Tag: Scott Simmerman Page 1 of 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

Darin Ulmer’s “LEGO Communications Exercise”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For the FUN of It!

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

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

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

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

Thoughts on Change and Choice – a Square Wheels LEGO cartoon

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On June 29, 2014

In Change, Change Facilitation, Engagement, Involving and Engaging People, Managing and leading change, Thinking

I was thinking about a discussion about climate change and decision-making and “considered alternatives” and things like that and I just happened to see one of the illustrations I did for my Susan and Courage slideshare package the other day.

And the whole idea of decision-making and information gathering popped into my head so I adjusted that original cartoon to look like this:

You can see lots more cartoons on my poems blog – click the image!

My thought is that you need to at least get people to STOP doing what they have always done in order to look for possibilities for improvement or change. Ideas are just not implemented, they first need consideration…

If you have not seen these before, my main cartoon in LEGO that sets up the above theme looks like this one:

And the above is based on the Square Wheels illustrations that we have been selling in a variety of toolkits that anchor to these line-art drawings, this one with one of my poems embedded into the main idea:

Square Wheels represent the things that work, but that do not work smoothly. Round Wheels are already IN the wagon, but getting the leadership and the team to consider these as possibilities for improvement represents the real challenge. From there, implementation of these ideas is often pretty straightforward. We KNOW how to implement things; choosing to do so is often the real issue of teams, organizations, and societies.

You can find lots of articles within the blog posts on this blog — there are over 400 of them now and searching is pretty easy since I keyword them. Click here to go to the main home page.

For the FUN of It!

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

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

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

You CAN herd frogs! Thoughts on Strategy Implementation

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On June 20, 2014

In Articles on Teamwork, business team building exercises, Change Facilitation, Engagement, implementation, innovation, Innovation Implementation, Metaphors for business improvement

A key role in leadership is one of implementing change and implementing strategy initiatives. And there is a lot of evidence that this is not done very well in many organizations. Research by thought leaders like Robin Speculand tend to show that most initiatives are unsuccessful when viewed objectively. The video on his site today is by Chris Skinner and is about why implementation fails in banking. (click on the names to go to the sites)

This simply reminded me that:

Getting things done around here is a lot like herding cats.That old EDS commercial about the satisfaction gained from successfully herding cats was just a hoot, where the cat herders talk about their accomplishment in a 1-minute video you can access by clicking the image below:

“Herding cats. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s easy…” “I’m living a dream…”

My British friend and associate, Barry Howell, used the phrase “herding frogs” in a conversation we had, so I played with that in a previous blog you can see by clicking on the image below. I thought the notion of herding frogs was pretty funny, but NOW, I am convinced that there is a Leadership Lesson here.

Before I get to the Leadership Lesson and Team Building Exercise I will share, let me first say that animals can be herded, just not all of them. View the following video for 30 seconds or so before I make my point below:

Stampeding the herded team of ducks. This is obviously a common event at this location. And that first team of ducks sure had their act together. But it you watch it longer, you might have seen that not all the duck teams were very effective. In some cases, hundreds of the ducks were just standing there or muddling around, seemingly without a clue. (Yeah, that happens in organizations, too.)

I love using those kinds of very visual, kinesthetic phrases to anchor reality.

So, here is your training activity, as promised.

Barry sent me this link to a video of people who seem to have the task of “Herding Frogs.” Obviously, that is not an easy one and the people are seen to fumble and stumble a bit. They also have to deal with the mud, which is something that certainly happens in most organizations as I show in my old Square Wheels Jeep Mud cartoon from our team building game on optimizing collaboration:

So, here is what you do:

Show this video on The Great Frog Roundup to groups of 5-6 people at a table — note that there can be any number of tables.

After watching the 3-minute video, ask them a few questions and allow them to discuss the issues of implementing the strategy of herding frogs along these lines:

What were these people trying to accomplish?
How would they know if they were successful?
How would you define success?
Were these people motivated to succeed and how would you increase motivation if that were necessary?
Were these people involved and engaged in the activity and how would you increase engagement if that were necessary?
Were there opportunities to improve their strategy and tactics to improve their efficiency and optimize results?
How would you coach this team around improving results?

My take is that the overall goals were to catch some frogs, but what was the purpose? It appeared that they did have some kind of net on the beach but that they could have used more boards and maybe even built a funnel to move more frogs into the same area for capture. Using buckets might not have been the best idea, since they could actually suffocate frogs if filled too high.And so forth.

Lastly, what IS it about frogs and ducks in outrageous numbers, anyway?

And those kinds of things that would help people to understand that while herding frogs is a difficult task, it CAN be accomplished and results can be improved.

For the FUN of It!

You can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

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

Why do teams choose to compete rather than collaborate?

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On June 4, 2014

In Articles on Teamwork, business team building exercises, Corporate Team Building Games, experiential learning, Managing and leading change, Organizational Development Tools, performance management company, team building exercises, Team work

People continually make choices, selecting responses from their existing set of “behavioral alternatives” and often simply choosing to do what they have done before. The book, Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman does an excellent job of sharing the research on decision making and thinking. (I share a little of this in my article on Square Wheels and decision-making.)

Why DO teams choose to compete?

Teams and teamwork are simply about choice and choices. Teams will often choose NOT to collaborate if they feel that competition offers them more positive benefits and impacts and this is especially true if they have competed in the past — it is the fast decision that does not require much thinking and consideration. Competition may also simply be More Fun!

But does competition really do much to support overall organizational results? Does competition really make results better when you look at the overall impact? Does competition between sales and operations really help things?

More often than not, the answer is that competition measurably sub-optimizes organizational results. Clearly. This is grounded in my work in implementing performance improvement and customer service as well as in a variety of other contexts — it is much easier to generate inter-organizational competition than it is to develop real trust and collaboration.

I tried to collect some of the key articles around performance and teamwork in this annotated blog of my best posts on our team building exercise, The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine. You can see some of these sources by clicking on the image below:

We often ask tabletops to discuss various real world perceptions after playing this team building exercise. Below are some thoughts of participants after playing The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine, which focuses directly on issues of inter-table collaboration and communications:

As you will see from these responses, there are a lot of systemic issues that block teamwork and there are also lots of experiences in “playing the game of working” that will get in the way of simply choosing to do things differently. Breaking the patterns is why an exercise like Dutchman works – people play, make choices, and see the impacts of their behavior on the play of others and in the overall sub-optimization of results.

Why do teams compete when collaboration obviously offers more impacts and benefits?

Evaluation and Reward Systems do not support it
Organizational objectives are unclear
Human Nature – we are competitive
Past Experience precludes collaboration and has rewarded competition
Lack of a Trust or Relationship with others
It takes extra time and effort to do it
Benefits of collaboration not supported by leaders
Impacts and payoffs are not obvious
Conflict may generate discussion of realities and produce creativity
Teams do not have a history or experience with doing collaboration or generating better impacts by it

What did you learn about teamwork and communications from playing the exercise?

There is a need for networking
Small teams work better than committees / larger teams
Someone needs to take on the role of team leader
We must compromise individually and collaborate collectively to succeed
Don’t dominate – listen to others views
THINK COLLABORATION and Trust
Share a common goal
Share Ideas and Information
Plan before Acting
Have a division of labor and roles and think creatively
Initiate support from others
Have Empathy for others
Identify others’ needs
Be Creative
Be a good listener
Build on others’ ideas
Recognize Interdependence
Move quickly, take some risks
We probably have sufficient resources – use them wisely

In this game, most people do NOT ask for help, which also happens in the workplace. Why don’t most teams ask for or get the active leadership of their managers?

We are conditioned by education, bad experiences and culture
Personality (we’re not proactive but quiet)
We’re too involved in our own work and forget the existence of the “Expedition Leaders”
We’re afraid of losing time, thus we suboptimize results
We are really not clear of our roles or the Leader’s role
There is a fear of losing Face (ego, insecurity)
There is an assumption that not asking means we get all of the praise and recognition for our good performance / ability
“Us and Them” mentality — Leader is not part of team
No access to them – can’t get their time so why ask
It’s not part of the rules of how we play
Trust is the residue of promises fulfilled

Some Key Learning Points for engaging and involving people in performance improvement:

Visions are critical for motivation
Motivation occurs when people share risks, goals and objectives
Teams are “naturally” competitive and processes must actively drive collaboration and cooperation
Teams only reluctantly ask Expedition Leaders for advice.
Leadership must clearly communicate with directness and honesty. They need to be perceived as supportive.
Justify the need for collaboration as it influences corporate profitability and improvements in systems and practices.
Identify the mud that is bogging teams down and wasting resources.
Insure that each participant knows his or her role on the team and their importance to the overall results — make sure each team member feels that their efforts are of value.

How does this exercise and debriefing link to improving organizational results?

Collaborative, overall effort is needed to achieve Company Goals
Plan – Do – Check – Action
Collaboration is essential
Manage your processes with effective allocation of resources
Do It Right The First Time – there are few second chances in reality
Highlight the internal customer concept – we depend on each other
All of us is better than Some of US!

The competitive aspect of the game:
How might it be harmful in an organization?

Not sharing information for personal reasons will sub-optimize overall results
Damaging relationships and trust
Duplication of efforts
Not utilizing resources in best or optimal way
Sub-optimization — Not seeing whole picture
Undermining the efforts of others

Overall, competition is harmful because it is not maximizing company results nor the performance by the largest number of people. Competition works for the competitive and not for everyone. Discussing these issues and opportunities in the context of collaboration and communications offers the chance that people may choose to behave differently, or at least be more aware of how they are influencing others in their workplace.

So, a key to organizational improvement comes directly out of debriefing on ideas and reflecting on choices so that different choices can be made in the future that would allow for a culture shift of some kind.

Find our articles on organizations and performance

We support all kinds of innovation, motivation, engagement, team building and other aspects of people and performance through the sale of our simple tools for facilitating change and improvement. You can find out more about these by clicking on the link below:

For the FUN of It!

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

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

Working while Not Working – The Problem of Overconnectedness

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On May 19, 2014

In Articles on Teamwork, employee motivation, Organizational Development Tools, people and performance, workplace performance improvement

I wrote a blog up a year ago about statistics on work and working and the interconnection with vacation time. I thought I would also update that, since I just read an article in Mother Jones magazine about the issues and problems of always being connected to the business life. Pretty scary stuff, all in all. And it points out research that shows disconnecting can be really beneficial.

—————-

Addendum:

We ARE in need of some brain freeing vacation time. An Intercall survey of American employees showed that people are simply NOT paying attention during conference calls.

65% said they did other work at the same time as pretending to participate
55% that they prepared or ate food
47% that they went to the bathroom
25% that they played video games
27% confessed to falling asleep at least once during a call, and
5% said they’d had a friend POSE as themselves in order to skip it completely.

People are simply disengaged, over-meeting’d and in need of a break from work to put humpty dumpty back together. You can find a more expansive article clicking on this link. The rest of this blog gets into that data.

—————-

As background and perspective, I am now well into my 30th year of running Performance Management Company, which started as a consulting business working in people and performance areas, with a shift to customer service quality and then to change management and now to themes of workplace involvement and engagement. The shift to selling materials has been a good one and the pressures of the day=to-day have shifted as I enter my 66th year of being in the business of living.

As a small business, I can affirm that one is almost always thinking about the business — it is impossible to get away. And I used to joke about spending 50% of my time marketing, 50% of my time developing materials and 50% of my time actually doing things to make money. Only the reality is that 50% + 50% + 50% is actually 100% small business reality…

(One of the very best articles ever about the issues of running a small business is Wilson Harrell’s 1987 article, Entrepreneurial Terror that appeared in Inc, Magazine. Heck, I still give out photocopies of that to people every so often…)

A Harris / Adweek poll two years ago said that 52% of Americans will work during their summer vacation this year. The survey showed that working people are expecting to perform a variety of tasks, including:

Reading work-related emails – 30%
Receiving work-related phone calls – 23%
Accessing documents on home computer – 19%
Receiving work-related text messages – 18%
Accessing documents on work computer – 13%
Asked to do work by a boss, client or colleague – 13%

Clive Thompson, writing in Mother Jones magazine, shared a good bit of interesting information on the issue of being plugged in all the time and why we need to unplug. View that actual article here.

He shared data from the Center for Creative Leadership finding that 60% of smartphone-using professionals were work-connected for a full 13+ hours a day and that they spent another 5 hours playing with emails on weekends. That adds up to 72 hours a week of job-related content — with pay for 40 hours!

Another study by Good Technology found that 68% of people checked work email before work — before 0800 — and that 50% checked it while in bed before going to sleep! Almost 40% check email at the dinner table! And the APA reports that one in ten check email hourly – when on vacation!

It would seem that the entrepreneurial issue of always feeling that one had to be connected is now everyone’s problem. And there is that scene from “Deal of The Century” (Chevy Chase) where Harold (Wallace Shawn) is waiting for the phone call and cannot leave his room. (Watch it here – 4 minutes and very well done!)– Chevy does a coaching / inspirational talk about making the sale.

Pressure. Pressure to make the sale. Pressure to complete a project. Pressure from the team. Pressure from the boss. Pressures of all kinds from working.

WITH our connectedness and other electronic support and unpaid work time, corporate productivity is up 23% since 2000. Inflation-adjusted wages and benefits are up 4% for these same jobs. (Data from Economic Policy Institute) And, Clive Thompson wrote, the marketing research firm Radicati Group reports that we can expect to receive 22% more business email by 2015 than we did 3 years ago. Managers get about 300 emails a day, from what I read, so when do we actually find any time to think, to innovate, to build trust in our relationships, or to even relax?

We are being multi-tasked and over-managed, we are being spread thinner and thinner, expected to know more about more things but also unable to get the training time or even understand how things work in many of our jobs.

And the research supports that reality that some play and relaxation and free time to reflect and refocus does an awful lot to rebuild motivation and morale.

PMC sells Square Wheels illustrations and performance-based team building exercises to help put more play into performance improvement initiatives. Click on the icon below to see more information on our website:

Have some FUN out there! (Yeah, me, too.)

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Facilitation Tools, Corporate Team Building Events and Business Haiku

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On April 25, 2014

In Articles on Teamwork, Business Haiku, Corporate Team Building Games, employee motivation, Engagement, Facilitation, people and performance

Content curation is a relatively new thing for me, although I have been a collector of all things since forever, tending to keep a lot of articles and different kinds of resources on a variety of business things as well as gardening, travel, etc. I guess I am an information junkie, even saving old bicycling magazines since the articles are forever… Evernote is one of my new places to file interesting bits and pieces and store ideas and the like.

A couple of weeks ago, I came across List.ly, which seems like a great place to store a variety of things for other people to browse — some of the articles are things I write about and others are things that I collect. The interesting thing about the list is that other people can also add ideas and content to the list.

To begin with, I posted up a list on some Facilitation Tools and ideas for involving and engaging people. Then, I added a list about my business haiku poems and then another list summarizing ideas on team building events. Plans are to expand on each of them as well as add others. You can visit these particular lists by clicking on this main link image to show all of them:

and you can go directly to the Corporate Team Building List by clicking on the icon below:

Here are some links to Facilitation Tools and engagement ideas and techniques:

And here is the one that shares some of my Business Haiku.

Plans were to get these lists started and then to go in and populate them with my own stuff as well as interesting resources from other people. YOU can go to the list and also add resources and support.

Lastly, and not about list.ly, I have just uploaded a new Slideshare bundle about our team building exercise, The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine. You can see an overview of the program by clicking on the image below:

Resources. Improving organizational performance is about having access to resources and information. I trust that the above will represent useful information in your efforts to impact people and performance,

For the FUN of It!

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

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

Strategy Implementation and Team Building – Years of Hard Work

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On April 24, 2014

In Articles on Teamwork, Corporate Team Building Games, employee motivation, Engagement, innovation, Metaphors for business improvement, Organizational Development Tools, workplace performance improvement

My friend and associate, Robin Speculand, has been working with strategy implementation ideas and frameworks from his base in Singapore. He has published 4 books and has brought his Implementation Hub to the world of collaborative organizational development. Summarizing expansively, he would suggest that implementation is very hard work, requires a great deal of investment of executive and management time, and only works slowly at best.

The research from the people who studied the implementation of quality control and management systems over the past 20 years have consistently suggested that it takes 3 years to really see good implementation. There has been a lot of research done on this issue by the university business communities and others.

I expand on some of the issues of why so many strategy improvements fail in an older blog that cites a good bit of Robin’s research, but here is a short summary from that longer article of mine:

Robin’s Key Findings include:

80% of leaders feel their company is good at crafting strategy but only 44% are good at implementation and only 2% are confident that they will achieve 80-100% of their strategy’s objectives
Most leaders should allocate more time to implementing strategy than creating their strategy
An overwhelming of managers believe that their bonus should be linked to the successful implementation of the strategy
70% of leaders spend less than one-day a month reviewing strategy
Leaders believe that only 5% of employees have a basic understanding of the company strategy and goals

I was reminded of this when reading a great article about the issues surrounding the effective implementation of high-performance work teams. You can find the full article here, but let me excerpt a bit of it to align with some of Robin’s findings above. The article in New Directions Consulting also suggests a time framework of 2 to 3 years and shares some key implementation steps, somewhat modified by me for clarity, but including these three phases and these bullets and more:

The “Start Up” Phase (6-8 months) – including initial budgeting for training, meeting time, lost production time, etc. This includes the initial design of team support processes and accountability:

Team charter including agreement on goals and measures
Help/Hinder list and other protocols for roadblock management
Team Meetings and support system processes with coaching
Early consensus building across the organization
Team conflict resolution engagements and alignment
Communications
Team training — basic
Cross training on task knowledge

The “Growing” Phase (9-18 months) with most time being spent in organizing and fine-tuning systems and processes:

Sharing cross-functional team and work assignments
Conflict resolution between members
Team planning and problem solving (continuous improvement)
New member selection, orientation and training
Team management system development – including defining of action items and feedback / support systems and measurements
Presentations to management – issues, results, opportunities

The “Mature” Phase (18-36 months and continuous) whereby changes and improvements will actually become visible and measurable – the impacts:

Continuing problem identification and management
Costing / budgeting and integrating financial reporting
Analyzing team performance and conducting “lessons learned” sessions to identify issues and opportunities
Redesigning work processes and systems
Proposing new capital and process improvement opportunities
Proposing new business ideas and customer requests
Team performance management, with feedback, rewards and recognition
Greater linkage between team’s metrics and organizational metrics
Integration of teaming into operational and management systems like compensation, performance management, career growth, training and development, etc.

above adapted from New Dimensions Consulting newsletter and blog.

A lot of the teamwork will appear like this to the organization as a whole:

and how the organization reacts to these situations of trial and error learning will be a critical cultural change that must happen if teams are to thrive and be effective in implementing change and improvement.

As teams become more operational and more common, teams and individuals will begin to address cross-functional issues that are harder to manage because they cross a variety of operational and logistical and systemic barriers. Changing metrics is always difficult and making people accountable for different things is not generally accepted smoothly. There will be change at a personal and a peer-group level that needs to occur before the organizational issues can be addressed with any effectiveness.

I wrote up a lot more extensively on these ideas in an earlier blog, focused on Ancona and Bresman’s book on X-teams (2007). This generated some good thinking on the components of the implementation process and especially about improving the external focus of teams — how that could be so beneficial to overall organizational collaboration and improve the closeness to customers. Find more on X-teams and cross-functional organizational improvement by clicking here or on the image below:

In my view, there are no silver bullet solutions to teamwork.

There are lots of troubles with teams, issues of team motivation, issues of leadership and alignment and the view that probably ALL of Murphy’s Laws will apply as you work with individuals with different personal and professional agendas and merge them into operational units and then try to get those units to address potentially risky issues.

But the impacts of good teamwork on organizational performance cannot be understated. It generates improvement in a wide variety of ways, helps increase engagement and decrease employee turnover, improves innovation and processes, etc.

But it is also like giving birth to a baby elephant:

If you are not fully committed to teams and teaming, consider doing more research and reading. There are hundreds of books and articles about the issue. There are also a wide variety of structures and frameworks under which your processes can operate. Some are quite rigid and some are much less so — your corporation’s style and culture will help determine which might be best for your particular needs and there is NOT one best way to accomplish this. What works for Apple or Google will not work for CVS or Walmart.

Plus, the one really important requirement for success is the absolute commitment of the top management team and senior leadership. If you are not willing to commit money and time and focus to the improvement initiative, consider NOT doing anything along these lines. The worst thing you can do is partly commit and then de-commit at some future time, since it makes implementing the next initiative so much harder.

If you are interested in powerful tools for involving and engaging people and for helping to build higher levels of inter-organizational collaboration — or you are looking for a leadership development exercise that will help focus your management team on the issues of team building and employee engagement, Performance Management Company has designed the Square Wheels tools for organizational improvement and The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine for building alignment to shared goals and cross-functional teamwork.

For the FUN of It!

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

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

The actual quote for the baby elephant birth quote is:

TEAMWORK: An awful lot like giving birth to a baby elephant.

It always starts at a high level.
It’s accomplished with a lot of trumpeting and screaming.
It takes 22 months to grow and develop.
– And then you have a baby elephant to take care of…

Team Building and Large Event Management Ideas

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On April 18, 2014

In business team building exercises, collaboration, Corporate Team Building Games, employee engagement, employee motivation, executive team building exercises, implementation, Leadership Development Game, motivational team building exercises, Organizational Development Tools, team building event ideas, team building exercises for the workplace, The Search for The Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine, workplace performance improvement

My network of consultant users is sharing the idea that the “large team building event business” which has been pretty sparse is starting to pick up once again. There seems to be renewed interest by companies in hosting effective team building events for their management teams to help refocus on issues of business improvement or interdepartmental collaboration. The theme of strategy implementation has inherent interest, as does general teambuilding to improve interdepartmental collaboration.

This is good for us because we offer one of the most effective simulations out there for helping to focus people in the theme of optimizing results through better communications, alignment and planning. We are also well-positioned to build on the successes of many of the outdoor training or challenge courses that set the stage for less work on individual learning and more work on organizational improvement.

The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine fits a unique position in the marketplace. It is inexpensive to own and use, with only a one-time purchase price and no annual fees or licensing requirements or similar. A corporation like Wipro can run it with 30,000+ employees with the additional cost of printing paper, for example (true!). And I just got a testimonial from a consultant user who has had the game in continuous use for 19 years (that even shocked me!).

And people are reporting that their organizations have not been doing much with teamwork, sometimes for many years. They battened down the hatches on those kinds of developmental events a few years ago and just have not moved toward re-energizing their people or refocusing or realignment. The time seems to be approaching when some solid OD will have clear benefits.

If you might be interested in a solid developmental activity, you can rent the exercise from us, custom-packaged to meet your desired outcomes. You are dealing with the principle designer and owner of the company, so you get hands-on support at a high level.

Lots of people look to do team building within their organizations and Dutchman is one of those exercises that works well with small and large groups.

Normally, my conversations are generally with consultants and trainers who have been doing these kinds of things on a smaller scale and are looking for some new tools and approaches. Many of those conversations were with the, “been there and done that” crowd who were simply looking for some new and better tools than what has been out there in the marketplace.

We also just put together an agreement with Challenge Korea, an outdoor-based team building company who is going to begin using Dutchman, in Korean, and working to assist the larger companies there. It will be a good product addition to their current offerings, and will enable them to build more collaboration and followup implementation with their clients.

So, it has been fun to put my Coaching Hat on once again, along with my Event Planner Hat, and offer up some ideas for optimizing impacts for these new clients.We just had one organization run Dutchman with 9 different groups of college accounting students all over the US, with sizes from 140 up to 250 — and with great reported successes.

The exercise is about getting help along with information and on collaborating and sharing information and resources to optimize results. But what leaders see are people choosing NOT to get available planning information, to compete rather than collaborate among tabletops and to choose to not get help from the game leaders who are there to help! The messages are pretty obvious and the debriefings are most excellent.

Anyway, it is really neat to see these kinds of large events start happening again, since they can be powerful events to engage people in change and improvement and to lead them out of the current “engagement doldrums” that we seem to find ourselves.

Have some FUN out there yourself!

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

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

Leading People by Involving and Engaging – some resources

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On April 10, 2014

In Articles on Teamwork, employee motivation, Engagement, innovation, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator

Motivating, aligning and engaging people are critical tasks of managing, but also something that seems to need consistent attention from leaders at every level of the organization.

In my 30+ years of working with people and performance, an Engaging Leader is one who facilitates and sustains an inclusive and supportive workplace for those who they lead, so that people become increasingly active participants in organizational and performance improvement. They take an incremental, long term view and look for a better future for the workgroup and the individuals.

How does a leader better involve and engage people? In my view of the world, they increase the shared vision of the future. It looks something like this:

The View from The Front is different than the View at the Back. And people DO have ideas for workplace improvement that can be implemented with teamwork.

You do not need to be a professional facilitator to involve and engage your people in workplace improvement. One just needs to get them working with you to identify issues and opportunities; generally, they will be self-motivated to make things better. And, you can build their intrinsic motivation and increase their creativity by helping them move forward. You can help them to implement their ideas and we have the tools, small packages of self-directed communications bundles that are simple as well as inexpensive.

We Sell Simple Tools for Engaging Employees

You will find that these easy-to-use, engaging tools are designed for leaders to facilitate communications, motivation, collaboration, innovation and teamwork. Examples of these toolkits are:

Square Wheels Facilitation Toolkit
A powerfully simple tool to get people engaged in the journey forward. This basic program is for anyone wanting to facilitate workplace improvement
and involve and engage people to impact intrinsic motivation.

The Square Wheels Coaching for Improved Performance Toolkit
Coaching is about involving and engaging and changing the picture of how things can be. One needs to develop a sense of ownership and deal with issues of perceived roadblocks to generate alternative choices.

Manager as Motivator – A Square Wheels Toolkit
A complete program for Facilitating Employee Involvement and Implementation of Ideas. A train-the-trainer kind of bundle for trainers and more senior managers to use to teach their managers involvement and motivational skills.

Innovate & Implement
A solid learning tool. It puts as few as 3 people (but works with an unlimited number of players) in a situation where they have to work together in a challenging, time-limited game focused on collaboration and communications.

The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Goldmine Team Building Game
This is our flagship team building exercise and you can find dozens of supporting articles here in the blog that explains its very unique capabilities and applications. It has received worldwide acclamation as a Game for Team Building, Communications, Strategic Planning, Collaboration and Leadership Development that works with all kinds of organizations and groups.

Any of these along with the other products on our website are proven tools for reaching out to and engaging employees in the process of continuous, continuous improvement.

Here are some of my Blog Articles around the Idea of Engaged Leaders who help generate a motivated and innovative workplace.

If You Aren’t Leading and Engaging, What are You Doing?

LEGO, Square Wheels, Innovation, Leadership and Stuff

Fear is The Mindkiller – Thoughts on Facilitation and Engagement

Facilitation? Me, a Facilitator? Me, a MOTIVATOR??

Decision Making, Creativity, and Implementation

Teamwork and Square Wheels and Implementation

Can Creativity be Taught? Illustrated Thoughts

Focusing Attention on Performance Improvement through Interactive Engagement

If we can help you, connect with me. I am easy to reach and can offer some pretty realistic and straightforward ideas and solutions to many performance improvement and team building issues that we find in the workplaces of the world.

For the FUN of It!

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

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

About Scott Simmerman, Ph.D.

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On April 1, 2014

In experiential learning, Facilitation, large group team building events, Metaphors for business improvement

Dr. Scott Simmerman is the creator of the Square Wheels illustrations about organizational behavior and the author of numerous team building games; his flagship product is The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine.

He is not a poet but strives to create some memorable works using his illustrations, poems, quips and quotes to leave an impact.

Scott has been operating Performance Management Company since 1984 and has been extremely fortunate in being able to work with consultants and managers in 38 countries so far.

—

For the FUN of It!

Scott Simmerman, Ph. D., CPF – “The Square Wheels Guy”
Performance Management Company – 864-292-8700
3 Old Oak Drive Taylors, SC 29687
Scott@SquareWheels.com

– Tools for Training and Development <www.squarewheels.com/>
– Scott as Speaker <www.ScottSimmerman.com/>
– Tools, games and presentation materials at
<www.performancemanagementcompany.com>

Dr. Simmerman is a Certified Professional Facilitator (IAF)

Some Square Wheels Illustrated Quotes

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On March 27, 2014

In employee motivation, Facilitation, Icebreakers, Involving and Engaging People, Managing and leading change, Metaphors for business improvement

There are a few main “one-liners” and memorable quotes that I use regularly in my articles and presentations and that I sometimes use as anchors in various posts on LinkedIn and elsewhere. And I inconsistently post them up into my other blog that is generally loaded up with poems and haiku and other thoughts that I post up as singles.

Since my readership is different, I thought to share a few of my Business Thoughts herein for your enjoyment and edification. If you want to see more, pop over to http://poemsontheworkplace.com/

We sell simple toolkits that use different illustrations and themes to generate discussions about workplace improvement.

They work beautifully in training programs as well as in simple workplace discussions about issues and ideas, teamwork and collaboration, innovation and motivation. You can connect easily with me if I can provide direct support to your efforts to better involve and engage people in performance improvement,

For the FUN of It!

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

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

The Square Wheels, LEGO Controversy: Thoughts on Leadership and Engagement (Part One)

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On March 25, 2014

In innovation, Involving and Engaging People, Metaphors for business improvement, Organizational Development Tools, Team Building Games

In the blog post of yesterday, I shared the LEGO image that was sent to me with comments that I was either collaborating with the author or that he was infringing on my intellectual property. The reality now, for all sorts of good reasons, is COLLABORATING!!

After all, we do make choices and some choices are simply a lot better than other choices. As I think about this, I think wheels within wheels because there are so many levels to the situation along with so many issues and so many possibilities.

Håkan Forss saw a cartoon and decided to do it “in LEGO” as he had been doing to a lot of other ideas. It looked like this:

One issue that I had was that the cartoon made it seem as if the guys on the right pushing and pulling the wagon were actually choosing not to consider possibilities for improvement. My thought was that it might sometimes be the wagon puller that does that, simply because they are isolated from the hands on reality of the wagon pushers, but that the wagon pushers also know that things could be different and better.

Wagon pushers have different perspectives than wagon pullers.

My Square Wheels One situation sets things up like this:

Håkan then went back to find the original cartoon that he used as the framework for his expression in the top figure and I was surprised to see this work as his basis:

I had never seen that cartoon. It also has no attribution as to copyright and there is no apparent information that I can find as to where it was published or who is the author. My thought, given that I have been using this theme of round wheels and square wheels since 1993, is that it is probably what is technically termed, a derivative product. And I DO need to know because we do not want the theme of “Square Wheels” to go into the public domain.

We literally have 300+ cartoons that have spun off that original idea, plus a few hundred other quotes, poems, haiku and one-liners that anchor to that theme and that are published in articles, blogs, training toolkits and other formats. Protecting the image called Square Wheels One is important to us.

mailto:Scott@SquareWheels.com

In later posts along this same line, I will discuss some of the different aspects of our Square Wheels One illustration in comparison to Håkan Forss’ work and probably challenge him to illustrate a couple of those cartoons with his unique and interesting style of LEGO art.

And maybe Håkan and I can create some LEGO block interactive tools so you can have your workshop participants play with ideas for workplace improvement. After all, the round wheels are already in (my) wagon and the ideas for improvement already exist.

Don’t Just DO Something,
Stand There!

For the FUN of It!

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

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

LEGO® is a registered trademark of LEGO A/S, a corporation incorporated under the laws of Denmark.

If you aren't leading and engaging, what ARE you doing?

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On March 25, 2014

In dis-un-engagement, employee engagement, employee motivation, Engagement, Facilitation, intrinsic motivation, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator, ownership involvement, people and performance, Team work

If you aren’t leading, involving, engaging and motivating people, are you just taking up valuable organizational space? We need Leaders in so many workplaces today and managers need to make choices!

—–

A key issue in most teams in most sports is having leadership. It can occur everywhere. Sometimes, they wear a little “C” on their jerseys indicating to the officials that they are Captains and sometimes they walk to the middle of the playing field to watch the coin toss. Other times, they are simply the people on the field who the other look to for motivation or depend on for The Big Play.

This happens in every organization, too. Sometimes, people depend on one of their own to speak up at a meeting to express a common concern. Sometimes these are just those people who get others involved in what is going on, since every person in the tug-of-war lends something to the effort.

Paraphrasing on Henny Youngman standard one liner, the research by so many different organizational polling companies would suggest,

Take my Boss… Please.

Jim Clifton seemed to seriously suggest that the data from his Gallup polling would suggest a realistic situation were for about 7,000,000 managers to simply be fired because they repeatedly seem unable to lead, manage or get out of the way. So many workers complain that no one listens and no one cares and that engagement is a HUGE problem with most companies worldwide. (Find a link to some of his writings here.)

Organizations tend to work like this, in the view of most people:

Wagon Pullers are seemingly isolated by the rope!

Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends 2014 Survey showed that leadership was a critical issue, with 86% of respondents rating it “urgent” or “important”. It also showed that only 13% of organizations say they do an excellent job of developing leaders at all levels — yeah, that is kind of noticeable.

But leadership is a big wide thing, with there literally being thousands of books on the topic. Most of us regular people would simply suggest that being trustworthy, involving and engaging are pretty important skills to generate everyday motivation. Feeling aligned to the goals and expectations and feeling appreciated seem to be pretty straightforward and understandable parts, too.

These Big Survey Consulting Companies like Gallup and Deloitte tend to offer up Very Big Solutions (you can read that as complicated and expensive). Me, I am more of a continuous continuous improvement kind of guy who thinks that everyone can make some improvements every day without requiring the extensive involvement of HR and Training & Development organizations — you know, the ones that always get their funding cut first because they are seen as costly to most senior managers (who do not get their development from them anyway, relying on outside groups like the Universities and Center for Creative Leadership and similar…).

There are a number of writings in the PMC blog around the issues of generating engagement and motivation, all of it simple and straightforward and all of which can easily be accomplished by any supervisor simply looking to improve their skills in motivating people.

– Here are thoughts on the problems of involving and engaging people– Here are ideas on Dis-Un-Engagement and issues of facilitating– Here is a framework for involvement and workplace improvement

As so many others have framed things, I believe that only some of the problems of leadership are at the top levels of the organization — senior managers may not be leading well or implementing strategies effectively.

But as Jim Clifton and others have shown, the real issues of organizational leadership and day-to-day motivation and performance occur at the interface of worker and manager – there are zillions of those minute-to-minute, hourly and daily interactions that might allow so many more people to work “more better faster” and that would help to involve and engage and align people to the expectations and goals. That is where organizations are failing their people.

There are no Big Silver Bullets out there to solve these issues. But there are bazillions of the Square Wheels, those things that work but do not work smoothly and that generate less than optimal performance. These are “artificial hindrances” in the sense that The Round Wheels are already in the wagon! There are all sorts of motivational impacts to be achieved when our supervisors do a better job of involving and engaging their people and our managers do a better job of involving and engaging our supervisors.

So many Big Solutions have been tried and have seemed to fail over the past 50 years. Sometimes, that exceptional leader like a Steve Jobs can get a good grip on things and have that major impact, but those cases are really rare (which is why Steve Jobs got all that press!).

Maybe it is time to try some “little solutions.“ Maybe it is time to simply allow a bit more individual development and initiative in the workplace of the managers and supervisors so that they can more effectively involve and motivate their people.

It does not take a whole big bunch of money or time to actually implement some of the ideas of the team that would make the workplace better in some ways. People generally want to make things better and will work toward doing that. And that little effort has a big and cascading impact on people and morale:

It is important to remember that Nobody Ever Washes a Rental Car and that people want to have a sense of ownership involvement in things. Plus, it is also important to know that people do need to be involved and engaged in order to want to be involved:

At PMC, we sell simple toolkits that allow a supervisor to generate actionable ideas from their people. We use these simple cartoons to get wheels rolling downhill, to show supervisors that involvement and engagement facilitation are not that difficult to accomplish and that these activities can be a part of their everyday life as a manager. It is easy to ask and to listen, to generate teamwork focused on implementing good ideas to make performance improvements.

People are creative and flexible. We can do simple things to remove or decrease frustration and deal with roadblocks to help motivate people. I call this process Engagimentation (or Dis-Un-Empowerment) and suggest that you consider taking such actions with your people to make some impacts on so many things. Let me know if we can help – we sell inexpensive and effective tools for communications.

For the FUN of It!

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

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

Fear is The Mindkiller – Thoughts on Facilitation and Engagement

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On March 6, 2014

In Change Facilitation, dis-un-empowerment, employee engagement, employee motivation, Engagement, Facilitation, innovation, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator, motivation in the workplace, ownership involvement, workplace performance improvement

In writing about facilitation and how it seems that some people want to make this simple concept into a horribly complex pedagogical framework understood only by experts (like me, but certainly not approaching the issues like me!), I was reminded of a quip and then looked it up for the whole source.

I remember reading Dune (by Frank Herbert) while on a 9-month solo car camping trip around the US back in 1977. I was acting out the definition of footloose and fancy-free in those days, for sure, since I had no plans, no timeline, no specific destination. Just me and my car and my tent and camping gear. Awesome journey all over the US and reading a few books in the quiet evenings.

Herbert’s Dune Trilogy was an outstanding set of science fiction works, one that took the basic characters over time and across The Universe. It was a lot about personal strengths and leadership and dealing with adversity and politics. And one of the repeated phrase in the first book and in the trilogy was this one:

The whole litany of the Bene Gesserit for building their personal strengths and resolve was actually,

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

Pretty neat mantra, I think, and a really good thing to tell yourself when you are faced with a challenge or challenges. Allow the fear to pass over and through and then reflect on it to learn. Personal growth from managing fear effectively.

I am reminded of this as we talk about facilitation of workplace improvement and the obvious lack of real involvement and engagement in the workplace.

The concepts and understanding of the related issues are pretty clear and there are some strong Big Ideas about what should be done. Jim Cliffton, CEO at Gallup and the surveyor of millions of workers simply says that there are 7,000,000 bad bosses out there who should be fired because they cannot demonstrably manage people very well.

(This is not me talking for him — see this link for what he said and how he was framing this issue of leadership and management practices in everyday organizations.)

So, a solution? Yes. Mine is a simple one designed to get things rolling and change the language of improvement. Mine is an easy, bombproof way to get workers talking with supervisors about issues and opportunities for workplace improvement. Mine is one that anyone can do without a lot of training.

Have a meeting and use this simple illustration:

We suggest that you:

Show the Square Wheels One cartoon.
Play with the general ideas people think of and share.
Link the ideas and process to the organizational issues of the group
Play with listing organizational Square Wheels of the workplace
Break down and separate the list into least difficult and most difficult.
Break easier ones into less costly and more costly.
Ask for volunteers to work up the idea or to try to implement a solution or solutions.
Provide organizational resources as needed (time, money, support, power)
Repeat the cycle building on successes.

Facilitation is not rocket science, although rocket scientists certainly use facilitation when they are brainstorming new ideas or looking for issues or problems or trying to define different ways of accomplishing difficult tasks that need a team-based solution.

Remember the movie Apollo 13 with the issue of the square filter needing to fit into the round hole: (Watch this 90 second YouTube clip by clicking on Tom Hanks’ image below). Pretty cool scene, and a real and urgent problem solving situation faced by the response team:

The facilitation is easy. Share the problem, share the tools and framework, and ask a group of people to put things together. In the case of YOUR people working in your organization, consider using our simple Square Wheels One illustration and cheap facilitation tools to create your Apollo 13 problem and ask your people how to help each other make things better.

Find my short screencast about how to use Square Wheels as a tool for improvement by clicking on the image below:

We help people make workplace improvements,

For the FUN of It!

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

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

Facilitation? Me, a Facilitator? Me, a MOTIVATOR??

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On March 5, 2014

In Articles on Teamwork, Change Facilitation, Facilitation, Involving and Engaging People, Team work

I haven’t checked lately, but 50 years of watching what people say they fear has kept

as the number ONE fear of most people, including most workers. Okay, so now we make a good worker into a Supervisor. Has much really changed? Are these new leaders actually good at involving and engaging their people? Or are they just trying to keep things moving forward?

Plus, we can add in other leadership fears such as fear of loss of control and fear of not having the best idea and all that other personal competency stuff and maybe, we can generate a list of reasons why so many people find it hard to:

for ideas. This really is understandable. There are a lot of common fears about leading and involving and engaging…

At the same time, it is my consistent discovery that so many workplaces tend to look something like this:

The people are working hard, pushing and pulling the wagons, and it is the same thing, day after day and week after week. No wonder that Sirota Research found that 85% of new hires saying that their morale declined significantly after spending 6 months in their job and that employee engagement is actually falling – from 24% to 13% in the past two years (Mercer, 2012). We are seemingly not doing a lot of asking and seemingly doing a lot of telling!

So, I am guessing that the reality of how organizations is not so much like that shown in the above illustration but seemingly more like what we share in the one below:

So, what is really so hard about facilitating a group discussion? Not a whole lot, actually, speaking as someone who was a Certified Professional Facilitator (CPF) by the International Association of Facilitators and who has been leading organizational improvement workshops since 1978. Really, it is really simple, really. Seriously, it is really really simple.

Share an illustration with them that has printed on it, “How might this illustration represent how organizations really work?” And let them think about it and then discuss it in small groups.
Ask them to share their ideas.
Ask them to share how some of those same ideas might represent how things work in their work initiatives.
Ask them what we might try to do differently and if anyone is already doing something differently than everyone else.
Ask them if they could try to implement a change in how they do things or to recommend something that you might change to make things work better.

That, in a nutshell, is facilitation.

You can read lots more about facilitation, engagement and intrinsic motivation throughout my blog posts, since I often talk about these issues and opportunities as being straightforward. You can also read about Russian Poets and nutshells and Hamlet, if you want, since all this stuff does connect to motivating people and improving how things work. And, you can find a simple, free guide to facilitation by clicking below:

Facilitating Engagement – an overview

The simple reality is that the Round Wheels already exist in the wagon but that people are seemingly too busy to stop and step back and identify issues and opportunities that are really visible and often relatively easy to fix.

So here is some really simple advice for supervisors and facilitators:

For The FUN of It!

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

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

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

Tag: Scott Simmerman Page 1 of 3

LEGO Team Building Exercises

Thoughts on Change and Choice – a Square Wheels LEGO cartoon

You CAN herd frogs! Thoughts on Strategy Implementation

Why do teams choose to compete rather than collaborate?

Working while Not Working – The Problem of Overconnectedness

<a rel=”author” href=”https://plus.google.com/u/0/114758253812293832123″ a>

Strategy Implementation and Team Building – Years of Hard Work

Team Building and Large Event Management Ideas

Leading People by Involving and Engaging – some resources

About Scott Simmerman, Ph.D.

Some Square Wheels Illustrated Quotes

The Square Wheels, LEGO Controversy: Thoughts on Leadership and Engagement (Part One)

Don’t Just DO Something,
Stand There!

If you aren't leading and engaging, what ARE you doing?

Take my Boss… Please.

Fear is The Mindkiller – Thoughts on Facilitation and Engagement

Facilitation? Me, a Facilitator? Me, a MOTIVATOR??

Tag: Scott Simmerman Page 1 of 3

<a rel=”author” href=”https://plus.google.com/u/0/114758253812293832123″ a>

Don’t Just DO Something, Stand There!

Take my Boss… Please.

Don’t Just DO Something,
Stand There!