I've been following the Maslow and Punished dialogs with great interest.
It is most interesting to see some of the old paradigms challenged
defended, rethought and rekindled.
In replying to Bill Hendry's comments about his agreement with Graham's
posting, LO14288, we again get back to the old carrot / stick motivational
approach and its implications:
>If the only rewards you have are money (a carrot) you will find that you
>will never have enough carrots, some people don't like the kind of carrots
>you have, they have to wait too long for your carrots (the length of the
>stick you dangle them from), they want more or better carrots every year,
>or some people just get tired of carrots.
Fully agree. And encores become increasingly difficult.
The approach I've been taking the past few years is to be engaging and
model participation in the sessions. This engages participants. Then, we
generate some objectivity and distance from this motivating event and ask
the participants to define some of the things that were operating in that
environment that were "engaging and motivating."
What we get are the themes of:
clear vision
challenge
shared risk
group involvement
creative situation
ownership of ideas for change or implementation
peer support
sufficient resources
and a host of items like this -- probably a list of 30 or 40 if I were to
ever take the time to accumulate them. This should NOT be a surprise.
What may often surprise the participants, though, is my approach of
talking about these dynamics but them simplifying the situation for them
by not talking about what they needed to add to the situation but a focus
on what they might REMOVE that currently serves to demotivate people.
THIS is generally a no-brainer. It is quite easy for them to come up with
ideas about what could be eliminated or reduced.
It's the same theme as my avoidance of "Empowerment" and my focus on how
we can "Dis-Un-Empower" the participants to improve service quality.
Generally, it is really easy to remove something that is a dissatisfier.
And the organizational wagons are loaded with those babies...
-- For the FUN of It!Scott Simmerman Performance Management Company 3 Old Oak Drive, Taylors, SC 29687 (USA) 864-292-8700 fax 292-6222 SquareWheels@compuserve.com
visit The Lost Dutchman at http://www.clicknow.com/stagedright/dutchman/
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>