Nobody Ever Washes a Rental Car – Ownership and Involvement

I got to looking at some stuff on “empowerment” within the past hour. One was about an “empower camp” where they claim that by attending the camp, kids will leave with, well, empowerment for their lives. Okay, I guess…

And I then looked at a program designed to improve engagement by empowering people, basically claiming that by sharing goals, one can generate alignment and thus make improvements and impacts on engagement levels. Okay, I guess.

But it is certainly my simple perspective that by attending a camp with others or by telling people to share a goal, you may get some improvement. I also think that both seem to miss a really key ingredient in the general framework of successfully implementing anything successfully with anyone, something I reduce to my simple view of using a cartoon. The cartoon is simply called Pride. And Pride is good. But it, like empowerment, is NOT the simple answer:

Yeah, my real thinking is that ownership involvement and real engagement around the issue and the opportunity are the keys to helping people change their behavior.

Instead of standing there and telling people what their goals should be and why their organization and their leadership is focused on such things, they need to more actively involve and engage the people — yes, DO call them PARTICIPANTS — in the act of identifying issues and opportunities. I posted this one up the other day:

Hope you like these cartoons and quips and I also hope that you truly understand what it takes to actively involve and engage people in the journey forward. After all, the view from the front IS different than the view at the back,

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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