Month: March 2017

Trust in the Sand

On March 15, 2017

In Change Facilitation, employee engagement, employee motivation, Engagement, experiential learning, Facilitation, improve organizational performance, intrinsic motivation, Involving and Engaging People, Leadership Development Game, manager as motivator, Metaphors for business improvement, motivational team building exercises, ownership involvement, Team Building Games, Trust Building

My colleagues in Romania just sent me an email about one of their blog posts on leadership that had this image within it:

I thought it was pretty neat, and it reminded me of my friend and colleague Frank Navran’s quote that:

“Trust is the residue of promises fulfilled”

and how easy it is to simply wipe it away with some foolish behavior…

All it takes is a gust of wind to change things and we need to be reminded that trust is something we need to maintain, not just do once in a while.

Now Vio’s blog is written in Romanian, and even with translation services, I am not going to spend much time going through his key comments around the elements of trust; I simply reacted to his email and sent him the following:

“Trust is not just about writing in the sand. It is also about having perspective, moving about to see what is really happening around you and being willing to move about to potentially see things from other positions rather than from where you are standing. It is also about involving people with shared goals and acting collectively. I think it can also look like this:”

We should also be reminded and mindful about the diversity of people within our organizations and about the reality that all of us know more than any of us when it comes to generating ideas and engagement for improving workplace performance.

Here at Performance Management Company, we sell simple tools for impacting teamwork (Vio at HumanInvest has our Lost Dutchman game in English and Romanian) as well as impacting innovation and motivation. We suggest that leaders work to actively involve their people in generating ideas for improvement and facilitating creative problem solving as well as generating alignment and collaboration.

We also have a simple online facilitation skills training course and toolkit (really cheap and highly effective!) at The Square Wheels Project.

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.

One of the best teambuilding exercises in the world, as rated by his users, is The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine, which focuses on leadership, collaboration, alignment and focuses on implementing the collective performance optimization ideas.

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

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

If not you, WHO? If not now, WHEN?

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On March 14, 2017

In Change Facilitation, dis-un-engagement, employee engagement, employee motivation, Engagement, Facilitation, improve organizational performance, intrinsic motivation, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator, Metaphors for business improvement, people and performance, Square Wheels LEGO images, team motivation

If not you, WHO?
If not now, WHEN?

I love that short little quote about personal accountability and action. Of course, we can always wait for someone else or we can simply choose to wait, which tends to be the most common response of people to opportunities. Lots of statistics point to the small numbers of “early adapters” of new programs or organizational change efforts while the bulk of managers simply sit and watch to see the results.

But, if things are going to change, someone needs to make them change.

If it is to be, it is up to me!

Otherwise, things will just roll like they have always rolled., which in my view of the world tends to look like this:

Things tend to roll along like they always have and why not. Things stay the same unless they change… And the continuous un-engagement of the wagon pushers is no surprise, since their view of the future tends to be, “boards and hands.”

Most wagon pulling leaders work hard, pulling the wagon and trusting that the measurements and expectations and performance appraisal mechanisms will insure that the people at the back are pushing instead of pulling. After all, what choice do they have? So, they simply keep pulling, hoping that things will always be okay.

But let’s challenge these assumptions. Let’s assume that day after day, month after month, year after year, all this gets really old and somewhat de-motivating. New hires become dis-engaged over about 6 months and regress to the average enthusiasm of the other workers even as their skill levels increase. And, the good workers will tend to blame their wagon pullers for a lot of the communications issues.

How bad is it? I share some stats in my post of a few days ago (here) but two that stand out are these:

• 35% of US workers would forgo a raise to see their boss fired.
• 3 of 4 workers say that their boss is the worst / most stressful part of the job.

This all begs the question of what might be done differently to generate improvements, basically, The Who and The When.

DDI recently shared some statistics that suggested only 11% of supervisors get management training. So, we can guess that support for skill development will not be coming soon from Training and Development / HR. Nothing new there… They simply have other priorities.

The reality is that people will continue to come into the workplace dragging. And if nothing changes, nothing changes. They are, for the most part (70%), un-engaged, un-enthused and un-involved, and the best predictor of the future is the past.

So, who other than their supervisor can change things? How can that supervisor become a Draggin’ Slayer and choose to do things that might DIS-un-engage them and generate some active involvement around identifying the Square Wheels^® that exist and the Round Wheels we always find inside the wagon?

Which, when facilitated with active questioning and group involvement, can begin to break the ice around communicating about issues and opportunities. It is NOT instantaneous in some workgroups where there is hostility of a lack of trust, but it DOES work if we keep asking questions and responding positively to the initial ideas. The process itself is pretty bombproof.

Having been around corporations and other businesses for 35 years, I actually see NO real solution to the issues we face in motivating and involving workers other than through the direct actions of supervisors.

Operations have always been this way; exemplary performers doing things differently than everyone else and exemplary supervisors choosing to defend their top performers from “corporate bureaucracy” — and simply managing people better. The best managers have always gotten people talking about Square Wheels and playing with Round Wheel ideas for improvement.

We simply cannot go #morebetterfaster if we continue to do the same things the same way and wait for help from above. It just is not going to happen! Our better managers ask questions and solicit ideas from their people, generating motivation and innovation. You simply cannot drive this from a tops-down approach since you can never reach the people who are doing the work.

If you can share a more effective or impactful approach to involving and engaging people in the workplace, why not contribute a comment? Workers DO have ideas about improving their workplace and impacting quality and productivity. Working together can foster teamwork and peer support and many of the other intrinsically motivating aspects linked to accomplishments.

Building communications and trust between workers and managers is an important factor in employee retention and skill development and cascades into innovation and service quality and customer retention.

We offer a SIMPLE toolkit for facilitation skills development at The Square Wheels Project. For a tiny bit of money, supervisors can gain access to an online course and also the powerpoint and handout sheets needed to have a productive and engaging meeting (or meetings, actually) with their people about issues and opportunities for workplace improvement.

If we can encourage our supervisors and managers to think differently and go off on their own paths to improving involvement and engagement and motivation of their people, is there really any downside? I guess you could call this empowerment. But how else are we going to take advantage of our human capital and go #morebetterfaster? The managers should be the motivators.

Share your thoughts and reactions,

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/

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

Continuous Continuous Improvement and Team Building

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On March 13, 2017

In Articles on Teamwork, business team building exercises, Corporate Team Building Games, employee motivation, executive team building exercises, experiential learning, intrinsic motivation, large group team building events, Leadership Development Game, Organizational Development Tools, team building event ideas, team building exercises, team building exercises for the workplace, The Search for The Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine, workplace performance improvement

Dozens of years ago, when I chaired our local ASQC group, it was common to hear these quality managers say that they had done continuous improvement, as it it were something they had completed and that it was OVER.

It was so common that I resolved never to use that phrase and to start using the term, CONTINUOUS Continuous Improvement, which STILL gives my grammar checker fits, as the WordPress editor is doing right now…

I mean, how can you complete something that is continuous?

And why isn’t continuous continuous improvement a better overall goal for organizations? When does stopping improvement make any sense?

So, let’s shift to the issues of workplace reality, team building and continuous continuous improvement of people and processes, focusing on collaboration, alignment and communications. It is a subject worthy of a few minutes of time if you are a manager and have people in your pipeline.

Winemaking is often the art of nurturing grape juice through a process of continuous incremental improvement until it ends up as a spectacular product, if that is the winemaker’s goal. Sure, you can make a million gallons of wine that all tastes the same, but the artwork and artistry of this vocation is not focused on consistency but on excellence, much like we should be striving for with our workplace improvement initiatives.

In the case of developing a team building game, one can also devote 25+ years to learning the art and substance of teamwork and collaboration and to continually fine-tune one’s ideas to optimize desired outcomes. And I can honestly say that I think we have reached that point with The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine, a team building exercise that has been continually improved since its first deliveries back in 1993.

We reached the point to actually enter it into a business learning games competition and are pretty pleased to say that we are a Finalist, with the judging in Lisbon in a month or so. We want to see how we compare with other great products in the global marketplace for experiential exercises for organizational development.

Selling and supporting a game was never my main objective; designing and refining an organizational development exercise to deliver consistently excellent results and have widespread positive impacts on people in organizations was always my goal and hopefully my legacy. Surveys of users say we have pretty much optimized our impacts from this single framework (see a supporting article here or download the results here.)

Dutchman’s existence grew out of dissatisfaction with a “team building game” that I represented as the first USA selling agent back in the late 1980s. That game’s play and its debriefing supported competition among teams – it’s program design allowed teams to quickly die because of their decisions, claiming that this was a reality of teamwork in most organizations. And the focus on competition was a distraction from the expressed objectives of building teamwork, something that I didn’t feel created a better Return on Investment than what a Collaborative approach would do. (Read more about that here)

When I tried to collaborate with that game’s developers, they resisted any ideas from any of us who were representing their product, ideas that would strengthen the game’s outcomes and impacts. So, over 24 years ago, Dutchman was created because there was a need in the team building marketplace for an inexpensive exercise that would support a serious learning framework for how collaboration beats competition in getting the best ROI.

We wanted a design that linked to real workplace issues, but also an exercise that could be easily facilitated by trainers or consultants and didn’t have a bunch of restrictive licensing and continual payment requirements attached to it. I wanted to sell Dutchman as a one-time cost game with a money back guarantee that could be used by virtually any type of organization and I soon found that this was a much appreciated concept compared to the typical way that team building products were put into the marketplace.

Once this exercise entered into the playing field, it immediately received accolades for how it drove home the concept of collaboration better than anything else out there. Through a much stronger debriefing than the other game provided, I was able to show how teams could have increased their ROI by the simple act of collaborating. We MEASURE the team and group results and can clearly show where and when collaboration would have had significant positive impacts on results. (If you own the game or are interested in performance metrics, you might find this detailed results analysis to be of interest.)

It is our belief that leadership, communications and strategic planning were all essential to creating a collaborative environment and Dutchman set this up well. Active involvement and engagement are also important for the success of any implementation, so the game plays really well in a situation where you want to better implement tops-down change and strategy.

The funny thing is that competition is a compelling force for players and they end up sub-optimizing their gold intake because of this, which is also a very common workplace observation. Therefore, this further indicated that a solid Debriefing was necessary to the game in order to get people to realize how choices around Collaboration brings in a better ROI.

Behavioral flexibility also became an important addition to the game and its debriefing because organizations have different reasons for using team building games and as Dutchman’s debriefing continued to evolve over the years so did its flexibility for creating different outcomes. Within its first year of use, Dutchman became a worldwide product that easily worked in various cultures and countries. And it is really neat when people working in one organization change jobs and buy the game for their new company. THAT is good evidence that the game holds high value and relevancy for them (and is a safe move to make!).

Today, we sell a variety of different Dutchman games, with LD-4 for up to 24 players (4 teams), LD-6 for up to 36 players (6 teams) and our LD-Professional Version for any number players.

These various versions and their scaled prices were well received and our idea of making a Rental Version of the game available for those who weren’t ready to invest in one of the other choices or who had a one-time delivery requirement. We have training consultant users who purchased the game to use in small classroom settings who can now profitably do that large organizational retreat (100+ people) for clients.

Throughout the years, I’ve continued to improve upon the game play not only from my own ideas but also from collaborating with Dutchman owners who have given me great ideas to incorporate into the game. The game materials have evolved over the years, the Debriefing presentation and slides have expanded, the training materials have evolved to now include videos of how to work the game, etc. Even the original game board has changed into a different version.

My colleague, Solomon Salvis, facilitates a lot of BIG Dutchman games for multinational companies. He shared this video with me today, one that I thought did a great job of overviewing the exercise:

People purchasing the game 24 years ago can still play with the materials they received at that time while those presently purchasing any of the game versions will have an updated set of materials — All versions will work exceedingly well to create a session worth facilitating because the outcomes of the game are like a fine wine in that the depth of appreciation for Dutchman and it’s return on investment continues to grow as it ages.

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/

We rent the Dutchman exercise to consultants and trainers in North America. See more details here about its play and its outcomes. It is a very good scheme to run a powerful, bombproof program with your own leadership serving as the Expedition Leaders. And it is easy and straightforward to deliver.

ASQC – American Society for Quality Control is now the ASQ /AQP, the American Society for Quality and the Association for Quality and Participation. I was actually a member of both groups and much more aligned with the frameworks of AQP – And I spoke at a couple of their international conferences.

Engagement – Think Local, Act Local

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On March 11, 2017

In Change Facilitation, collaboration, employee engagement, employee motivation, Engagement, Facilitation, improve organizational performance, innovation, intrinsic motivation, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator, Managing and leading change, Metaphors for business improvement, motivation in the workplace, Organizational Development Tools, people and performance, Spring Forward Monday, Square Wheels LEGO images, Statistics on workplaces, team motivation, The Square Wheels Project, workplace performance improvement

I was reading an article on adapting things like HomeKit and Echo into the way people interact with their homes. Alexa is pretty cool, but there are issues around its inability to recognize voices and there have been instances of voices on TV actually telling the system to order products online and the reality that a burglar could simply tell the system to turn off security alarms. The point that author Seyi Fabode was making was that one of our most basic needs is for security and safety, both at home and in the workplace where so many of us spend so much time and emotional energy.

MY thinking about his thinking was framed around a workshop I attended by Brad Thomas with my local ATD group yesterday morning. Brad was focusing on the implementation of full-company engagement systems and his excellent talk was anchored somewhat to these local issues but mainly focused on the corporate commitment to generating and acting on large amounts of employee feedback to frame up issues and opportunities.

In that Big Picture Corporate Model, things needed to cascade down from the top and that HR departments had to rethink how they focused so that they could actually bring human resource capital into play for their operational counterparts, that they could not simply remain the paper pushers they are in so many places. HR needed a seat at the corporate boardroom table to focus on the people side of improvement initiatives. It seems like an awful amount of senior management engagement and systemic change was a requirement before ANY actions could occur.

And when you have, as I once did, senior executives out there saying (or believing) things like this about people / engagement / involvement and being actively working to generate innovative ideas:

“That’s like asking the vegetables how to design a refrigerator,”

you pretty much KNOW that you are not going to be successful working from the tops downward forward. (And, yes, there are senior managers who could not care less about employee involvement and ideas — we seem to have one in the White House if you need an example.)

These two things clanged for me about an hour ago. Big Corporate Solutions trying to solve the issues of the worker / supervisor interface. What could possibly go wrong? Well, as results seem to consistently show, pretty much everything… Overall, statistics seem to show that OD things look pretty much like this:

From this month’s issue of Workforce magazine (3/17), Rick Bell shared some statistics and anchor points. Supervisors clearly improve their leadership and engagement skills. Some tops-down corporate program to improve overall engagement will simply not get traction:

• 35% of US workers would forgo a raise to see their boss fired

• 44% of employees say they have been emotionally or physically abused by a supervisor

• 3 of 4 workers say that their boss is the worst / most stressful part of the job

Other statistics supporting the idea of local control / local influence include:

• “Communication and connection are the cornerstone of relationships – a quarter to a third of employees believe their managers seldom or never listen to them, understand their issues, seek their input and ideas, or help them to resolve the issues and challenges they face. This persistent gap presents both a challenge and an opportunity to leaders and managers.” (Leadership Management Australasia’s LMA survey, April 2016)

• Only about 1 in 3 US managers are engaged in their jobs, and about 1 in 7 are actively DISENGAGED. Employees who are supervised by highly engaged managers are 59% more likely to be engaged than those supervised by actively disengaged managers. (Gallup)

Bell and others share these statistics, however, so there IS opportunity here if we can improve the interaction between workers and their managers. A short list of opportunities and benefits looks like this:

Managers are the Number 1 way that people feel supported by their organization
Managers influence 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores
Close to 60% of Americans say they would do a better job if they got along better with their boss
Close to 70% of those polled said they would be happier at work if they got along better with their boss, with the breakdown equal among men and women, but younger workers in their 20s and 30s were even higher (80%)
Over half (55%) of those polled, think they would be more successful in their career if they got along better with their boss
Only 4 in 10 of Americans will thank their boss on National Bosses Day with most believing that their boss wouldn’t care enough to bother
About 10% said they would use the day as an opportunity to talk to their boss and improve the relationship

——————————————–

Try this:

Have a conversation with someone who works in an organization and ask about how they feel they are being managed. I had two such conversations with people in my pool league two nights ago. Absolutely eye opening!

——————————————–

So, what IS a viable solution? Understand that the Big Corporate Improvement Program Initiatives seem doomed to fail unless organizations impact that supervisor / worker interface and make it more supporting and effective. And you can probably figure out that working to engage workers working for the 1 in 7 managers who are actively DIS-engaged within their own organization is simply a waste of money and resources.

Throw some mud at the wire fence!

Break away from the Big Corporate Program Mentality and do some Guerilla Engagement. Give some of your better supervisors the tools they need to improve their effectiveness. Allow them to improve their interactions with their people and to improve their facilitation and involvement skills.

The Square Wheels Project is an online training program designed FOR SUPERVISORS who need some training and some tools to improve communications. The Spring Forward Monday Toolkit is a package of tools (handouts, powerpoints, posters and instructions) to give supervisors the framework for a series of meetings and implementation action plans for simple ideas for workplace improvement and innovation, to allow more teamwork and active involvement.

The Square Wheels Project is not THE Solution to anything, but it does represent a most excellent alternative to the initiatives that are generally not working very well, a step forward in the effort to improve communications.

But some facilitation skills training can certainly help your managers to become better motivators and better leaders. Help them lead on-site workplace innovation and improvement initiatives at the very bottom-most layer of your organization, where most things are actually happening. Do things differently and let them lead!

Solve the small problems in simple ways, keeping a sense of safety and security in place with your supervisors feeling a minimal amount of risk for doing something differently. Look for some “small answers” to local issues and build things from the bottoms up. Make real improvements where you can, instead of looking for Big Answers from a distance.

Addendum: Since initially publishing these thoughts, I have begun to focus on a framework of Disruptive Engagement, which takes in much of this thinking and adds more data and rationale. You can find those blogs by clicking on the two images below.

Our stupidly simple tools are designed help any manager get some really effective, performance-focused improvement conversations going using better facilitation skills and our metaphors, plus our online help and networking,

For the FUN of It!

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

Learn more about Scott at his LinkedIn site.

Square Wheels® is a registered trademark of Performance Management Co.
LEGO® is a trademark of The LEGO Group

The two newer blogs can be found by clicking on the links above or by going to:

Corporate Engagement Hasn’t Worked – Why not try Disruptive Engagement?

Radical Candor and Disruptive Engagement

DHL Customer Service – All I wanted was a straight answer…

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On March 10, 2017

In Engagement

I sell teambuilding games, simulations designed to improve inter-departmental collaboration and leadership and focused on improving different aspects of issues around people and performance. And I did customer service consulting work for nearly 20 years.

So, this all clanged on a recent DHL-assisted shipment to Romania. It is not about the money, since the customer paid for shipping, but it has all been about service quality as well issues of trust and efficiency. It has been well over a month now, and I am still unable to get any facts on why my shipment on January 26, with all the proper documentation and details, was not delivered on time and in an expedient manner, and why I got this from my customer on February 10 (15 days later!):

Dear Scott,

For the past week I’ve been on the phone with DHL every single day, giving them all the info they required: invoice, payment proof, info of what the package contains, explaining them it’s a game and that I need it asap.

And today they had informed me that Customs needs to know how heavy is the package. So I took the problem in my own hands and called Customs. Guess what they told me… that DHL hasn’t given them any information that they needed – the information I gave DHL last week on Friday… (note: this would be March 3)

So I made a big fuss about it and I managed to convince them to give me the package without that stupid info about how heavy it is. On Monday I am going to drive all the way to customs to get the package, because DHL can’t promise they can sent it to me on Monday – I need it on Tuesday when we have the workshop with the client.

Thank you for all your support you have given us.

Have a great weekend,
(the customer, in need of the shipment to run a scheduled workshop)

Now, that seems pretty clear, right? My customer calls DHL for a week trying to get information about retrieving the box that should have been delivered, since it had all the required information included. (It is not like I do not ship these games internationally for 20 years, you know, and I pack the games with a copy of the shipping label because DHL has had those stripped off the outside of the package before. I also include duplicates of the invoice as well as an unnecessary list of each of the pieces of the game that are included as part of the whole.)

They also had to postpone that workshop, which still has not occurred. That delivery was to pay for a good portion of the game.

My customer clearly says that DHL — not Customs — is holding things up and not providing information that Customs needs to clear the package.

The box, by the way, is clearly marked to contain ONE game and DHL should know how much it weighs along with its size because they bill me for shipping with those numbers, right?

I called DHL Customer service and spoke with Janet English on three or four different calls, each simply to get information as to why the box could not be delivered (janet.english@dhl.com and 877-292-6031). At no time did what she say align with the comments of my customer. Here was DHL’s actual final written response to my forwarder, who filed a claim for a refund, which was refused:

There were additional details needed in order to clear the shipment with customs. The shipper S. Simmerman opened a trace on February 10, 2017 and information was communicated to DHL Romania. The shipment cleared customs on February 14, 2017 and the DHL courier made the final delivery.

I simply asked them, “WHAT ADDITIONAL DETAILS?” And I never gave them a single piece of information that they did not already have… They simply did not execute, from everything made available to me. Timely delivery was apparently not an important issue for them on a local basis there. (I am reminded of Tom Hanks in Russia for FedEx…)

The information in their response, above, was apparently the information that they then used to refuse a refund. Shipped on January 26th, with the details clearly spelled out in the included invoicing as ONE GAME and the need to know the weight of the package, it was somehow missing something.

In the book Closing Time, Joseph Heller had a quote to explain things like this:

“Nothing made sense, and neither did everything else.”

It would appear that DHL needs to add that as part of its mission statement:

• Our vision is to be The Logistics Company for the World.
• Our mission – Excellence. Simply Delivered. – is our guiding light and we believe that. “Nothing makes sense, and neither did anything else” when it comes to giving customers information.

It seems that the DHL light bulb needs replacement. There is nothing in here about accountability or on-time-delivery or excellence and honesty in responding to customers about issues that are apparently caused by their people and their processes. They share this, but no joy, it cost my customer money and I did not trust their answer about this.

I write this not about getting a refund, but with it being in alignment with my 20+ years of working on issues of customer service quality and the theme of alignment of behavior to missions to goals and expectations. And there is the theme of accountability, that seems to be missing. Clearly, it seems that there is NOT the kind of personal commitment to excellence that they say they are focused on.

It would be of great interest to see a senior manager of DHL actually respond to this blog; there is sufficient data to act on. It would be of great interest if this one small incident might be a factor in the re-evaluation of their commitment to service excellence and accountability. I understand that Janet English is in a difficult position, but I also know that there were things that could have occurred within the overall followup that did not occur.

Accountability, Breakfast of Champions.

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

Learn more about Scott at his LinkedIn site.

Intrinsic Motivation – It comes from having a goal

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On March 3, 2017

In Articles on Teamwork, collaboration, employee motivation, executive team building exercises, intrinsic motivation, Involving and Engaging People, LDGM, Leadership Development Game, manager as motivator, motivation in the workplace, motivational team building exercises, team building event ideas, The Search for The Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine, workplace performance improvement

My friend Jimmy Jain posted up a picture of himself after running a race.

The images of him below should tell you all you need to know about motivation, if you spend a moment to consider individual performance and how things really work. You cannot get this satisfaction from some extrinsic reward system; it is all about Intrinsic Motivation!

In high school, I ran one year of cross-country on a team that included Leon Nocito and Lee Mallory. That was in 1965 and I did it to get in condition for playing tennis (Jay Einstein and I were a really good doubles team who could beat our number 1 and 2 singles players even though we sucked at singles, ourselves. We took great pride in our play and were 7-0 through the first matches of our senior year (1966) ).

We were cross country State Champions for the big New Jersey schools and I could run only 15th on the team, but there was constant improvement in my times over the season, with me finally reaching 15:15 for 2.5 miles on grass (Seriously. I have this stuff written down in my yearbook! I had motivation but not much talent for running! Not like those guys…)

In the picture above, you can see Jimmy is obviously taking great pride in his running success and he is most likely comparing his personal performance to his individual goals. I am also guessing that both Leon and Lee would run far faster! But that is NOT what motivation is really about. It is about self and team and you can see the peer support Jimmy has if you look at the others in the side pics!

Vineland High School state championship cross country team of 1966

Leon top left and Lee top right and the rest of the team.

Leon, undefeated for two seasons, almost always ran a course record each race. Lee, always finished second to Leon, ever race, with Lee also generally beating the course record each race. Leon would never let Lee beat him and Lee always pushed Leon to new records and they finished 1-2 in the State Championship. One time, Leon was really sick and he STILL would not let Lee beat him — he nearly died, but that was simply how things were.

Our Track & Field team was unbeaten in ’63, lost one dual meet in ’64 & was unbeaten in ’65 and ’66. Coach Cosh had records like 125 wins in a row in track as well as the cross-country successes. We beat everybody. Unbelievable!

And these kinds of motivations and accomplishments are really found in everyday kinds of things, from the Special Olympics kids running their races to the bicycle club events with groups of people all doing the best they can to the professional athletes who do it for money (but also for pride). When that pride of accomplishment disappears, so does the motivation to perform.

So how are you running YOUR organization? How important are those intrinsic rewards based on personal goals, measured improvements, and peer support for teamwork and accomplishments? Are your people supporting each other or competing to beat the others? Is it a team-based effort to improve group performance or one of competition, sabotage and under-cutting to allow one person to “win” and create failures if they don’t.

Coach Cosh knew how to get whole groups of kids working together to generate championship levels of performance. He knew how to get Leon and Lee and Don and John all running as hard as they could individually to generate that TEAM success. Can you do the same to generate peer support, or do you try to motivate people with extrinsic rewards that are ineffective for the bottom 50% of your organization?

If you want some insights into how this all plays out, ask me about The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine exercise, where the goal is to mine as much gold as WE can but where tabletops will often compete rather than collaborate. It is one of the top leadership and organizational developmental team building games in the world, based on extensive user-feedback.

Ask Jimmy — he is one of our long-time Lost Dutchman customers and he says he feels the same way after successfully delivering a client workshop! Or, click on the image below to go to a descriptive page on my website.

For the FUN of It!

www.PerformanceManagementCompany.com

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

Learn more about Scott at his LinkedIn site.

Spring Forward Monday™ is March 13, 2017 – A Square Wheels® Solution

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On March 2, 2017

In dis-un-engagement, employee engagement, employee engagement, employee motivation, Engagement, Facilitation, improve organizational performance, innovation, intrinsic motivation, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator, motivation in the workplace, motivational team building exercises, people and performance, Spring Forward Monday, Square Wheels LEGO images, team building exercises, team motivation, The Square Wheels Project

Okay, March 13 is a Monday. But it is also the Monday after Sunday morning’s loss of an hour’s sleep as we set the clocks ahead each Spring. AND, it will be one of the low productivity workdays, since you know people will be dragging. (How many do you think will go to bed an hour earlier on Saturday night? Plus, there are lots of statistics on the measured impacts!)

So, with most people dragging, and this to be a known problem, why not choose to do something differently? Why not recharge their batteries and increase involvement (known to be low in general) and motivation (generally low) and teamwork (sometimes very spotty) by having a meeting focused on their issues and their ideas for improvement?

Choose to be a Draggin’ Slayer. Seize The Day! Choose to focus on rebuilding some energy and gaining ideas for improvement.

You can probably expect some low energy from your people. But our experiences show that this will be short-lived as people get involved with the Square Wheels^® metaphor as a vehicle to discuss issues and problems — and there are lots of Square Wheels out there! Simply talking about perceived Square Wheels will generate many Round Wheel solutions to make things roll more better faster.

People want to make improvements and people will work on teams to look at the ideas for improvement and offer ideas for implementation. It is just that they need the collective thinking of the group to really understand the issues more clearly and to better define some solutions.

And it is a fact that people are pretty good problem solvers, when they know that something IS a problem and they have perspective and resources and support. They can find solutions and if the solutions are their idea, they will be more motivated to implement those ideas. It is an issue of ownership and active involvement; you really cannot push them to make improvements you think are needed, since they resist your changes…

Nobody ever washes a rental car.

So, it is about choice. Your choice to simply continue to do things the same way or to involve and engage your people to look at things from different perspectives and define some issues and refine some ideas for workplace improvement. This kind of session can be held at the front-line worker level or even among the top management team, although workplace realities would suggest that the people pushing the wagon know a lot more about the realities and problems than the wagon pullers.

Most organizations do have the tendency to work like this and we will note that our experience proves that the Round Wheels are already in the wagon — those good ideas already exist. It is simply a matter of identification of the better ideas once the bad ones are recognized for what they are.

The reality is that the Square Wheels^® actually DO work, they just do not work smoothly…

Square Wheels One is a metaphor for performance improvement by Scott Simmerman

Square Wheels® One is our main illustration about how things really work.

So, with that perception about how things really work, you can use your imagination to guess at what might be done differently. You can choose to be a Draggin’ Slayer on Spring Forward Monday™ or continue to let things thump and bump. You can choose to improve involvement and engagement by involving and engaging your people in a new vision of how things can roll to the goal.

People WANT to be involved. Even the ones that say they don’t will get involved and engaged, since they so-often complain about how things are working and this is the perfect venue for them to contribute! So choose to involve everyone. Let people make some better choices and own the process of implementing workplace improvement.

If we have gotten you interested, here are some simple resources. One is a 2-minute video overview of the whole idea.

You can also purchase a complete $25 toolkit to support your effort with our metaphors and materials. The package contains:

The Square Wheels One image
A Leader’s Guide for facilitating the session
Participant Worksheets/Handouts
A collection of Square Wheels Posters that can be used as anchors to the insights gained as the group rolls down the road.

And, you can access The Square Wheels Project to complete a 30-minute optional course on facilitating workplace improvement through facilitation. It is a general course, but focused on our metaphors and worksheets. And it costs only $10 as we gain traction for our approach to organizational performance improvement and motivation of workplaces.

We are working hard to make this simple tool available directly to supervisors and managers who need simple and effective tools for motivating their people. Doing this on Spring Forward Monday™ would be a nice touch, but doing one of these sessions any time would be impactful.

For the FUN of It!

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

Learn more about Scott at his LinkedIn site.

Square Wheels® is a registered trademark of Performance Management Co.
LEGO® is a trademark of The LEGO Group

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