Category: employee motivation Page 1 of 25

Choose to help your people Spring Forward!

March 14 is a Monday, the day after Daylight Savings time advances and we lose an hour of sleep. It doesn’t sound like much, but global statistics of many kinds show that there are many, multiple general negative impacts on people and performance.

It will be one of the low productivity workdays of the year — it is also called Sleepy Monday by many — and you know people will be dragging. I mean, really, how many of your people will go to bed an hour early?

So, expect things to look like this:

So, with most people dragging, and with this a known problem, why not choose to do something differently? Why not recharge their batteries and increase involvement and low motivation and teamwork (sometimes not really good anyway) by facilitating a meeting focused on their issues and their ideas for improvement? Why not have some FUN and generate some ideas that you can then implement? Worth a try?

Choose to be a Draggin’ Slayer. Seize The Day!

Choose to do some things different with your onsite and especially your remote workers. Ask them to work together to share ideas for what might be done differently to address those problems that do not roll along smoothly!

People are good problem solvers and when they know that something IS a shared problem, they will collaborate to define the problem and generate the needed perspective and define appropriate 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. Put them to work!

We are offering a $15 toolkit that works for onsite and Zoom-type meetings:

It comes complete with our main discussion illustration, called Square Wheels One:

And related worksheets. You can present the image as a screenshare and have your people discuss this to get them started thinking about the many workplace things that do not work smoothly.

From those engaging discussions, you can shift the talk to the workplace issues that the Square Wheels might represent, the many things that do not work smoothly. You can engage them in their normal work teams or create new breakout room to allow them to share thoughts and generate possibilities.

You can close with the image we call Intrinsic Motivation, the reality of how people feel when they implement their own ideas and see resulting improvements.

As a manager or team leader, it is your choice to continue to do things the same way or to actively involve and engage people to interactively consider things from different perspectives, defining some issues and refining some ideas for individual or organizational improvement.

This kind of interactive discussion 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.

Our decades of experience using similar materials repeatedly 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.

You can choose to be a Draggin’ Slayer on Spring Forward Monday^® or continue to let things thump and bump along. You can choose to improve involvement and engagement by actively involving and engaging your people in a new visions of how things can roll to the goals.

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.

You can also purchase this simple $15 toolkit to support your engagement efforts with our metaphors and materials. The package contains:

The Square Wheels One image
A simple Leader’s Guide for facilitating the session(s)
Participant Worksheets/Handouts

Optionally, you can access The Square Wheels Project to complete a 30-minute optional course on generating workplace improvement through facilitation. It is a general skill-development course, but focused on our metaphors and worksheets. And it costs only $15 as we gain traction for our approach to organizational performance improvement and motivation of workplaces.

We are continually 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 of high impact and benefit.

Please note that this Spring Forward Monday® toolkit contains only the two new Divya Style illustrations of Square Wheels One
and the Intrinsic Motivation image and does not include the LEGO images used to illustrate the Draggin’ Slayer idea.
Other Square Wheels® illustrations will become available shortly and we are easily able to support your use of the metaphor with custom-designed tools.

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 who is trying to retire!! He now lives in Cuenca, Ecuador.

You can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

Learn more about Scott at his LinkedIn site.

Square Wheels® is a registered trademark of Performance Management Company
Spring Forward Monday® is a registered trademark of Performance Management Company
LEGO® is a trademark of The LEGO Group
Square Wheels images are copyrighted by Performance Management Company

Team Building, Leadership and Change

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On January 21, 2022

In Corporate Team Building Games, employee motivation, Facilitation, Leadership Development Game, manager as motivator

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.

—

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.

—

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

Implementing Round Wheels to fix your Square Wheels

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On December 29, 2021

In employee motivation, Engagement, Involving and Engaging People

Ask a worker and they will share ideas for improvement. As a consultant walking around, this is a given and a simple reality. People doing the work know there are things that can be done differently that would have impacts on organizational performance. Some will even take the time to give you a list of them if they think you are really interested. (true.)

Many things do not work smoothly in their workplaces, which are the things that frustrate them and measurably lower productivity. And it is an exceptional manager who appears to be interested in making changes and improving work processes.

And this frustration and dissatisfaction about potential improvements causes all sorts of negative spins to impacting intrinsic motivation and employee turnover. Sometimes it is simple training that can smooth things out and sometimes is is the sharing of a best practice across all team members. Often it is about improving collaboration across departmental boundaries. But the act of ASKING goes a long way toward improving communications.

Discussing and implementing better ideas can send the message that what the workers see is actually important to managers. Often, what management sees as important and what management pushes through are different things — and that is most likely not going to lead to any sort of workplace engagement and performance improvement.

But the problem is often related to how the problem is discussed and presented. And people are BUSY, and often appear not interested in listening or considering new ideas. Maybe it looks like this:

Today’s Organizational Reality would conclude:

People do not fix or care that much about ideas that are not their own.
Bosses are busy, or at least too busy to spend time listening to ideas
Improvement may not be measured by the company
The improvement possibility is not related to your job or their job
The value and impact of the improvement is not thought-out or defined
Everyone has different perspectives on what to do differently
The idea is not well presented or framed as a business proposition
The idea not seen as cost effective or it may take time to address
Some interdepartmental collaboration may be required (needs IT or another department or something similar to implement)

What I suggest that supervisors and managers can do differently is to schedule some time to ask people for ideas.

But first, we want to engage and involve them and get them to “step back from the wagon and think out of the box” a little. This image below is a simple framework for the overall thinking about the issues and the opportunity:

“Don’t Just DO Something, Stand There” and “The Round Wheels are already in the wagon” are two of the main operational metaphors. The process depends on people actively engaging with the metaphor and generating their own ideas about issues and opportunities.

If you are interested in more details about how you might use the Square Wheels theme to address issues and opportunities with your people, click on the worksheet image below and view an older post of mine with more details. We are in the process of developing a whole series of tools for the remote workplace and for supervisors to use to engage their people through Zoom and similar tools.

Note that we moved from the original line-art images to using LEGO to illustrate and animate different themes and that we are now in the process of redoing the line art in a new and more colorful style. More to come, for sure!

For the FUN of It!

Dr. Scott Simmerman CPF, CPT 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.

You can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

Scott’s detailed profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottsimmerman/

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

Power, Petit Tyrants, Sharking and Performance

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On December 16, 2021

In Articles on Teamwork, employee motivation, manager as motivator, people and performance, Trust Building, workplace performance improvement

Sharking is a term used in pocket billiards and other cue sports when one’s opponent tries to use sometimes subtle behaviors to disturb your game or your rhythm. It can be as obvious as talking to you while you are shooting or standing behind the pocket in which you are aiming to sink your object ball. The general idea is to disrupt and to give them an advantage. Often, sharking does not work, but sometimes it does and thinking that it does reinforces the tendency for a shark to keep on sharking…

In business, you might see it as a small comment at a meeting to distract you or to focus attention away from what you are trying to communicate, to decrease your effectiveness in some way, to their perceived benefit and to your detriment. Sometimes your peers do it to you, consciously or unconsciously.

In some cultures this kind of sharking is even The Norm. People poke fun at others and it becomes a joke to many. I think of stereotypical cop cultures or military cultures as examples, which generally changed with more and more diversity being added, which served to constrain it to some degree.

And sometimes, your boss can act as a “Petit Tyrant” — a little tyrant — and behave in a way that “sharks” you in some way. This can happen in so many situations that it is hard to nail down, and it often reflects their conscious or unconscious biases against things. It is not the size of the tyrant, but the act of workplace bullying that makes them little. And what they do may not even be important so long as they think it raises them up over you, somehow. This behavior, done over time, can disrupt teamwork and decrease performance or one’s motivation to succeed.

The best way to deal with it is to identify it, to acknowledge it and to hope that it goes against some kinds of rules and organizational paradigms, to make them see their behavior as abnormal in some way. But it can also be political.

I’m generally a “Rules Guy,” in that understanding the rules generally mitigates the sharking to some degree. In pool, it is not a legal activity and people can be banned from tournaments or leagues by engaging in that behavior. (If you want to see my summary of 10-ball rules, you can find it here – I could not find a good summary so I created one!)

So, how might this impact the perceived power of a leader?

In many ways, I think. Often, the “petit tyrant” would actually benefit if their behavior could be more self-constrained, that they do a better job of recognizing “the sharking” they engage with others in their workplaces. Their behavior actually does nothing to improve collaboration and teamwork and generally pushes people apart. It can also be political for someone other than themselves to address the problem.

Let me share a divergent example as a case study. Understand that I am a pretty good observer of behavior, looking at the issues around people and performance since 1978.

I learned how to play pickleball. It is a great game and a lot easier than tennis for an old-timer like me. It is nicely challenging, a group activity where one meets new friends, and is physically active enough to be challenging.

Of course, as I was learning the game, I was watching YouTube, spending many hours watching instructional videos, matches, summaries of rules and all that stuff. (I am, remember, a rules-hound.) I would guess that I have spent 100+ hours observing over the past 6 months.

My understanding of the rules and tips for play then sometimes bumped into the group’s organizer, perceived leader and instructor, who we can call BT. Generally, he was right, but sometimes he was wrong. And he did not, generally, seem to like the fact that I was aware of things about the game that he may not have known about. He criticized aspects of my game for months, on many things. (I can only guess at this stuff.)

But the reality is that he often seemed to play petit tyrant with me, and only me.

In racquet sports games, it is common to call out the score. In pickleball, there is a norm that one always announces the score before serving.

My Mom, starting about age 80, gradually lost her hearing and would generally wear a hearing aid. But with my sister and I, she would often say that we were mumbling so that we would have to repeat ourselves. I never witnessed her asking anyone but Kim or me about not hearing. To a degree, I think it was a power issue, that she could play “petit tyrant” and try to control us a little as she felt she was losing her power because of her age. Understand that at this point in time, I was delivering public workshops and presentations to make a living, that I had presented 100s of session and thought that my speaking was clear and comprehensible. Except for my Mom. So we often repeated ourselves for the next 20 years…

So, it was always ME who never said the score loud enough often enough, even though I said it every time. He said I talked to the ground, I spoke behind me, etc. He would interrupt my service rhythm a few times a game, standing there with both arms up, telling me to yell the score again. Various playing partners, standing near him or receiving my serves, always heard it and never asked for it to be repeated. And he never challenged anyone else ever on this, to the best of my memory (only me.) And to the best of my recall, no one else in our group ever asked me to repeat the score during play over the last 6 months. (BT also says that this is HIS rule, even though this is the norm in the game worldwide.)

BT also recently started complaining about how slowly I walked from the net back to the line to receive his serve. When he served, I had just turned around, and if he had waited ONE SECOND, literally, I would have been set. But it was not about my speed of walking, it was another example of how he could “power” me about my game. Sharking.

Other players see it, and they tell me to just ignore it. But does anyone think this will get better on its own? I don’t.

So, the next time he stops my serve, I will walk up to the net to say it clearly to him, then walk back at my regular pace to the service line, compose myself and serve.

Is it worth the effort to confront a Petit Tyrant? I think that is your decision and you need to weigh the balance of consequences. Maybe it is, and maybe it is just not worth the effort and you can choose to suck it up and sabotage their efforts another way. The latter is a reality — sabotage is a French word arising from the tendency of French workers to throw their wooden shoes (sabots) into the machinery that was taking their jobs away, as I understand it. (History Here)

Thanks for reading. I did want to vent a little, but I also wanted to share some thoughts for those of you who feel you’ve been sharked. It IS generally a conscious decision on the part of your opponent. Good bosses and good co-workers do not engage in these kinds of behaviors, only the ones who feel that things are competitive and that they rise up if you sink a little.

Question for Reflection:

Are there any sharking or Petit Tyrant behaviors that YOU might look to mitigate in your workplace?

Keep things rolling out there and leave better impacts on your teams,

For the FUN of It!

Scott Simmerman Ph.D. CPF, CPT is still managing partner of PMC and collaborating with the team at PMC LLC,
but also sort of retired…

Scott is developer of the incredibly useful Square Wheels® tools and images
and the board game version of The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine

The new ONLINE, VIRTUAL version of Lost Dutchman is now being demonstrated (video here)

Scott has presented his concepts in 47 countries and collaborates with consultants and trainers worldwide.

You can reach him at scott@squarewheels.com and you can see his profile at LinkedIn

Dealing with Spectator Sheep — Because you can!

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On August 14, 2021

In Articles on Teamwork, Change Facilitation, employee motivation

Spectator Sheep. You know who they are and what they do – they stand on the outside of what is happening and voice their opinions: Naaaaaaaa. Baaaaaaa.

Nothing is quite good enough and nothing works well enough and they are not satisfied with the current state of things.

But how about a little reframe around this problem…

One of the primary workplace motivators is the dissatisfaction with the way things are.

People sometimes see issues with how things work and get frustrated with systems and processes that do not seem to make sense or that do not align with their goals and objectives. This builds up a negative residue over time and people do get frustrated with the way things remain.

Similarly, some people are always looking for things that they can improve, and hope that others might feel the same way and that bosses are listening. But when they don’t, that builds up a residue, also.

Lastly, some people just “sort” things for the negative – they just look for things that are wrong rather than seeing things through those old rose-colored positive outlook glasses. And they say what they think; it just comes out flat and maybe negative. It is not that they are bad people, but they just see things differently. And they can often be frustrated because things could be better.

So, things generally work like this:

So, of course people can act like Spectator Sheep and surely you will hear the Naaaaaaaah, Baaaaaaaah refrain.

Here are some ideas for re-directing and engaging or re-engaging (my guess is that these same people used to be engaged and slowly dis-engaged over time):

1. Ask for and try to understand their perspective. Often, they just want to be heard and be respected. They may simply see things differently than you or others. Try to get some clarity as to what they are thinking. Plenty of research says that most workers in most organizations do not feel that their managers listen to their ideas. They may see something as a Square Wheel and wonder why things continue to thump and bump along the same old way…

2. Align them to your perspective. Make sure that the missions, visions, goals, objectives and expectations are clear (and make sure that your measurement and feedback systems are in alignment with the above!).

3. Ask for and write down their specific issues. You may think you understand what they said but what they said is not necessarily what they meant or what you understood them to mean.

A: You must know that you know that I know change is needed now.
B: Yes, I knew that.
A: I knew you knew. But I wanted to know that you knew what I know and that I knew.
B: Yes, but I didn’t know that you wanted everyone to know, just me knowing you knew.
A: I didn’t know that. So, what do you think? What do I need to know?

4. Obviously, request any specifics and details. “A Desk is a Dangerous Place from which to View the World” – the natural isolation of a manager is different from the hands-on day-to-day reality of the worker and congruence is necessary here. You need to know what they know and their thinking in order to generate better alignment and increased productivity and performance from them.

5. Focus on solutions and get them involved. If it makes sense, see who else in the workplace might share this perspective and maybe you can form a performance improvement team to share the perceived issue(s) and to help address this issue. Allow these people to feel part of the team and work to change their direction. “Nobody ever washes a rental car,” so get them actively involved with you on making improvements and implementing change.

Re-Direct and engage!

In my experience, spectator sheep are good people who are frustrated because they see things differently than everyone else (or most other people, some of which may also be dis-engaged but do not voice their opinions). Continuous improvement is a continuous process — view it as continuous continuous improvement — and understand that active involvement in problem solving and solution implementation is engaging and motivating for most people.

And at the very least you may quiet some of the negativity, if that person feels like their ideas have been heard and considered.

And don’t say, “Naaaaaaaaaaaaaa…..”

For the FUN of It!

Dr. Scott Simmerman CPF, CPT is still managing partner of PMC

Scott is developer of the Square Wheels® images and the board game version of Lost Dutchman. The virtual, remote version of the exercise is about to be released (August, 2021)

Scott has presented his concepts in 47 countries and collaborates with consultants and trainers worldwide.

You can reach him at scott@squarewheels.com and you can see his profile at LinkedIn

Godzilla, Bambi and Innovation and Creativity

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On August 13, 2021

In Design Thinking and Agile, employee motivation, innovation, Metaphors for business improvement

Why does innovation and creativity sometimes seem so hard to generate?

This is an old issue with workgroups and seems especially to be the case now that so many people are working remotely.

It continues to be difficult to involve and engage them in generating ideas for workplace improvement or for involving them in design thinking or other kinds of developmental situations. Why do people just seem generally uninterested in helping their organizations make improvements?

Thinking about this in the context of digital implementation in general and remote workers in particular, it seemed to come down to the issues of ownership and engagement, that those organizations doing a good job of keeping connected with their people seem to be doing a better job of overall innovation and active involvement.

It reminded me of two things:

“Nobody ever washes a rental car.”

and

“Godzilla Meets Bambi.”

Yeah. I expected a, “huh?” response. So let me explain a little and keep things simple.

A critical factor in motivation is ownership. So the first quote references the reality that people who do not feel ownership or at least active involvement in problem solving cannot be expected to care as much as people who do. And, sometimes we simply do not do a very good job of doing things with people, choosing more to (unintentionally) do things TO them. People naturally resist things done to them, pushing back in different ways.

So, we might expect more innovation and creativity from those people who feel involved and engaged by the issues and opportunities in their workplaces. This is really an art in managing remote workers to generate those reactions, but asking and involving is usually more effective.

This first thought led to the second, which is actually the name of a 2-minute video I did 10 years ago to help explain these thoughts. It uses a short series of my Square Wheels® illustrations to explain why workers are less likely to be involved.

I tried to be funny but also real as well as entertaining and informative.

The link to Godzilla Meets Bambi is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOZk6UOii6M

Your thoughts and reactions are most appreciated.

For the FUN of It!

You can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

Follow Scott’s posts on Pinterest: pinterest.com/scottsimmerman/
Scott’s quips and quotes on Poems on The Workplace is here.

The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine goes online / virtual

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On July 12, 2021

In Articles on Teamwork, business team building exercises, employee motivation, motivational team building exercises, Organizational Development Tools

This week, we will see an operational ONLINE version of our team building exercise, The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine. First developed as a board game in 1993 and sold and delivered globally, we have been working with a software development company to bring the same dynamics of play generated in face-to-face game deliveries into a mode that allows for remote players to engage in collaboration, strategic planning and fun as they put together their plan to Mine as Much Gold as We Can!

As more and more companies get back to a more normal operational framework, we will continue to sell and support our board game versions for groups of 3, 4 and 6 tabletops of six players each. We will also continue to sell our Professional Edition which allows for basically unlimited numbers of tabletops.

Lost Dutchman – Virtual is designed to operate with pods of 6 teams, with up to 4 players per team. It will play on the common browser platforms and have extensive communications capabilities for collaboration between the players on a team, between the teams, and between the pod Facilitator and everyone.

For those people who already facilitate the exercise, this online version should be a nice addition to your team building toolkit. Play will be very similar to what you already like and the learning curve for operation will be quick. For those new to the game, you can expect extensive online training and support materials, plus live support from our team (including my son and me).

Jeff Simmerman has been driving this forward. He has applied his online game playing experience over the past two decades to the look and feel of the virtual version. I should also note that he first helped me deliver the game at age 12, so he knows it really well. Jeff fully understands all aspects of play and design and has developed the exercise so that all of our extensive library of debriefing questions still apply. So, if you have a solid debriefing already packaged, you will be pleased to know that you can most likely continue to use that same focus, only without the players needing to be in one room!

We are not quite ready for our network of users to access the exercise, but we are moving fast-forward as best we can. Much of the distribution and execution of the licensing will be through our long-term colleagues at The TEAM Approach. We are also finalizing our agreement with our long-term Japanese associates, WorkHappiness, to bring their Zipangu version (LDGM reset into Japan) of LDV online and to support their use of LDV.

If you have any thoughts or questions, send us an email,

For the FUN of It!–

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

Scott@SquareWheels.com

– Tools, games and presentation materials at
<www.performancemanagementcompany.com>

A Joke on the issues of Implementing New Ideas

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On March 28, 2020

In employee motivation, Engagement, Facilitation, manager as motivator

We’re playing around with a bunch of new tools to help supervisors manage their remote workers and overall team more effectively, wrapped around our Square Wheels® images. And, in my framing work, I thought of an old joke that I wanted to share about some of the difficulties in implementing improvements.

And, in thinking about that, I thought to share it with my readers.

So, here goes:

This guy was driving down a dirt road when he looked to his left and a three-legged chicken was running next to the car. Interesting, he thought but he also thought he would drive faster. He sped up but so did the chicken. So, he sped up a bit more but so did the chicken. Finally, he’s doing over 50 miles per hour and the chicken is staying with him.

Then, all of a sudden, the chicken speeds up and cuts in front of him and runs onto this farm road.

Well, the guy slows down, backs up and goes down the road to reach the farm house where a farmer steps off the porch and comes up to the car.

“Man, did you see the speed of that chicken?”

“Yep.”

“And did you see that it has three legs?”

“Yep. We breed them that way.”

“Why?”

“Well ever have people over for dinner and you want three drumsticks?”

“Sure. That actually makes good sense. How do they taste?”

“Well, we don’t rightly know. We’ve never been able to catch one…”

(speaking of Square Wheels, I have been unable to get the correct formatting on this post. Sorry.)

The theme is that sometimes, what appears to be a really good idea can be pretty hard to actually implement.

What really good “3-legged chicken” ideas might we have to run around? How might you use this joke to lighten up a difficult meeting about implementing changes within an organization? How can you use the joke to stimulate a discussion about your organization’s issues and opportunities?

What plans might the farmer and driver make?
How do we make a great idea into a success by doing a better job of planning at the start?

… and so forth.

—

For the FUN of It!

Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization improvement products like Square Wheels®.
Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced presenter and consultant who designs simple, powerful effective learning tools.

You can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com
See his poems and performance haiku poems at www.poemsontheworkplace.com

Learn more about Scott at his LinkedIn site.

Square Wheels® is a registered trademark of Performance Management Company

Square Wheels Tools for Managing and Leading Remote Workers

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On March 17, 2020

In Business Haiku, Change, Disruptive Engagement, employee motivation, Facilitation, innovation, manager as motivator

There are massive shifts happening right now, some are trends that are simply continuing and some are having significant impacts on people and performance. In millions of workplaces, people who have had desks are not expected to continue to contribute by working remotely. That transition is going to be unbelievably painful for millions of workers and their supervisors.

My network of consultants and trainers are now discussing how we can help people better handle these changing conditions by providing some very simple tools and some very simple training to impact communications. We think that our Square Wheels® themes can be made into simple webcasted interactive discussions.

So, we are just beginning to pull a wide variety of resources together to share ideas about what we can do and what we can implement. My current view is to package things like the old “brown bag luncheon” tools, with images and animations to help jumpstart discussions on various issues, present and future.

Impacts should be on worker (and manager) motivation, dealing with change, innovation and designing better workplace systems and processes, implementing improvement, team building and collaboration and other issues that are being faced by managers. And the tools will be simple, like this haiku I did a while back…

If you are interested in playing with us as we develop these things, please let me know by email. I may see comments but may also be slow to react to them.

These tools will strongly align with my “Manager as Motivator” thinking, whereby we support people managing people with simple engagement processes and implementation tools and ideas.

Scott Simmerman – scott@squarewheels.com

Decreasing Resistance to Change — The Finger, Arm and Leg Exercise for facilitating discussion

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On February 1, 2020

In Brain and Behavior, Change, Change Facilitation, employee motivation, experiential learning, Facilitation, manager as motivator

In The Dilbert Principles, Dilbert said, “Change is good. You go first.”

That one little quip captures the essence of trying to do something differently. Change is commonly resisted and often actively resisted, combined with a variety of reasons and excuses. People tend to rationalize the many reasons why something cannot be changed. Let me use a simple example of teaching someone to play pool.

In pool, one holds a cue stick and attempts to hit the cue ball into an object ball and then into a pocket. It is a fun and simple game and everyone can play. The balls are stationary until you hit one into another. Obviously, how and where one hits on the cue ball influences the level of success; striking the cue ball consistently and accurately hitting the object ball allows one to pocket more balls than hitting randomly.

So, there are skills around holding and swinging the cue stick related to the position of the head and eyes and arm and what is called “a bridge,” which is the placement of the hand closest to the cue ball which holds the cue stick for aiming. HOW one forms the bridge influences how stable the bridge is and how accurately and consistently one can then strike the cue ball. Some bridges are MUCH more stable than others and experienced players do this little thing MUCH better than people starting to learn the game.

But, the reality is that once people get comfortable with their bridge, they become resistant to changing / improving their hand position. One would think changing a hand position would be a simple thing; but repetition and habit generally make the newer player actively resistant to learning a newer or better way of doing this. This is generally a consistent kind of resistance to learning. So, in teaching pool, bridging is one of the first things to be addressed. And the active resistance is clear.

There is a simple exercise that works great to expose those things that underpin this active resistance and to increase the probability of change. So, I start by holding both hands up, fingers apart and wiggling and then fold my hands together, interlocking my fingers. When I do this, my left thumb is on top but the other person (or people) will do theirs randomly; it does not seem to be related to handedness, in my experience. Some people simply do it with their right thumbs winding up on top. So, ask them which thumb they put on top.

Then, unfold your fingers and wiggle them again and interlock them the other way, so your other thumb is on top. Ask the other person to do this. And observe the process. Most people will fumble with this a bit. Some might even have to try it again. ALL will feel uncomfortable. Why?

Because they probably have never before interlocked their fingers this new way.

Many will need to actually concentrate on doing this differently. They will actually study their hands and fingers and carefully look (probably for the very first time) how they have their fingers interlocked.

But do not stop here. What you then do is fold your arms across your chest. Ask them to fold their arms. Then, after they are comfortable with this, you will fold your arms exactly the opposite, so that things are not like they were at first. (I encourage you to practice this a few times before you demonstrate because it IS difficult to do for many people!) If your left hand is under your right upper arm and your right hand is over your left biceps, for example, reverse it so your right hand is under and your left hand is over. (If you try this right now, you will see why some practice is necessary, so practice it a few times so you can appear to do this easily.)

You will see, in all likelihood, the other person flounder around with this. Ask them why and they will probably give you some reason or other but the reality is that things are more difficult and uncomfortable when you have never done them differently than you normally do. (The phenomenon can be termed behavioral flexibility — note that there are a dozen ways one can make a bridge in pool, each used in different circumstances so being comfortable with doing a bridge differently is a real skill!)

The third part of this is optional to do but easily demonstrated, or even discussed. When people cross their legs (and there are a few different ways to do this like at the ankle or over the knee), they will “naturally and normally” change leg positions because staying in one position cuts off the blood flow and becomes painful. People learn to cross their legs differently because of this and they do not ever consider leg position and reversal an issue. (Pain / discomfort is a good motivator for change!)

Okay, so, it you have actually DONE the above exercises and interlocked your fingers and arms differently, you will have undoubtedly felt the discomfort associated with doing things differently. Perfect! And you now understand clearly that dealing with discomfort is always associated with change and that being less uncomfortable being uncomfortable is a really good learning point, something that can help you better deal with change in the future.

Now, in the example above, I went through how all this related to teaching someone how to improve their pool game. I hope it helps you with your game, too!

But the ideas underlying sharing these simple exercises are that you can use them with others in your efforts to improve workplace performance, to help decrease active resistance to new ideas and to the feelings common when one implements new ideas. Do this with others and have some fun making people re-assess their thoughts and reactions. Apply this to your leadership efforts.

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. He is a CPF and CPT and holds a doctorate in behavioral neuropsychology from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Scott is co-Founder of The Square Wheels Project and currently working on being retired in Cuenca, Ecuador while still supporting a variety of business improvement projects.

You can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

“Why are team-building activities conducted?” – An answer to a Quora Post

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On January 24, 2020

In Articles on Teamwork, business team building exercises, Corporate Team Building Games, employee motivation, improve organizational performance

This question was asked in Quora, where I posted up a response. Your thoughts?

The Big Answer is “organizational improvement.” That can take the focus on improving collaboration to impact innovation or creativity or customer service or similar. It can take the focus of re-aligning (or aligning, even) people toward shared goals and objectives, missions and visions and that sort of thing. And different events can help people focus on optimizing performance results.

In many organizations, “interdepartmental collaboration” is an oxymoron, in that the objectives of different groups within an organization are often adversarial, since they tend to have opposing or at least different goals and objectives, measurements and rewards.

A well-designed team BUILDING initiative can accomplish a lot, and get people moving in the same direction. It is NOT the solution, though, since there are lots of cultural issues that might need to be addressed. In most organizations, there are good individual rewards for good performance, which do not generally drive collaboration, communications and teamwork.

Team BUILDING is also quite different than team BONDING. You can build bonds by going out drinking together or to a strip club (I jest, but one does see such events posted in Twitter with a hashtag of #teambuilding!) or by having fun events and get-togethers. You would be hard-pressed to find those things having any impact on measurable results, however.

A good team building exercise with a good supporting framework for post-event improvement can do a lot to impact motivation and results. Check out, “The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine” to see one example of how an event can be structured for organizational improvement.

My thought was to share a simple framework around the goals of accomplishing some real team building around shared missions, visions, goals and behavior. Increasing collaboration between departments is a very high impact behavior that can be accomplished.

A focus on improving teamwork and better aligning people in organizations to shared goals and missions has many positive impacts. After all, the goal should be, “To mine as much gold as WE can!”

—

For the FUN of It!

See the powerful new teambuilding game, Seven Seas Quest, Saviors of Cultura

You can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com
See his poems and performance haiku poems at www.poemsontheworkplace.com

Learn more about Scott at his LinkedIn site.

Teamwork: Things Can All Play Out with Everyone Being Comfortable!

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On July 17, 2019

In Articles on Teamwork, business team building exercises, Corporate Team Building Games, employee motivation, executive team building exercises, experiential learning

You Don’t Have to Build, Shoot, Cook, Find Things, Find A Way Out, Be Physically Challenged or Be a Loser, Sing, or Even Be Especially Clever! You Don’t Even Have to Sit Still Unless You Want To!

The above points can all be true, however, given today’s climate for sensationalizing corporate adventures and team building scenarios, too many people are placed in situations that lead to personal discomfort and feelings of inadequacy, thereby creating scenarios that do not lead to organizational improvement or improve team effectiveness.

And why? What necessitates overdoing something that could so much more easily be handled with care and consideration for everyone’s comfort while also creating a fun and solid learning experience? Why not simply create a fun environment that supports teamwork and performance improvement? Why test individuals in a team building environment?

Learning happens best when people feel secure and the challenges presented are within their abilities. Of course, pushing people beyond what they think they can do may build confidence if they succeed, but this isn’t a necessary option for strengthening organizational culture or building a more collaborate workplace.

Thirty years ago, I was intrigued by a team building game for organizations that offered both fun and learning all done within a tabletop setting. This is the kind of stuff most of us grew up with—board games. Seeing this as a unique and purposeful learning tool, I enthusiastically became the first USA facilitator / seller for it. However, with repeated developmental deliveries, I quickly realized that their game design fell short of reaching the full potential that I felt it could fulfill.

This is how The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine team building exercise came to be because after suggesting to the creators of the game that I was representing, that it needed more substance and a better design within in order to create that all important “ah ha!” that happens when a connection is made from one thing to another, they refused to make changes to their game. (more)

Recognizing the strength and inherent qualities of using a boardgame as an organizational learning tool, I began my journey with the designing and continuous continuous improvement of Dutchman. I wanted it to be the memorable game that I knew would work not only as a pleasurable experience but also one designed with the proper mechanics so that players would understand how their game behaviors and outcomes align with what happens in their workplace.

Now, all these decades later, Dutchman still remains a relevant and universally appreciated approach to getting people away from their workplace so that they can experience camaraderie, an engaging challenge, teamwork, group and leadership dynamics, competition and collaboration factors, strategic planning and elements of communication that happen though the play of a compelling game. (user survey) Its dynamic debriefing, however, is what truly makes Dutchman loved and trusted by our users because it gives participants insight into how their behaviors are crucial to organizational and personal change and improvement.

Our users love Dutchman. Many have run it for dozens of years
for a variety of developmental purposes.

Yes, lots of people enjoy the great outdoors and various types of challenges that offer a different twist from their day-to-day experiences, but the beauty of a game like Dutchman is that it doesn’t put people in a compromising position should they feel unsafe or unfit or too old to enjoy what is put in front of them. Everyone has played board games and while Dutchman would be described as much more than just a game, it is a more familiar setting than climbing ropes, shooting arrows, walking over hot coals or being locked in an escape room. And, it’s an easy bombproof tool to set up and deliver, as it includes all the instructions and ideas that will make it successful. You can even use your own personnel to facilitate the game!

A quick overview of Dutchman:

Everything needed is included in the game materials (you may wish to add your own props for décor to the room)
No need for participants to bring special clothing or equipment for the game
No physical challenges will be placed on anyone
Total time required for Dutchman introduction, play and debriefing is about 3.5 hours
No teams lose or die in this game; it’s about optimizing for the best outcome
The debriefing is flexible and can be designed to address specific issues or ideas
It’s inexpensive to run and can be either rented or purchased
Dutchman plays with any size group from 8 to 800+
It’s a valuable investment in organizational improvement

And, quite simply, it creates a feel-good-for-all learning experience for your organization without jeopardizing anyone’s comfort zone!

Here is the last bit: We FULLY support you in your purchase or rental of the exercise. You get unlimited free help through emails or calls to reach the point where you feel comfortable in running the exercise and focused with your key debriefing themes and targeted desired outcomes. Actually, we wish more of our users would talk with us, something that our very extensive included support materials seems to preclude.

Your goal is to, “Mine as much as WE can!
Our goal is to, “Make teams optimally successful.”

—

For the FUN of It!

See the powerful new teambuilding game, Seven Seas Quest, Saviors of Cultura

You can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com
See his poems and performance haiku poems at www.poemsontheworkplace.com

Learn more about Scott at his LinkedIn site.

Square Wheels® is a registered trademark of Performance Management Company

Play the Fool, Achieve Hero Leadership

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On May 1, 2019

In Change Facilitation, dis-un-engagement, Disruptive Engagement, employee motivation, experiential learning, manager as motivator

David Riklin caught my attention a while ago with one of those quotes that says a lot more than it says. So, I added it into my catalog of Square Wheels® Posters and something to add to our Culture Wall idea of motivational and developmental Square Wheels themes.

Organizational alignment and culture change can look like this, in actuality:

(If you would like a free high res version of the above, email Scott@squarewheels.com)

Shared conversations about missions and visions, and shared perceptions about issues and opportunities can allow a group of people to align together to work on implementation. This builds teamwork and engagement.

Workplace conversations related to the perceived issues can be part of your effort to dis-un-engage people, to identify and remove those things that are decrease engagement and generate frustration or withdrawal. You can read more about Dis-Un-Engagement, motivation and workplace performance improvement here.

I’ve been playing with communications tools for 25+ years and these toolkits on Square Wheels are cheap and amazingly flexible. They are useful when getting managers to be more motivating and work great for innovation and creativity facilitation.

You can also see a cute animation of “Continuous Continuous Improvement” here: https://www.squarewheels.com/

You can see us playing with Santa’s Performance Improvement Culture Wall in this cute little blog post.

—

For the FUN of It!

Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization improvement products. Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced presenter and consultant who designs simple, powerful learning tools.

See my 90-minute teambuilding game, The Collaboration Journey Challenge

You can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com
See his poems and performance haiku poems at www.poemsontheworkplace.com

Learn more about Scott at his LinkedIn site.

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

Design Thinking: Who ARE those customers

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On April 12, 2019

In Design Thinking and Agile, employee motivation, Facilitation, innovation, manager as motivator, Thinking

Attending an Agile workshop this morning, my thinking was on Design Thinking and how many of those processes neatly support the Agile approaches to innovation and implementation. What we are seeing so often is an active resistance to even the basic ideas around implementing improvements. But, as I have seen since starting my consulting and training efforts back in 1978, “What else is new?”

The critical success factor often seems to be “perspective” or “reflection.” Outside of the technical and the processes involved, nothing gets done until things get implemented. The viewpoint of the leader, the wagon puller, often remains the same as it has always been and they are often not going to embrace the improvement initiative. They are looking forward at what needs to be accomplished today much more often than they are reflecting on the ideas of others about what might be improved in the future.

The workplace thus seems to roll forward along these lines:

As I shared in another blog, there are a variety of reasons for why people do not share ideas for improvement in most organizations, and very few GOOD reasons…

Square Wheels research on why people are not engaged

(Click on the image to see more about this original research)

The statistics are about workers’ perceptions of managers but the reality is that this also reflects the managers view about their managers and their managers view of the senior managers…

The simple summary is that managers need more reflection about how their workplaces perform and the understanding that many people are motivated by participating in workplace improvement initiatives. Managers can facilitate the generation of ideas and can benefit when those ideas produce positive impacts. We can see that in Agile kinds of improvement initiatives where teams quickly design and test new frameworks for implementation and they can be seen in design thinking kinds of initiatives focused on new products, change and productivity.

The Round Wheels already exist,
but need to be implemented more better faster.

The Round Wheels of Today will become
The Square Wheels of Tomorrow.

You can take a 30-minute online facilitation skills training program, called The Square Wheels Project at Udemy for $20, complete with handouts and powerpoint presentation tools.

Or, you can purchase a simple toolkit with a wide variety of supporting instructional ideas around facilitating workplace improvement.

Both of the above are designed for supervisors and both of these are easily embedded into communications and training initiatives to support organizational improvement. We have been working with Square Wheels as tools to impact people and performance since 1993 and can do a variety of things to support any kind of innovation and implementation initiative.

—

For the FUN of It!

See a fun animation about innovation and improvement here.

See another great teambuilding game: The Collaboration Journey Challenge

You can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

Learn more about Scott at his LinkedIn site.

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

Category: employee motivation Page 1 of 25

Make Spring Forward Monday a Day for More Engagement

Team Building, Leadership and Change

Can you IMPROVE a Square Wheel?

Implementing Round Wheels to fix your Square Wheels

Power, Petit Tyrants, Sharking and Performance

Dealing with Spectator Sheep — Because you can!

Godzilla, Bambi and Innovation and Creativity

The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine goes online / virtual

A Joke on the issues of Implementing New Ideas

Square Wheels Tools for Managing and Leading Remote Workers

Decreasing Resistance to Change — The Finger, Arm and Leg Exercise for facilitating discussion

“Why are team-building activities conducted?” – An answer to a Quora Post

Teamwork: Things Can All Play Out with Everyone Being Comfortable!

Play the Fool, Achieve Hero Leadership

Design Thinking: Who ARE those customers