management people are apparently not being effective in how they are communicating with their people on workplace improvement discussions.

Performance Management Company sells a variety of inexpensive and highly effective illustration-based toolkits for improving teamwork and implementing innovation and engaging people in the workplace. Check out our simple and straightforward toolkit for facilitation by clicking on the icon below:

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.

Square Wheels are a trademark of Performance Management Company
LEGO® is a trademark of the The LEGO Group

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

Month: July 2014

Is Work Funny or What? Paradoxes in Perceptions

Asking Key Questions to Generate Intrinsic Motivation and Engagement

Don’t Just DO Something, Stand There!

Trust is Revealed by implementing Round Wheels

Keeping It Stupidly Simple – Thoughts on Teams and Teamwork

Quotes by James Madison about Liberty and Freedom

Some New Thoughts on Trust and Devils Advocate

LEGO Team Building Exercises

A Compendium of Posts on Team Building Events and Design

• Large Group, Off-Site Team Building Event Ideas

• Having an Off-Site Company Meeting? Ideas for Success

• Thoughts on Hiring the Right Presenter for a large event

• Team Building and Collaboration for Performance Improvement – Large Event Management

• You CAN herd frogs! Thoughts on Strategy Implementation

• Implementing Changes after Team Building Events

• Team Building and Large Event Management Ideas

“Nobody ever washes a rental car.”

Team Building Events with Large Groups – organizational improvement ideas

Weed Killers, Bug Killers and Organizational Development

Engagement, Communications and Building Teams