When my parents passed away, the family had to clear out their house to prepare it for sale. My brother and his wife came across a stack of report cards for my K-12 education. The stack included my kindergarten report card.
When I thought about the “Personal and Social Growth” items on my kindergarten report card, I recognized the kinds of behaviors that should be exhibited throughout our lives, not just in kindergarten.
Simply, a meeting is intended to bring the right people together to accomplish some important task at the right point in time. Many people find meetings to be distractions from getting work done. Perhaps some improvement might change that.
It’s been my experience that there are only a few reasons to have a meeting. There are many tools that can help in accomplishing the intended purpose:
“So what if his office is bigger.” “Our project must not be important since we can’t get a bigger work room.” “He must be important. He eats with the Vice Presidents.” “When you’re a VP, you park in front of the building.” All of these are examples of what symbols do to send messages.
My reference says that “symbols reinforce the values of the culture. . .reinforce what and who is important.” The Oxford English Dictionary says that a symbol is “a thing that represents or stands for something else, especially a material object representing something abstract.”
Businesses take in inputs from suppliers. Value is added to those inputs through an internal process which provides outputs to customers.
One has to consider all the “moving parts” of the organizational system.
| SUPPLIERS |
INPUTS |
VALUE ADDING PROCESS |
OUTPUTS |
CUSTOMERS |
|
Raw Materials Human Resources Financial Resources Information Equipment |
Transforming Inputs to Outputs Tools; Enabling Systems; Skills; Structure; Style; Symbols |
Goods / Services Employee Behavior Profits / Losses Waste / Pollution |
||
|
FEEDBACK |
||||
(McShane, 2005. p.22) Italicized words added by the author
Whether it’s investors, clients, or employees, we all need to motivate others.
Let’s go all old-school on the problem of motivating employees. How about we apply Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs? This table is oriented to employees but applies to a variety of people.
Macomb-OU Incubator 