Month: January 2022

In my LinkedIn feed was a blog by Jacob Morgan about leadership in change. In it, he talks about the thinking of Simon Mainwaring, who thought that there are 3 transforming trends happening:

Leaders are allowed to be more human,
Cultures are more inclusive, and
Leadership is much more collaborative.

His key point was that as leadership changes, the skills and mindsets of leaders will also change. Successful leaders are willing to adapt to best serve their organizations. This only makes sense.

My initial response to this was, “maybe.” I have been seeing similar thoughts for a very very long time, almost every time there is some paradigm shift like the move to “Excellence” and the move to “Quality” and so on and so forth. Maybe, “covid-driven remote working” is the next great new thing in the world of leadership to drive a focus on managing, or maybe not.

I think that a lot of managers view the world pretty simply:

…and this is NOT how to motivate them for good performance…

I remember reading pre-covid that the workers that were remote way back in those good old days had more contact with their managers than the people who were sitting in the same offices, watching their manager walk by not saying much, multiple times a day. The managers apparently seemed to feel the need to keep connected to these remote workers and never bothered to bother the ones sitting in the workplace.

And, I just read a great PwC survey of CEOs. In this broad-based analysis, one can see that Customer Satisfaction and Employee Engagement Metrics were the top two measures to which these execs were compensated and that they were the top two corporate strategies.

But then you read nothing much about the people strategies of these CEOs and nothing about how they are communicating the criticality of managing the front-line workers and their supervisors to improve their workplaces. And it seems to me that if people are that important to their view of performance, they would be at least talking about that herein or maybe in their regular communications with their management teams.

Now, you read the stories around The Great Resignation and see how so many people are CHOOSING to leave their companies. So much of that hangs around the issues of them and their supervision and management (training, compensation, engagement and similar). And if you read the survey, the word “people” was used two times and there was little recognition that improving the management of people on generating those desired results.

And then I read a great and really well-written article by Ethan Burris about how to manage ideas around your negative boss and up the organization (https://hbr.org/2022/01/how-to-sell-your-ideas-up-the-chain-of-command) — which makes great points but which angers me because only the most motivated workers will choose to do something that risky within their own organization.

How many workers are going to read the article to learn the strategies for working around their managers and how many managers will see this whole thing as needing change?

(This other article on employees speaking freely (also by Ethan Burris) is much better, and will be the subject of another blog post soon: https://hbr.org/2016/01/can-your-employees-really-speak-freely)

WHY should workers even want to manage ideas around their manager? Why take the risk? Why not just go to another company which will probably generate a pay increase and the possibility that the manager really cares about their people? There is always hope, right?

I’m an old geezer, 73, and recently un-retired and re-engaged in themes of people and performance. I’ve been reading about these same “better management practices” for over 50 years and some of those business writings are now about 100 years old. And little has really changed. METRICS have changed since we now measure engagement and quality, but the general interactions of managers and employees? Not so much.

BOSS spelled backwards is self-explanatory and there are still WAY too many managers who think they are The Boss.
(And most would agree that they are!)

Going remote has HUGE potential benefits for people and performance. But how do we really implement improvements in organizations to make the workplace a real place for personal growth and family support?

So, I am thinking of taking a back-door approach to changing supervisor’s behaviors and forcing them to be more engaging. We just released the online, virtual version of our team building game. It is designed to run with as many as 6 teams of 4 people in a pod, just a perfect size if we can get organizations to push their managers to do some actual teambuilding with their people. One or two supervisors could run the game, which is focused on, “Mining as much gold as WE can.”

If, we can teach these managers the positive facilitation skills needed to run the game as Expedition Leader, basic psychology says that their attitudes around the ideas of facilitation will change, that they will need to be in alignment with their actual behavior.

The game is about getting people to collaborate within their teams and getting them to collaborate between their teams in order to generate to most gold that they can. Competition makes it more difficult and measurably sub-optimizes game results.

Then, these Expedition Leaders generate a debriefing to get at the ideas the players have for performing better, and then discussing how some of those suggestions could be implemented within their workplace. Later communications done for teaching and around implementation would further the need for more engagement and more changes toward desired outcomes.

We will move this way as we develop more of the game support materials. We will wrap the exercise around generating motivation and teamwork and improving how people engage and collaborate around their remote workplaces.

If you want to see more about The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine, you can click on the icon below and see a short overview video or to to our website to read about the exercise in more detail.

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For the FUN of It!

Scott Simmerman, Ph.D., CPF, CPT – “The Square Wheels Guy”
Managing Partner, Performance Management Company – 864-292-8700
1520 S McElhaney Road, Greer SC 29651 USA
Scott@SquareWheels.com

Visit our website at www.performancemanagementcompany.com

See a 2-minute video of Lost Dutchman Virtual here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cE6gDtZymwk

Can you IMPROVE a Square Wheel?

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On January 17, 2022

In Change, employee motivation, Engagement, manager as motivator

A casual note in Slack to me from our marketing guy Amit got me thinking, so I responded and then felt I should write a blog about it. I had shared an old LEGO style, “Too Busy to Improve“ image with him with a note that we want to change this to our new Divya illustration style.

Amit said, “…most times it’s only because we don’t know how to work them smoothly.” (referring to the Square Wheels on the wagon)

And my immediate response was, “Nah. The Square Wheels always need to be replaced with better ones. BUT, sometimes we see organizations implement Triangular Wheels because they can measure the improvement — “one less bump per revolution.” Square Wheels cannot be made into round ones. Yet the Round Wheels really are everywhere. Customers have them, workers have them, supervisors have them, consultants should get them from the three previous groups. Senior Leadership seldom has really good ones…”

So, my response got me thinking: maybe I might clarify my thinking about improvement and engagement and innovation.

Square Wheels® are simply things that do not work smoothly. We show the image of the wagon and ask people for their thoughts on how this might represent how things work in most organizations. Results from asking are simply amazing. People project their beliefs on to this “Organization Ink Blot Test*” and you get a pretty amazing number of thoughts about issues of systems and processes, innovation, leadership, culture and similar. A few people make funny comments like, “We’re not like that. We push our wagon uphill in the mud!”

Then, the next phase of the engagement is to ask the participants, “What are some Square Wheels that we might want to address” and let them discuss the things that do not work smoothly from their perceptions. These discussions are amazing, in that some of the ideas represent really good organizational improvement ideas and some represent only minor and easy to implement changes. Some are systems and process improvement thoughts and many are problems that have already been solved by top performers, the Best Practice kinds of things.

People have real and well-considered ideas in many cases. And everyone engages and offers their thoughts. A few things are seen as problems by an individual or two but those do not generate traction and the lack of consensus peer support for them tends to make them go away in the proposer’s mind (which can be really helpful to the team!).

And because the ideas are generated in group discussion, the active involvement serves to generate engagement and the cognitive dissonance that because there are Square Wheels, there must be some ROUND Wheels out there to address them. Too often, they start solving a Square Wheel problem before they have even finished the discussion of possibilities.

As to “fixing” a Square Wheel, I think that is not a functional possibility. Square Wheels can generate new ideas for implementing improvement but trying to fix an existing problem is not as effective as looking at a variety of possible solutions. Too often, we jump in to fix something without considering other possibilities.

Let me complete this post with another relevant thought. In a John LeCarre novel, he wrote, “A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.” And I think that is right. The people who have hands-on experience generally have a good sense of reality. While they view things from the back of the wagon and they may not have great overall perspective, they DO have a sense of what is happening in reality. I contrast this with the reality of isolation of the more senior managers, who may see things from the Big Picture much better, but they do NOT know the specifics and the details of how things work. Two things happen:

One is the reality of the long rope:

And another is that they may measure their impacts without considering all of the ramifications of their solution. I call that basic problem two different things, “The Cost of Human Capital” and “One Less Bump per Revolution.” We can easily make changes that have significant negative impacts on people and we can always measure the wrong thing…

I hope that you have found this interesting and I am looking forward to updating this post with our new illustrations, which are powerful tools that can be used in zoom conversations to generate more active involvement, engagement and motivation to address some of the things that can be changed and improved in most organizations.

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For the FUN of It!

Scott Simmerman, Ph.D., CPF, CPT – “The Square Wheels Guy”
Managing Partner, Performance Management Company – 864-292-8700
1520 S McElhaney Road, Greer SC 29651 USA
Scott@SquareWheels.com
SquareWheelsGuy (Skype)

Our new VIRTUAL version of our team building game is now available for demonstrations and developmental partnerships.

See a 2-minute video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cE6gDtZymwk

* This is also know as a Rorschach Test, more formally…

Square Wheels® is a registered trademark of Performance Management Company.
© – All illustrations copyright Performance Management Company, 1993 – 2022

“Use All Your Strength” – A Story on Learning and Improvement

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On January 4, 2022

In Articles on Teamwork, business team building exercises, Corporate Team Building Games, Engagement

A colleague shared a story in a blog which I saw years ago. With our recent release of the online version of our Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine team building game, I thought to share it here to illustrate one of the game’s key learning points. Dutchman is about optimizing results and collaboration, two of the main performance improvement themes:

A father and young boy were walking along a pathway, when they came across a large tree trunk that had fallen across the way.

The father encouraged the boy to go move the tree, to which the son replied he wasn’t strong enough.“Yes! You are,” said the dad. “If you use all your strength, I know you can do it.”

So, the boy summoned all he had, and, against the mighty forces of nature, he tried. And tried. And tried again. Finally, hanging his head, he went back to admit to his father that he just couldn’t do it.

“Did you use all your strength?” The man asked. The boy nodded he had. “No, actually son, no you didn’t,” the father said.

And as the boy looked up, puzzled, the Dad bent down and said … “You didn’t use me.”

With a man and his son, the situation is obvious. But what about organizations? How does the same story apply?

Let me illustrate within the framework and then broaden out into how people and organizations can improve results.

The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine starts by generating the challenge for teams, “to mine as much gold as we can.” The goal is to maximize the Return on Investment and the role of the Expedition Leader is, “to help teams be successful.” Simple enough. The Expedition Leader provides a map, resources, information and expects a return on that investment. Teams need to make decisions as to their strategy and plan, manage their resources and time, and reach the mine to mine gold, returning by the end of 20 “days.”

With a great deal of energy and a short planning time, they learn the rules as to how the game operates (in both a board game or in our new online, remote delivery framework), select the most important and necessary resources, gather information from other teams or game leadership, and implement their plan. Survival is critical — they must return by the end of Day 20 — but the goal is to optimize the time they spend in The Mine to generate the most gold.

The issues that stand out about using possible strengths is that people often choose to go it alone, do not ask other teams for information or to share resources. As a result of better planning, some teams gain more information to guide their choices and more resources to speed their journey or to reallocate their resources. (I will not get into specifics because I don’t want to give away game secrets!)

If they collaborate and share, they mine more gold. Often, these solo teams might mine 5 or 6 days of gold if they plan well. But the collaborating teams generally mine 8 to 10 days of gold simply because they know more and make different choices.

But another game reality, often prepared in advance for the debriefing, is, “Why don’t teams ask The Expedition Leader for help?”

The explicit game ROLE of the Expedition Leader is to help teams be successful, and their overall GOAL is to optimize the results of ALL the teams, since they are investing time, information and resources to all involved and having only one or two teams being optimally successful simply does not make sense. It is the OVERALL results that are what is important but teams often do a, “My Team, MY Team, MY Team” kind of decision making, one that is often is less successful. Collaboration between teams is a critical design feature of the game, as is the absolute power given to the EL to do whatever makes sense to optimize results, from giving teams extra resources to sharing critical strategic advice or extra tools.

People want to feel successful, and sometimes they feel that they need to go it alone.

But the reality is that teams make better decisions than individuals and even teams can benefit from collaboration with other teams and other people who have different information and different perspectives and even different ideas.

The goal in the initial design of Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine was to clearly show that collaboration between teams is beneficial, but the real world reality is that teams most often compete. Competition might be motivating, but it clearly decreases the ability for an organization to optimize results. Some people also really dislike competition and choose to opt-out early when things get competitive; they would much rather collaborate. And, it is a definite corporate reality that “Interdepartmental Collaboration” is an oxymoron in larger organizations.

So, the play of Lost Dutchman is designed to show players the benefits of doing better planning and resource management, collaborating and sharing information between teams, and actively asking the organization’s Expedition Leaders for advice. We want to make this one of the key desired outcomes for playing the game, to increase the collaboration between workers and their Expedition Leaders. We designed the game so that managers and supervisors can quickly learn how to deliver a powerful exercise, with many benefits around building a stronger and more collaborative team.

Like the boy in the story above, teams can ask for help from people who have more power and more resources. Most leaders in most organizations will help people succeed.

If you would like to see more about the Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine, click on this link.

If you would like to see more about the new, online virtual version of the exercise, you can:

Watch this 2-minute video
Read more about the exercise on our website
Email Jeff Simmerman and schedule a demo

Consider scheduling a team building event with the online version for your training team. We can assist you through our network of consultants or help your training department to add the capability of delivering the program internally. There are a wide variety of benefits and we can tailor a program to meet your specific desired goals and objectives. And note that an event with players from your HR and Training Departments will generate a very positive payback to impacting your overall corporate development efforts — the insights into how they might collaborate more effectively is one of my most fun adventures!

Our role, as Expedition Leaders and game designers, is to help YOUR teams be more successful.

Make the choice and ask us for our help,

For the FUN of It!

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Scott Simmerman, Ph.D., CPF, CPT – “The Square Wheels Guy”
Managing Partner, Performance Management Company – 864-292-8700
1520 S McElhaney Road, Greer SC 29651 USA
Scott@SquareWheels.com

SquareWheelsGuy (Skype)

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

Month: January 2022

Team Building, Leadership and Change

Can you IMPROVE a Square Wheel?

“Use All Your Strength” – A Story on Learning and Improvement