Month: July 2017

In business team building exercises, Change, Change Facilitation, Disruptive Engagement, employee motivation, Engagement, Facilitation, Icebreakers, improve organizational performance, innovation, intrinsic motivation, manager as motivator, Managing and leading change, Metaphors for business improvement, Organizational Development Tools, The Square Wheels Project

We sell simple tools for communications and engagement and have been doing it now for 25 years. We had a consistent brand image for 20+ but then decided to shift and now we are faced with the perplexing problem of shifting again. I am guessing that this is a common problem but also asking for some perspective and dialog, since what we do is about communications and engagement. (Can you see the paradox there?)

Stay tuned if you want to receive a free engagement toolkit!

My trademark is Square Wheels^®. And started out using this image as an engagement and development tool in the context of,

“How might this illustration represent
how organizations really work?”

The original image, with so little context, works wonderfully as a Rorschach test, in that people projected their beliefs onto it and the responses from a group of people were pretty amazingly diverse and creative. It always worked to generate great ideas about issues of the things that did not work smoothly and the Round Wheels that already existed and could be implemented. The year was 1993 and the image looked like this:

This wagon rolled forward for a LOT of years and lots of miles, with me presenting sessions in almost 40 countries and initially selling transparency-based books and then powerpoint illustrations as toolkits for change, motivation, etc. It got me to be known as, The Square Wheels Guy.

But more recently, things happened and we started shifting over to using LEGO^® blocks and Technics people to represent the themes and ideas, creating various scenes and frameworks that continues today and have moved into our other product designs and toolkits that continue to evolve.

Those images and scenes anchor to the same metaphor but represent themselves this way:

And we think this is a big improvement. The goal of showing the image is to generate active involvement and diverse thinking about how things work and what things might be done differently. The key points are quite obvious and people project their thoughts about their workplaces onto the visual.

These conversations around what it might represent as an organizational reality tend to focus on people, engagement, active involvement, innovation, leadership, motivation and similar. They are about issues, opportunities and implementation. They are about innovation and best practices and collaborative dis-un-engagement.

And we package a number of very simple toolkits as well as an online course so that supervisors and team leaders can learn facilitation skills. We have also used the LEGO scenes to create some stop-motion videos, which are easy to do and which would be much harder with line art.

This is NOT rocket science, to show an image and generate a discussion. It is a powerful but elegantly simple tool to generate real discussions about perceived workplace issues.

In our efforts to broaden exposure, we engaged with an organization to sell an Icebreaker toolkit around this theme to their customer base, which is different than mine but very congruent. It is a framework for collaboration and co-marketing that seems to have no downside.

As the two companies discussed this Icebreaker possibility, her staff came up with the idea of using a different representation of the Square Wheels® theme and suggested using an image that looked like this:

So, I am faced with a marketing decision with a variety of factors.

Does the above image represent an improvement or is it simply a dilution of my intellectual property?
Is the image itself going to generate better discussions about organizational reality and issues and opportunities, since it IS a very different scenario and has different features.
Is the last image going to get the positive reactions from discussion participants like the first two does?

And another set of questions:

If you were to change the latter image, how would you change it to improve its effect in generating engagement and ideas?
Which image do you personally prefer and why?

Your thoughts on the above would be most appreciated, and if you share a useful informative considered opinion or idea as a comment, I will send you a free toolkit to play with,

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.

Scott and Dan Stones built The Square Wheels Project as an LMS, sharing tools and training to support Disruptive Engagement in the workplace.

Visit The Square Wheels Project at www.TheSquareWheelsProject.com

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®

© Performance Management Company, 1993 – 2017. All Rights Reserved.
PMC has no affiliation or relationship with The LEGO® Group®

Please Note: The offer of a free Square Wheels Toolkit is limited to the first twenty (20) people who share a relevant and useful comment about the image dilemma and its resolution.

“It makes sense to us” – Thoughts on disengagement and customer service quality

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On July 13, 2017

In employee engagement, empowerment, Engagement, improve organizational performance, people and performance

A trip to the library should be enlightening, and I read a lot of books so I go at least twice a month. I usually have my card and the transaction process for checkout works fine. That is unless you bang up into a dis-engaged person running a rigid transaction processing system that is NOT customer oriented.

I had a book on reserve that had a pickup deadline and I was returning that day from a camping trip, pretty scruffy as well as somewhat disorganized, but certainly relaxed. Then I made the mistake in thinking that just because I was a regular customer to this small branch, the transactions could be accomplished without my library card.

I thus went into the library with:

a book checked out in my name (it was a science book – who reads those?)
a book reserved on the shelf with my name
no wallet, it being temporarily lost among all my camping gear that was on the floor of the garage, so no picture ID or library card.

So, could we simply do this transaction? Nope. I was required to have a picture ID. They said that someone could have stolen the book I was returning to pretend they were me so that they could steal a book that no one would know that I had reserved. (That somehow made sense to them and I guess there must be a big black market in stolen library books by friends of people who get books from the local library that I am unaware of.)

They also call this their Privacy Policy, as if there was some aspect of my personal privacy that they were protecting.

And when I asked them to comment about the policy, one that focuses only processing and handling transactions and not on helping customers, one of them said that they like it as it is and that, “It makes sense to us.”

(The library management, BTW, drives the policy and the supervisor was no more helpful than the clerk. Even showing her a picture of my mother’s driving license (Mom is 98 and does not drive, but her ID is valid) and with the same last name was not sufficient to indicate my probable personal identity, nor was the fact that my phone list shows “OWNER – Scott Simmerman” as the first entry in the numbers and it requires my thumbprint to even open the phone!)

“It makes sense to us!'”

Really? Does that process make sense to customers? I mean, what is my exposure here from a privacy standpoint? The Federal Government set up a commission that is demanding the states release voter names and social security numbers and addresses and voting affiliations and voting history to supposedly prevent future in-person voter fraud (which exists in a tiny percentage) but my LIBRARIAN is going to protect by privacy by not lending out a reserved book in my name without a picture ID?

How would any potential thief even know that the requested book was in my name on the shelf? And some internal thief could certainly just take the book and walk out if the marketplace was that lucrative for stolen library books, right?

Solution:

A simple solution is that the leadership of the library would be to get the clerks to improve their service by calling the customers by name.

I see the person that cuts my hair a lot less than my library visits and THEY always call me by name… That is a fairly common thing and positive thing for organizations with a small customer base and repeat customers.

The team should realize that some reasonable security is important, but that some judgement can also apply. I just put a picture of my drivers’ license on my phone (there was one on there but with 30,000 images, I simply could not find it quickly). And, I am asking each clerk to repeat back my account number when I check out a book. I am thinking of testing the system again without a proper ID…

The leadership should allow their people to act with judgement and sort through the situation logically and allow intelligent and reasonable deviations from their policies, procedures, rules and regulations. They could have asked me for some history of what I had borrowed in the past, or my address or phone. But they made NO attempt to think through how I might be verified. They simply said NO.

The library is not the DMV, where people might be trying to get fake IDs. It is The Library! They have books and tapes, not jewelry or gold coins. Nobody is trying to really steal from them, are they?

The leadership could CHOOSE to do things differently and the management could dis-un-empower the clerks to deal with their taxpaying customers in a bit more friendly way.They should not have stupid, inflexible systems that frustrate their taxpaying customers or their employees.

I am also publishing a short letter on this in the local newspaper, since I cannot be the only person this has happened to and we DO pay for their books, building and salaries, right?

I also came back to this and redid the graphic just a little. They really DO need to have some Disruptive Engagement and arrive at a better customer service quality standard. Processing and handling transactions is NOT service quality, meeting expectations actually defines it. Managers need to have policies that empower people to make good decisions, not simply defend a bad policy!

For the FUN of It!

 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

Positive Disruptive Employee Engagement for Innovation and Motivation

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On July 10, 2017

In Change Facilitation, Disruptive Engagement, employee engagement, employee motivation, Engagement, improve organizational performance, intrinsic motivation, manager as motivator, ownership involvement, people and performance, workplace performance improvement

It is funny, if you google the word DISRUPTIVE, most of the associated descriptive links will be on negative things and that the main positive framework is the link to Disruptive Innovation, where it spins around to be The Good Thing.

When I use the term, “Disruptive Engagement,” many people’s’ first reactions seem to be that it must mean chaos and that chaos is bad. On the other hand, what we are framing is the positive aspect of active employee involvement that will be generated from the bottoms up, from the interactions and ideas of workers and supervisors. Disruptive impacts are on the corporate control and management systems that are generally working against engagement.

Let me reframe that:

Positive Disruptive Employee Engagement will actually translate to active involvement, intrinsic motivation, facilitative behavior by supervisors and managers, and a broad swath of innovation from a wide variety of hands-on perspectives. If you will step back from your organizational wagon, you are likely to identify Best Practices.

Best Practices are those things that a few people are actually doing that makes them exemplary performers. Some people are exemplary performers because — wait for it… They do things differently than everybody else!

Translating to my lexicon, exemplary performers generally use Round Wheels in a world full of Square ones. They choose to do things differently. They have developed a more efficient or more effective ways to do things. Often, they break — sorry, BEND — the existing rules, policies and procedures to do things #morebetterfaster than other people. And the absolutely crazy thing is that most managers are not really sure what these performers actually do. And few other workers ever bother to try to model those behaviors and actions and processes.

Those old Square Wheels^® continue to thump and bump, predictably and safely unless we decide to look about doing things differently. People cannot make different choices if they do not have considered alternatives, and those will not come from sitting around doing the same old, same old. The need is for perspective, along with a desire to do things differently, which comes from cognitive dissonance.

Recognize that we need to actively search for opportunities for improvement and better ideas, and not just sit around expecting things to change because someone else will change them.

If not YOU, who? If not NOW, when?

“If it is to be, it is up to me,” should be the mantra of all supervisors everywhere, along with the recognition that there is NOT going to be a lot of help from elsewhere to get things done, to motivate people or to make the improvements that are necessary to continue the innovation and productivity improvement prospects. Supervisors are pretty much on their own when it comes to people development and process improvement and motivation in most organizations.

What I am proposing here is for people to step back from the wagon and look at how things are working and what possibilities exist. Supervisors can ask the questions and listen for the ideas, proposing that people consider different alternatives and choices in what they do.

But the ideas come from the people and are not simply more stuff rolling downhill from somewhere else. The supervisor facilitates, rather than lectures. The participants discuss their issues of possibilities, fear of risk-taking, problems of implementation and the issues surrounding peer support and teamwork.

The ideas are around changing perceptions about possibilities and about shared learning around choices. The skills needed are straightforward and focus on asking for ideas, asking for commitment and asking about progress as things roll forward. Problems are around generating active ownership of the improvement ideas and managing actual and perceived roadblocks to implementation.

Can’t we all just work together to get things done?

For the FUN of It!

Scott and Dan Stones built The Square Wheels Project as an LMS, sharing tools and training to support Disruptive Engagement in the workplace.

Visit The Square Wheels Project at www.TheSquareWheelsProject.com

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

Dr. Seuss on Disruptive Engagement

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On July 6, 2017

In Articles on Teamwork, Business Haiku, Change Facilitation, dis-un-empowerment, dis-un-engagement, Disruptive Engagement, employee motivation, Facilitation, improve organizational performance, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator, Managing and leading change, Organizational Development Tools

Even Dr. Seuss would understand about the issues and opportunities around the positive impacts of supervisors leading more active involvement to make impacts on people and performance. The data are simply so clear that people DO have ideas for improvement but that no one in the organization facilitates the process of capturing those ideas. Thus, there are large gaps in innovation and quality and productivity because possibilities simply are not realized.

I’ve blogged elsewhere about the general idea of Disruptive Engagement but I thought that one image, simplifying to the stupidly understandable level, might generate some actual thinking about choices and doing things differently! (grin)

People have ideas for improvement, the Round Wheels are already in the wagon. But they interact with their supervisors, who generally choose to NOT do things differently because of risk or time or task interference or the lack of collaboration from other departments. “I’m here from Human Resources to help you,” is such a “reality joke” in so many places because they are structurally unable to help, too.

If things are going to improve, it is going to be the people who choose to improve things. And it is going to come from increased collaboration and alignment to shared goals. Do some effective team building (see why I hate outdoor activities)!

Facilitate Dis-UN-engagement and Dis-UN-empowerment with your people by choosing to actively involve them in some workplace improvement activities. Visit The Square Wheels Project for some simple tools and support,

For the FUN of It!

Scott and Dan Stones built The Square Wheels Project as an LMS, sharing tools and training to support Disruptive Engagement in the workplace.

Visit The Square Wheels Project at www.TheSquareWheelsProject.com

 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

Facilitation, Learning and Motivation: The Supervisor

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On July 3, 2017

In Change, Change Facilitation, Disruptive Engagement, employee motivation, Engagement, Facilitation, improve organizational performance, manager as motivator, motivational team building exercises, people and performance

Networking and Idea Sharing are keys to generating considered alternatives and there are a LOT of ideas about impacting people and performance when people start thinking together and sharing perspectives and support. My thought was to write about workplace applications of this idea.

A couple of good email conversations got me moving again on this issue of Supervisor as Facilitator and how little downside there seems to be to that concept of them being idea encouragers or coaches. This is really a main part of their jobs, yet one where we do not seem to be supporting them with skill training or with tools.

Who but the Supervisor can motivate the workers?

One of the email threads developed the idea that people hate training, which a bunch of us jumped on pretty hard in the conversation. There does not seem to be any data to support this idea that I could find, but it is true that a lot of training is wasted in training that has no visible impact or result. And a lot of people do not want to GO to training simply because there is no ROI for it in their view. Not a lot of training is something that people really want to just jump into, for a lot of reasons. “You are going to a training program” is often met with the comment, “Why? What did I do wrong?”

Some of the training is off-target and irrelevant or totally boring, done by people with good intentions but who are not SMEs (subject matter experts) or who do not have hands-on experience in the issues (it would be like me doing time management training or sales training or teaching people how to speak English!).

A lot of trainees either see little relevance of that training to their work or career or that the new things learned will not be supported in the workplace. Past experience can be tough to overcome. And the reality is that the work generally piles up when people are gone.

And sometimes training might cause people to feel like they are being appraised and tested, or that they will be potentially embarrassed when trying to put those new behaviors into real play in their workplace. I think the phrase might be “fear of constructive criticism” or some such thing.

And is it really a training need? Can they do it if you gave them $500 or put a gun to their head? So, are supervisors the trainers or simply the coaches and the people doing the followup to install the desired behaviors?

So, it should be obvious that supervisors should be trainers but also coaches and supporters, especially as training through LMS and smartphones becomes more and more the norm. Supervisors should be mentors and performance coaches, supporting the small changes in behavior that result in more small changes in behavior, something we call incremental improvement (or reality!).

Who but the Supervisor can implement training?

Supervisors can also address The Fear Factor that so commonly affects workers and workplaces. My colleague Dan Stones has addressed that here, for example. Fear is the Mindkiller, and supervisors are absolutely the best people to address those issues and impact their workplaces. We need to do things differently!

But what about the fear within the supervisor for doing something differently? Who but their manager is going to support them as they try new things and do things differently? Human Resources? And who supports them if they make a mistake?

So who is going to do this serious human resource development (training, facilitation and engagement) in the workplaces and what outcomes do we expect? What tasks and commitments do we remove or eliminate to free up the time to do the coaching and mentoring? What current systems and processes are we going to have to disrupt to make new behaviors appear both on the shop floor and among the management team?

So, the question you need to ask is what needs to be done differently to really impact people and performance in your organization? Our management team generally has a good perspective in how organizational change is accomplished. For many based on what people report about their experiences, it looks something like this:

We can make the choices to really do things differently. Will We?

PMC has some simple tools that can support your improvement initiatives. Check out The Square Wheels Project or investigate our team building simulation, The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine. But more than anything else, look at what needs to fundamentally change within your management team to allow people to make improvements,

For the FUN of It!

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
Twitter @scottsimmerman

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

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

Month: July 2017

Branding, Change, Marketing and Square Wheels

“It makes sense to us” – Thoughts on disengagement and customer service quality

Positive Disruptive Employee Engagement for Innovation and Motivation

Dr. Seuss on Disruptive Engagement

Facilitation, Learning and Motivation: The Supervisor