The Square Wheels Project – Performance Management Company Blog

In Change Facilitation, employee motivation, improve organizational performance, innovation, manager as motivator, Manager as Trainer, productivity improvement, team motivation, The Square Wheels Project, workplace performance improvement

For two dozen years, I have used a “strength building” illustration as step one to discuss how training is not always a good solution to performance improvement problems. It is the old Bob Mager, “If you put a gun to their head, can they do it?” kind of framework in that it separates a skillset from a motivation. Simply put, if people can do the job, they don’t need more training to do the job.

Training is a good thing if skills are deficient, but we often see new people demonstrate the skills as they are coached but then not demonstrate those same skills over time. Something else is happening and workplace systems and processes are often a good place to look for new Best Practices and ideas to improve motivation and teamwork.

So, while training is a GOOD thing, and often one of those reinforcers for workplace performance, it is not THE solution most of the time.

My suggestion is to step back from the wagon and change perspective. Ask people for ideas and listen to issues and opportunities. That is the nature of The Square Wheels Project.

So, here is a little ditty poem about those issues and opportunities. I hope you like it!

Note that training WILL often generate a 2 or 3% improvement in performance since the wagon pushers WILL be a little stronger!
But maybe that time could have been better used for engagement…

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.

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

Learn more about Scott at his LinkedIn site.

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

A Round Wheel Happy New Year!

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On December 27, 2016

In Change Facilitation, employee motivation, Engagement, Facilitation, Feedback, innovation, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator, people and performance, Performance Feedback, The Square Wheels Project, workplace performance improvement

We had a Christmas Day brunch at one of the finer hotels here in Greenville and, to put it simply, things did not roll very smoothly. There were any number of service quality issues from beginning to end, starting with a “10 minute wait” that was 35 minutes (we sat outside where it was nice and not in the stuffy crowded lobby) to the food quality / timeliness issues to having our table swept when we went back to the buffet (even the silverware and glassware and I had to re-serve our water because there was no one there…) and to having to wait 20 minutes to get the check.

Giving specific feedback to the restaurant manager generated a nice conversation with the General Manager /Partner of the property. I expected nothing and was simply sharing information, but he sent me an email a bit ago inviting me to another event. It was both unexpected and unnecessary — maybe we will followup and do it. But getting something for free was not part of my effort to share information to enable better performance.

Anyway, I wanted to cheer things up a little and since the Square Wheels image was something he and I discussed, I thought to do up a Happy New Year Poster.

The key point is that people know what they could choose to do differently or #morebetterfaster if they simply had a better sense of why it is important. It does not take much effort for a team of people to implement better solutions and improve how things work. The idea of stepping back from the wagon (and also ignoring the Spectator Sheep) is important to get the overall perspective to find and implement some new ideas.

If YOU have some Square Wheels issues around people and performance, visit The Square Wheels Project and pick up some simple facilitation skills along with some simple tools to use. The Round Wheel solutions already exist; it is about identifying issues and implementing solutions,

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.

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

Learn more about Scott at his LinkedIn site.

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

Santa’s Square Wheels Performance Improvement Poem

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On December 20, 2016

In Articles on Teamwork, Change Facilitation, employee motivation, Engagement, improve organizational performance, manager as motivator, Managing and leading change, Metaphors for business improvement, Square Wheels LEGO images, The Square Wheels Project

A special Holidays greeting to you with the hope that an illustrated “Getting Santa Rolling” poem might add a touch of fun to your days.

Each year at this time, my little company sends out a seasonal greeting anchoring to either our Square Wheels illustrations around engaging people in making improvements or to our Lost Dutchman game about collaboration and teamwork. This year, it’s the Square Wheels theme that is the poem’s focus since after 25 years of using original line art we’ve transitioned to using LEGO images for a more playful representation of, “How most organizations really work.”

Since other mailings have gone out to my contacts in LinkedIn and to our subscribers, apologies if you get this twice. We would simply like to wish you the best for a great year ahead and for your having some positive impacts on the people around you. Here is what we had to say about getting Santa rolling this year:

Getting Santa Rolling….

Things look too bumpy for Santa, his Elves and Reindeer!
How they’ll get flying with those Square Wheels isn’t clear.
Santa, ask your teams to stop & look in their “wagon”
As solutions exist there that’ll keep it from draggin’.

Then the Elves and Reindeer could quite easily share
Their ideas for how things could work better there.

By Asking and Listening you’ll most surely generate
Engagement and motivation leading them to innovate!

Their Round Wheel thinking will give them insight
into how to implement to make things quite right.

Then all will gleefully rejoice as Christmas time arrives
Knowing their Round Wheel ideas got Santa in the skies!

Those Square Wheels exist everywhere, you’ll see,
But the Round Wheels are reachable—ab-so-lute-ly!

Managers who involve workers with positive intent
Offer everyone involved a gift of empowerment!

“Getting Santa Rolling” aligns with our mission to support Supervisors, Managers and Leaders with simple tools for facilitating improvements leading to a happier and better workplace.

If you’re interested in strengthening your facilitation skills, you can do that easily through online learning and support by joining The Square Wheels Project where you’ll receive self-paced learning and materials for making a positive difference in your workplace. Check it out here:

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.

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

Learn more about Scott at his LinkedIn site.

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

WHAM! The Square Wheels Guy sees a Round Wheel

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On December 19, 2016

In Change, experiential learning, innovation, Managing and leading change, Metaphors for business improvement, productivity improvement, The Square Wheels Project

I shared this story with a couple of associates last night and both said I should blog about it. The situation is where some guy (me) who deals in Square Wheels and Round Wheels finally makes an improvement because he finally sees something as a Square Wheel, something operating that way for almost a year. Seriously…

My house has one room set up as an image production area and we got some green screen cloth and used a 5 foot by 3 foot table as the base on which to set up our various Square Wheels scenarios and images. We have good lighting sources and a tripod for using my iPhone to take pictures. We even have a remote control so we can keep the camera still while we do some stop-motion movies. (We will start publishing some animations in January – an amazing fun way to be creative and get some key learning points across.)

Anyway, I thought that we had production down to what was a science. Simple set up, hit some light switches and get out the iPhone, with auto upload to the cloud and downloading to my computers. Neat!

But there were small problems. In some shots where we had wider images, like with Santa and the reindeer plus some elves at the back, we were getting the sides of the screen to come into view at the back. That resulted in me having to move LEGO more toward the back to control the angles and image quality.

On Thursday, Joan and I were shooting Santa shots (new poem will be published) and I sat there and heard voices in my head saying, “Why don’t we rotate the table so that it changes from 3′ wide and 5′ long to being a more usable 5′ wide and 3′ long?”

Why was it 3 x 5? Because the table fit neatly along the 5 foot wall to the left and we had a light box sitting on the table when we first started. But then we moved the table away from the wall when we went from shooting within the box to a back-screen open arrangement. We kept changing backgrounds, raised the height of the table and did other things but we never bothered to rotate the table. It worked as it was, but it did not work smoothly. It took 5 minutes to make a really useful fix…

My own Square Wheels metaphor winds up whacking me in the side of the head. A better solution has been there for MONTHS, but I simply could not SEE it because I was used to the way it was working, Neither Chris nor Joan saw it either, and Chris helped me with all the initial set up and has taken half the pictures.

The message and key learning point is simple:

The Round Wheels are already in the wagon.

Improvement often just requires us to stop, step back, and LOOK for ideas to make things better, rather than simply doing the same thing over and over and somehow expecting better results.

I do TRY to live my own metaphor and look for those Round Wheels.
But apparently, “not always,”

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.

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

Learn more about Scott at his LinkedIn site.

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

Monday Morning Square Wheels and other thoughts

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On December 12, 2016

In Change, employee motivation, Engagement, Facilitation, innovation

Here is our new framework for considering how things really seem to work in most organizations, this one done as a paradoxical joke that might take a second. It is also something for consideration about the perception of reality:

Here are two of my most useful quotes:

Nothing made sense, and neither did everything else.
(Joseph Heller, from his book “Closing Time,“ (1994) )

It is not possible to awaken someone who is pretending to be asleep.
(Navajo proverb).

————

Caterpillars can fly, if they just lighten up. Thus, be the caterpillar or the butterfly, but always watch out for the birds and expect changes because we go through cycles of existence.

If you can’t be kind to others, at least have the decency to be vague.

Indecision is a key to flexibility.
A decision made is an opportunity for flexibility missed.
Thus, flexibility is a key to indecision.

“We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.” — Marcel Proust

“In Paris, they simply stared when I spoke to them in French. I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language.”
– Mark Twain

Some thoughts on Flying:
Keep thy airspeed up, lest the earth come from below and smite thee.

Basic Flying Rules:

Try to stay in the middle of the air.
Do not go near the edges of it. (The edges of the air can be recognized by the appearance of ground, buildings, sea, trees and interstellar space. It is much more difficult to fly there.)
Strive to keep the number of successful landings made equal to the number of take-offs you’ve made.

If you lend someone $20, and never see that person again, it was probably worth it. And borrow money from pessimists, since they do not expect you to pay it back.

Some managers choose to be rock solid in their commitment to flexibility. Some drink from the fountain of knowledge, others just gargle.

“That’s like asking the vegetables how to design a refrigerator.” (An actual quote I heard a company president make when asked about the idea of employee involvement. Really!)

The dome on Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home, conceals a billiards room. Billiards were illegal in Virginia when Jefferson lived…

The term “devil’s advocate” comes from the Roman Catholic church. When 20 of the church’s most important convene in deciding if someone should be sainted, a devil’s advocate is always appointed to give an alternative view.

Management in some companies reminds me of 5,000 ants on a log floating down the river with each ant pretending they are steering and that they know where they are going. But it is not their fault, it is simply the result of their perceptions about how things work.

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.

Check out The Square Wheels Project, our LMS for teaching Square Wheels facilitation skills to supervisors and managers.

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

Learn more about Scott at his LinkedIn site.

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

What is Negative Reinforcement, a Square Wheels Innovation Framework

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On December 11, 2016

In business team building exercises, Change Facilitation, employee motivation, Engagement

The key point here is that removing Square Wheels has widespread, natural systemic reinforcing impacts for improving organizational results. It is a direct and simple way to impact results, everywhere.

I am a behaviorist from way back, getting one of those doctorate thingies and playing with “behavioral engineering” back in the late 70s and working with people like Tom Gilbert and Ed Feeney and Ken Junkins. The main approach was to identify critically leveraged, high-impact behaviors and then set up mechanisms to implement changes systemically, to give performers self-reinforcing feedback that enables performance improvement. It was an interesting and effective approach that certainly has applications today in so many situations. (More on feedback here)

Feedback is all about alignment and engagement, since it focuses on giving people the information they need to be high performers. It focuses on best practices and things that can be improved with focus.

We see a LOT of this in many of the gamification approaches to accelerated learning and training in general.

In reading an excellent whitepaper on gamification in general, there was some confusion in using the term “negative reinforcement” that I thought might be useful for a blog, since it does share some different enlightening information. I even did an illustration that anchors it and shows why it would have a positive impact.

Negative reinforcement is commonly used as an alternative phrase meaning punishment.

They are NOT the same. There are three things here:

Positive reinforcement works when some behavior occurs and it results in a positive outcome or response, positive from the viewpoint of the individual or the team. Positive reinforcement increases the likelihood of that behavior occurring in the future.
Punishment works when some behavior occurs and a negative outcome or response occurs. Punishment reduces the likelihood of that behavior occurring in the future. It is a negative outcome.
Negative reinforcement works when some behavior occurs and it results in the removal of some aversive stimulus of some kind. The removal, contingent on the behavior, causes an INCREASE in the behavior. It is a positive outcome.

There are a lot of issues involved in any stimulus / response situations. There are intrinsic rewards and extrinsic rewards and contingent and non-contingent rewards and a whole lot of “past experience” operating to determine impacts. Perceived (non-actual) links between stimulus and response can generate superstitious behaviors (article here) such as blowing on dice or wearing lucky hats.

Intrinsic rewards are personal to people while extrinsic ones (like money) are added and can generate all sorts of unpredicted impacts. (more on extrinsic rewards here and here ). Candidly, I do NOT like extrinsic rewards, since most set up competition and generate both winners as well as losers. Many people (as many as 40%) have also learned that they never win, so why even try.

So, why does generating a discussion about Square Wheels^® work so well to generate motivation and engagement? Why is it so bombproof as a tool for organizational development and innovation? Because it works something like this:

By removing some Square Wheels, the things that work but do not work smoothly, and replacing them with Round Wheels, you do the workers the favor of helping them remove some of the aversive aspects of their work and workplace. This increases the likelihood they will repeat the behaviors, both individually and collectively. You build teamwork, alignment, and collaboration and you improve communications and you get positive actions like these:

You get to go #morebetterfaster.

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.

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

Learn more about Scott at his LinkedIn site.

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

It’s about Perspective Opportunity, People!

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On December 9, 2016

In Change Facilitation, employee motivation, Engagement, Facilitation, improve organizational performance, Metaphors for business improvement, productivity improvement

Perception. Breakfast of Champions.

Or some such thing. Stepping back from the wagon to look for opportunities is such a more effective strategy than putting one’s head down and bemoaning all the things that are wrong.

What you see is all there is. So why not choose to look at things differently and go #morebetterfaster?

Our Square Wheels Project is designed to generate those ideas for workplace improvement from the wagon pushers. It is about facilitating different perspective ideas about issues and opportunities.

Check it out and let us know how we can support your performance improvement, engagement, innovation and motivational improvement initiatives,

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.

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

Learn more about Scott at his LinkedIn site.

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

Choose Rolling over Rocking

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On December 9, 2016

In business team building exercises, Corporate Team Building Games, employee motivation, Engagement, Facilitation, manager as motivator, productivity improvement, The Square Wheels Project

Below are two images that represents one of those simple contemplation ideas or thoughts on life, just for consideration as to personal or organizational innovation and improvement. The first one is a giveaway, but the second one is a paradox. Maybe, for learning possibilities, I should have reversed the order, but then people will probably just skip by and ignore this opportunity…

The impetus came when I got a Creative Whack Pack (1992) last night. I flipped through it and thought I need to do a card deck around the many dozens of our Square Wheels LEGO images as a tool for some creative thinking on implementing improvements as well as innovating solutions to workplace realities. (We’ve been using images as creative thinking tools since we first started playing with Square Wheels^® One back in 1993. That has been a most interesting journey.)

So, from that review of the card deck framework, I started generating two new “posters” around people and performance:

The reality is that both Square Wheels^® and Round Wheels already exist. Square Wheels are exceptionally common, a daily occurrence actually, since so many systems and processes simply do not work well — but so few people seem to understand that things can be fixed and improved. Few things out there seem to work smoothly and continually and continuous continuous improvement is an organizational reality. But people also resist change when they believe things are working.

The Square Wheels Project is our course focused on improving the facilitation skills and engagement competencies of managers. All sorts of statistics point to this as an organizational issue worldwide, to the reality that engagement is awful in many places, and the the issues that motivation and innovation are critical to long term success. But it is NOT just about identifying problems. It is about implementing solutions and that is often impossibly hard without the active support of the people doing the job.

It is not simply the identification of the problems, it is the implementation of solutions that is critical to success and the involvement and engagement of the workforce. And how one actively involves and engages people in change is the key. That is a SKILL. It is not accomplished from yelling and telling or by people simply using power to try to influence — that just generates resistance. We see that in all kinds of statistics (low engagement, lack of respect, employee turnover, etc.)

Performance Management Company has been supporting workplace issues of people and performance since 1984. We offer simple teambuilding tools and the Square Wheels^® themed tools for engagement and change management, to keep things straightforward and simple.

If we can provide some support, let us know,

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.

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

Learn more about Scott at his LinkedIn site.

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

Engagement. Motivation. Innovation. The Critical Importance of Supervisors

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On November 30, 2016

In business team building exercises, Change Facilitation, employee motivation, Engagement, Facilitation, innovation, manager as motivator

WHO in your management team has the absolute most impact on profits? Please do not delude yourself with some belief that it is senior management. We know from all kinds of research that the ideas from top management take 2 to 3 years, in general, in order to be fully implemented in most medium to large organizations. And we also know that, “a desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world” (John LeCarre). Right? 😀

Okay, than it must be sales or engineering or manufacturing or something, right? Well maybe… But let me make the simple point that workers work and managers manage and who has the biggest impact on the workers working? Let me suggest that it is our lowly supervisor.

Supervisors! You know, the ones you had to promote because the other ones quit; that person who you promise to actually send to training one of these days when the workload drops some or you can get a relief person ready…

And what is their normal day like? Mostly, from our conversations and observations, they are covered up with obligations about summarizing results, solving problems, doing HR paperwork, dealing with angry customers or angry managers in other departments and, above all, attending meetings!

You can save them a lot of time by reducing meetings, or making them more effective and efficient and sending them information instead of telling them. And you can also impact them positively by giving them some job-skills with broad impacts.

And you cannot expect them to impact their people much if you do not allow them to interact with their people. (I read an article that showed that people working remotely had more manager contact than those located in the same office space.) And I believe that. Managing by Wandering Around is just not the norm these days, for sure.

Let me suggest that effective communications are also somewhat of a skills problem, that many people simply do NOT know how to facilitate effectively to involve and engage and motivate people. If you put a gun to their head, they simply could not do much better, so it is a SKILL issue and not simply one of motivation. And that lack of skill and the pressure to perform causes something like this in most workplaces:

I’ve been playing with the themes of Square Wheels^® for over 20 years and they are a fabulous as well as easy to use way to involve and engage people in workplace improvement. What we have done with The Square Wheels Project is design an online training program to teach the techniques and share the tools.

Give us a try. Allow one of your supervisors to go through this course and network with our other users and with us about their issues and opportunities, and see if they will dramatically improve how things work in their organization,

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.

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

Learn more about Scott at his LinkedIn site.

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

Square Wheels, Dr. Seuss and “suck” or “muck?”

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On November 28, 2016

In Business Haiku, employee engagement, employee motivation, Facilitation, improve organizational performance, innovation, team motivation

As we develop more and more thoughts on The Square Wheels Project, our course to teach facilitation and engagement skills to supervisors using an online LMS and our Square Wheels^® tools, I will occasionally digress and do something like a Dr. Seuss poem around one of the images.

With this particular one, though, I could not decide on the best wording so I ask my team and of course, I got two different answers so I did up a third one to confuse things even more…

Let me know which of these you like best. Maybe Dan or Chris can set up a poll; that is beyond my pay grade, I think!

Anyway, here are one, two and three:

So, if you have a most liked, let me know.

The Square Wheels Project continues to roll along,

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 quips and quotes on Poems on The Workplace is here.

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

Workplace FUN – ONE stupidly simple idea

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On November 25, 2016

In business team building exercises, Change Facilitation, employee motivation, Engagement, Facilitation, improve organizational performance, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator

Gallup just published a report that showed that only 35% of male managers in the US are engaged in their jobs. Let me repeat that — only 1/3 of males who are managing and leading other people are themselves engaged. (It is better for women, and it also shows that the teams working under women are also more engaged).

But WHAT IS THIS ABOUT? I mean, it does flow downhill and all that but is this even remotely acceptable? NO, in my belief system. How can those employees even be remotely satisfied if 2 of 3 managers don’t care?

I ginned this up for other purposes, but I will show it here since I think there is a leverage point around this somehow. I know it may offend a few people maybe, but there IS a reality here and most can agree that this IS a style of management:

Donkey Hotey's Trump Image and Samuel Goldwyn's quote

This quote was actually that of Samuel Goldwyn, the G in MGM Studios. But it does reflect a style of management that we see out there…

Today’s reality is that “this guy” is seen as a successful manager of people and a “good businessman.” The reality is meaningless; this is the perception and the model for leadership in the minds of many people.

I am not going to narrate much on this. But I will ask:

WHY is work not fun?
HOW can we shift the thinking of supervisors AWAY from “managing” — aka manipulating — and get them to be more involving and engaging?
How can we generate more RESPECT among people working together, thoughtfully, on shared goals and missions?

The TRUTH must be out there somewhere. The TRUST that we need for good working conditions can be developed. And we should be adding some FUN to how things work, not some gun. So, a little poem and the suggestion that you check out The Square Wheels Project, a stupidly simple training and development program focused on facilitating more asking and listening in any workplace.

My personal goal is to leave a legacy with my Square Wheels^® images and approach to involvement and create a learning space for managers to become more engaged in their own workplace improvement practices. The Manager IS the Motivator — who else can involve their people?

So we are trying to build a place where one can learn how to use simple tools to better involve and engage people in workplace improvement, a place that will help a supervisor build more effective communications and teamwork with their people. A place to learn, without the over-burden of Human Resources or Training Departments where one can get #morebetterfaster by simply spending 30 minutes in learning some new skills and supporting others,

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 quips and quotes on Poems on The Workplace is here.

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

Engagement and Involvement: What Would Santa Do? Engagimentation!

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On December 10, 2012

In Change Facilitation, collaboration, empowerment, Engagement, implementation, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator, Team work

I thought you might like this little story about Santa and the Elves and his reindeer and how he put together some teams to improve motivation and innovation.

This is a research report from an arms-length investigator and all facts and details can be confirmed by contacting Mrs. Santa Claus, Administrative Manager, Santa’s Workshop, North Pole. No email was made available to us at this time…

Santa wasn’t so jolly upon finding his Sleigh not ready for its Big Day!
“So,” he demanded from his Reindeer, “How’d you let it get this way?”

“We asked the Elves to help cause it’s too banged up to fly with ease
but they told US to fix it, they were busy, and then ignored our pleas!”

Santa went straight to the Elves and asked why they hadn’t heeded
his Reindeers’ concern about his Sleigh; the work it needed.
In reaction to this, the Elves yelled, “Because we’re overworked!”
And it was at that exact moment that Santa became mightily irked!

This lack of teamwork had Santa feeling stumped!
He needed a way to get them collaborating and pumped.
So, he used teambuilding he’d heard through the grapevine
called, “The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine.”

Reindeer and Elves were mixed together and put into teams
and played Dutchman with energy, competition and beams!
By game’s end, they realized that their tendency to compete,
gave them less ‘Gold’ than if collaborating had been their feat.

Invigorated with a solid commitment, as a team, they turned
to fixing Santa’s Sleigh as they talked about what they’d learned.
“Since now we know working together benefits all,” said a Reindeer,
“Let’s show Santa his sparkling sleigh to bring him Christmas Cheer!”

What Santa did and needs to continue to do is Engagimentation. This is the process of engaging people with their ideas for improvement and then working with them to implement those same ideas. An inexpensive Square WheelsToolkit is available.

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.

Check out The Square Wheels Project, our LMS for teaching Square Wheels facilitation skills to supervisors and managers.

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

Learn more about Scott at his LinkedIn site.

Square Wheels® is a registered trademark of Performance Management Co.
LEGO® is a trademark of The LEGO Group
Poem by Joan Simmerman and line art by R. Sabean

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

Tag: The Square Wheels Project

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A Round Wheel Happy New Year!

Santa’s Square Wheels Performance Improvement Poem

WHAM! The Square Wheels Guy sees a Round Wheel

Monday Morning Square Wheels and other thoughts

What is Negative Reinforcement, a Square Wheels Innovation Framework

It’s about Perspective Opportunity, People!

Choose Rolling over Rocking

Engagement. Motivation. Innovation. The Critical Importance of Supervisors

Square Wheels, Dr. Seuss and “suck” or “muck?”

Workplace FUN – ONE stupidly simple idea

Engagement and Involvement: What Would Santa Do? Engagimentation!