leadership | Behavior Matters! - Part 4

Tag: leadership Page 4 of 6

Passion or Lunancy – You Decide?

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…

Mount Rushmore

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.

Read More

What Drives Meaning?

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!

Do you have wisdom you could share with small businesses? We need you!

As noted before – I am on the board of the non-profit Economic Growth Centers in Minneapolis (http://www.egcmn.org).  We are looking for experts and leaders who have some wisdom to share.

Economic Growth Centers (EGC) is focused on strengthening the economic vitality of Twin Cities communities and neighborhoods.  We do this through helping small businesses grow and prosper.

Small companies are the engines of economic growth for the USA – yet they do not have many of the human or economic resources that larger firms do.

Our goal is to create a library of on-line training presentations that can be accessed at any time for free by small business owners, managers, and employees.   By providing small business leaders and employees with the skills and information that they need to prosper, Economic Growth Centers is helping them grow revenue, increase buying, add employees, and build out infrastructure, thus increasing the economic vitality of the Twin Cities Metro area as well as other communities across the country.

We are looking for  experts in various fields to volunteer to host our training seminars. By volunteering your time and expertise you are helping these small businesses grow and prosper.   The library will be focused around key developmental areas that small businesses need to grow:

  • Marketing and Sales
  • Human Resources
  • Financial
  • Strategy
  • Legal / Regulatory

The success of this endeavor depends on ensuring that we have a robust offering of meaningful courses – I would encourage anyone who is interested in presenting to contact me at kurt@lanterngroup.com or at 612-396-6392 to get further information.

Please share this with people you know who you think might be a good fit.  Thank you!

Kurt

The Motivation of a child

Has something like this happened to you?

I was walking with my 4-year old child to the park. It’s just a few blocks away, an easy walk for him most days. But not today – he wants to be carried.

“I’m tired.” He says. Huh? He was just gung ho about going.

No matter how I try to get him to continue walking, he won’t. I try to use reason – “it’s just two blocks – you can do that.” I try to encourage – “you’re a big kid now who can do this easily.” I use incentives – “if you walk, we can stay an extra 15 minutes at the park”

It is all to no avail…

Ok. I pick him up and carry him on my shoulders. I carry him until the edge of the playground – and now…

Now he is full of energy. He wants down. He takes off. I can’t catch him. He runs, he slides, he swings and he plays….on and on and on.

So here is my question – do I have a lazy kid or did his motivation just kick in? Was it the proximity effect or was he rested because I carried him? Was I played? In the end it doesn’t matter: he enjoyed the park and I enjoyed watching him.

PS – I made him walk the whole way home.

Tell me your experience with motivating a child…

5 Lessons From the Maze

People going through the maze

The Maze

Over the past 18 years I have conducted a team building event called the Electronic Maze® with hundreds of companies and thousands of participants.  Sometimes called the “Magic Carpet” the Electronic Maze is extraordinary, not because it is magic, but because of the team behaviors and emotional responses it elicits.

Those behaviors and emotional responses are surprising similar across a wide variety of groups: senior managers, line workers, middle management, cohesive teams, strangers, international audiences, men, women, and every group that we’ve ever done this with.

Those behaviors are also very insightful as to how we perceive the world, work with each other, and get things done.

Read More

Economic Growth Centers – Small Business Learning Initiative

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!

Motivation Webinar Link

More on the Drive to Challenge & Comprehend

Why we do the things we do

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.

Read More

3 Tips to Increase the Drive to Challenge & Comprehend

Challenge 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.

So here are three tips to help increase the C drive:

Read More

How to start a movement – Dancing Man at Sasquatch

Derick Sivers (sivers.org) has some great insights on leadership – all garnered from watching a shirtless man dancing at a music festival.

We literally watch a movement start with one person out there baring his soul and his bad dancing with everyone to see.  But doing it with a passion and an abandon that is compelling.  This act of enthusiastic dancing draws another to emulate him.  Now it is more than just one crazy dancer, maybe there is something there.    Then the third person joins in, and now it is definitely something more.  People start looking at this as something different.  It is something that they could do to.  Something that looks, not so much like a crazy man dancing, but something that is fun and free.  In fact, as you watch what happens after that, you might just call it a movement.

And friends, as Arlo Guthrie states in Alice’s Restaurant:

“And the only reason I’m singing you this song now is cause you may know somebody in a similar situation, or you may be in a similar situation, and if your in a situation like that there’s only one thing you can do and that’s walk into the shrink wherever you are ,just walk in say “Shrink, You can get anything you want, at Alice’s restaurant.” And walk out.

You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he’s really sick and they won’t take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they’re both faggots and they won’t take either of them. And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singin a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out. They may think it’s an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day,I said fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out. And friends they may thinks it’s a movement.”

So lets go start a movement – will you be the first to dance or the first to follow?

The Story vs. The Analyst: How good communication gets ruined!

The largest part of our business is developing communications for sales incentive plans.  We create presentations, develop plan books, and design flash and other forms of communication. We got into this work by accident (one client many years ago asked us to create a “meeting in a box” for his IC plan – the rest, as they say, is history), but now we embrace it and have carved out a niche.  That niche is taking highly analytical and dry plan data and making it more interesting, more engaging, and more motivating for the sales representative.  Over the past 10 years we have done just this for thousands of plans and hundreds of thousands of participants.

We strive to tell a visual and emotive story with our work.  We work hard at capturing the vital information that is important to a sales person and making that information understandable and engaging.  I like to think we do a good job – when our clients allow us to.  You see, telling a story about incentive compensation and creating captivating visuals to convey that information isn’t easy.  It requires that we make choices about what information we share.  It means that we may have to simplify the message.  It may mean changing how we present and what types of communication that we use.  This, for some clients, is easier said than done.

Read More

Page 4 of 6

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén

Behavior Matters!