Performance Management Blog

Building Leadership Skills and Being Successful

As we build more tie-ins from our teambuilding games into the themes of Selfless Leadership (which I much prefer as a framework more than the more common Servant Leadership label), I have been reading and thinking a lot more about leadership skills and the notion of improving people and performance.

So many things lead to the same conclusion about personal effectiveness, that being better able to involve and engage people in their personal growth and to be able to align them with workplace goals and objectives improves impact. Those are the natural precursors to improving teamwork and impacting results.

One interesting article was Zdravko Cvijetic’s in Medium that discussed 25 essential leadership skills — it started with the metaphor of playing Super Mario and the key behavior of gathering “mushrooms” to help you grow and excel. While that mushroom metaphor reminds me of the old, “Keep them in the dark and throw a lot of “fertilizer” on them” framework of command and control, his thought about gathering more skills to improve impacts is certainly an effective anchor point.

I would encourage you to read his post and to select a few things to work on. As I did, it reinforced my notion that communications with others and the idea of framing better goals and expectations is a solid one for managers. It also reinforced my thoughts about generating better workplace collaboration and teamwork around those shared goals and expectations and the reality that changing the language of the workplace is a simple way to generate improvement.

At PMC, we play with LEGO and images and metaphors as simple tools to generate active involvement and engagement, to get people talking about issues and opportunities. This was one of my reactions to the Cvijetic article, that these tools and related language can become one of those tools for success. Asking people for their ideas is what generates perspective, innovation and active involvement.

Image on perspective and innovation

And being able to generate active personal involvement is a key to generating intrinsic motivation, because we all know that,

“Nobody ever washes a rental car.”

Ownership is a key feature of motivation and being better able to generate that active engagement is one of the key leadership skills for today’s workplace. Plus, the skill in gaining personal perspective and generate a team initiative to implement improvements is valuable.

Lost Dutchman Gold Mine teambuilding theme

•  You can purchase a simple Square Wheels toolkit that teaches engagement skills here, cheap! Click on the link.

•  Or, you can take our 30-minute online course in facilitation skills and also download the materials to lead conversations about improvements. Click on the link to see the course overview.

Regardless, the issue about replacing the Square Wheels® is a solid one. There are lots of them out there, working as they thump and bump along, that could and should be replaced.

The Square Wheels Project Round Wheels

For the FUN of It!

Dr. Scott SimmermanDr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization improvement tools focused on people and performance. Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is a globally experienced presenter and consultant.

You can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.comRead Scott’s blogging on people and performance improvement

Learn more about Scott at his LinkedIn site.

Square Wheels® is a registered trademark of Performance Management Company
LEGO® is a trademark of The LEGO® Group®

Dr. Scott Simmerman

Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of the amazing Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine team building game and the Square Wheels facilitation and engagement tools. Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced global presenter. -- You can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com and a detailed profile is here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottsimmerman/ -- Scott is the original designer of The Search for The Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine teambuilding game and the Square Wheels® images for organizational development.

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