In this morning’s email was a note from Allan Mees along with a picture. His thought was that the picture he saw (apparently from Silverstone Fleet Management) reminded him of my cartoons:
Yeah, I think we have all felt like this every once in a while. Pretty unmotivated… All those ideas we cannot implement, all those people that we cannot engage, and all those issues and opportunities. All those possibilities that remain unrealized.
For those of you readers not familiar with my work, this illustration below is called Square Wheels One and it anchors my basic thinking about possibilities and motivation and leadership:
It is about resources and about implementation, among other themes. It is about possibilities for improvement, and it relates directly to engagement and motivation for performance improvement.
Maybe, just maybe, Allan’s pickup truck would have been better off if it was rolling around on Square Wheels, since a board and a hammer and a couple of nails might have gotten the guy back on the road. Ya think? But then again, one wonders how the poor guy would feel thumping and bumping along on those wheels hour after hour, day after day…
I put the driver in the position of the caterpillars below, who feel all those thumps and all he needs is the perspective of the butterfly, ya think? That and a little help from his friends.
And I am reminded again of how a lot of people simply view work and working in the world of today:
Isn’t there something — or maybe even many things — that we could do differently that would have positive impacts on our people?
Aren’t there a variety of different approaches to involving and engaging people in the workplace and generating more intrinsic motivation to get more things accomplished? It seems like we waste a lot of time in spinning our wheels and not motivating the people in effective ways and generating better organizational performance results.
Yeah, I also understand that I take a pretty simple view,
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
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Scott’s blog on Poems and Quips on Workplace Improvement is here.
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