I’m linking to this blog as it has a great post that highlights some of the “old school” thinking that is still out there. It amazes me that in this day and age there are still managers that believe that showing appreciation is a bad thing….
Let me know what you think…
You might motivate like Spock if you focus on…
Other ideas on this? Add a comment and let us know…
First, if you have not watched Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog starring Neil Patrick Harris, Felicia Day, and Nathan Fillion – please, please do. It is funny….ha, ha, ha, he, he, ha…. (ok, I need to work on my laugh – you’ll see the connection after watching).
Joss Whedan on why he developed Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog:
I read “Sales Comp Demands a Deep Sales Dive, Not a Best Practices Quest” by Ann Bares on Compensation Force yesterday – the article really resonated with me. The basic premise of the article is that companies should focus on understanding their sales force and not depend on best practices. Ann states it best when she says, “the problem with the notion of best practices in HR is that it too often leads to a blind search-copy-cut-paste effort whereby we simply lift popular program elements (out of professional journals, books, studies, etc.) and implement them, without sufficient thought as to their fit and strategic applicability.”
It resonated because it is right-on but also because I just completed an assignment for a company where they were looking for “best practices.”
I didn’t give them any (we’ll not really – more on that later…).
I was in South Dakota last week on a family vacation. First off, I forget how beautiful South Dakota is and all that it has to offer. Secondly, there are some really, really humongous carvings there…
The original idea for Mount Rushmore is credited to South Dakota historian Doane Robinson who thought that it would increase tourism (he was a pretty insightful man). His idea was to carve local famous people into some of the granite mountains of the Black Hills. In 1924, after working on Stone Mountain, GA, sculptor Gutzon Borglum was brought in to carve the mountain.
Mt. Rushmore
Borglum expanded on the original idea and wanted it to be a National monument that focused on our presidents. He insisted that his life’s work would not be spent immortalizing regional heroes but insisted that the work demanded a subject national in nature and timeless in its relevance to history.
Borglum started work on Mt. Rushmore in 1927 at the age of 60. He worked the rest of his life on the mountain.
What is it that drives meaning in work? True, real meaning that goes beyond the obvious “completed this project” or “achieved that goal”? I have some ideas, but would love to hear what other people have to say first. I’ll keep a track of the responses we get and put up another post on this with some ideas at a later time.
So please, leave a thought in the comment section!
Riding a bike My 4-year old son just got his bike a few weeks ago. He is in heaven. Ask him what his favorite thing in the world to do is, and he will tell you, “Ride my bike!” He wants to ride it everywhere…which is fantastic. He is definitely motivated!
I have one problem…he won’t ride it without training wheels.
We tried. The first four days I was out with him every day, running up and down the sidewalk, holding on to the bike as he peddled. But he was too scared. He would stop peddling anytime the bike tilted. He would always look back to make sure I was there (which caused him to turn the wheel and tilt the bike to one side and then stop peddling). He would stop and say he wanted to go slower.
And the problem was he was actually doing a good job riding on his own. He was able to go a fair way with me just running beside him and not supporting the bike. I would let go and he would be riding just fine.
Here is the link to the webinar I did with Economic Growth Centers (ECG), a 501C non-profit that I’m on the board of. ECG’s mission is to strengthen the economic vitality of the Twin Cities Metro area.
One program that we are working on is to create an electronic small business education curriculum that can be freely accessed from our website by small business owners, managers and employees. Our goal is to have an entire curriculum of educational webinars available free of charge, hosted by various experts in their fields. This type of training or consulting would be cost prohibitive for many of the small businesses we aim to help.
If you would like to donate your time or expertise – please let me know kurt@lanterngroup.com or leave a comment. We are looking for people to work with to create a one hour webinar that would teach small business leaders and employees a key business skill. If you are interested, let us know -we would love to hear from you!
I was reading an the transcribed copy from a conversation between Ira Flatow and Dr. Paul Bloom on the NPR show Science Friday. This show was titled, “Why we like the things we like” and I think it highlights some very interesting insights that we could all learn from.
The following excerpt is a great example of the Drive to Challenge and Comprehend.
FLATOW: Well, you led into a topic I wanted to ask you about, and that is the pleasure of just learning about things. It’s – you know, just knowing more. I mean, I find that extremely pleasurable, and I’m sure a lot of our listeners do, or else they wouldn’t be tuned to this program.
The 4-Drive Model of Employee Motivation’s 3rd drive is the Drive to Challenge and Comprehend. The drive focuses on our innate desire to learn more about the world around us and to not be bored.
I like to call this the “4-year old drive.”
If you’ve ever tried to get a 4-year old dressed quickly, you know what I mean – they want to do it themselves. It is the challenge of being able to button their shirt or put on their own shoes that they are striving for. Or think about a 4-year old sitting at dinner with a group of adults who are talking (i.e., boring) and think of the trouble that they get themselves into trying to add some excitement (or learn something new). For instance, my 4-year old was bored and decided to see what meatballs in a glass of milk would taste like…you see what I mean.
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