I presented two glass bowls to the audience, and told them to think of a way to move the bowls two meters on the floor, but they are not allowed to move themselves.
One volunteer tried to slide the glass bowls on the floor to reach the desired distance, and succeeded. Another one tried to roll it, but found that the bowls, being only half a ball, rolled to the left and bumped the wall. Good thing it didn't break.
When the audience were out of ideas, then I proposed another way involving duct tape : I put the lids together to form a kind of glass ball - not a perfect ball, but at least it's close to a round tire - and bound it with the duct tape. Then, I rolled it on the floor, made it reach the two meters target, and roll beyond the line.
At work, people consist of two, completely different sides : Technical and tactical. People can be taught and trained about technical things, like - for example - good soldering methods, sewing techniques, SAP implementation, etc. People develop skills from years of experience doing his work, enabling him to do nice acrobatics through it, like, a mechanical engineer who can manipulate and modify the mechanisms of broken and malfunctioning machineries, or a machine operator who's able to make temporal adjustment to his workstation to keep it productive while waiting for the mechanics to come, etc. All that are the technical side of human being : There's no limit to what we can develop from people, thus we can keep filling the glass with knowledge forever.
The second part is the tactical part : Feelings, motives, courage, creativity, etc. People DO need to be encouraged. People DO need something to drive them to do their work.
But unfortunately, many organizations treat their people like robots, that is, only focus on the technical side. Companies arrange tight and intensive training program on how to operate the production machineries, upgrade their knowledge on new specifications and features of the company's products, or invite experienced and professional gurus to conduct a series of courses and training sessions, etc., while putting aside the fact that they also need to persuade and encourage the people to correctly and appropriately implement the knowledge in their daily activities. Not to mention to keep them loyal and implement their newly-acquired knowledge to the benefit of the company.
Treating people like robots is like sliding one bowl on the floor. While the bowl would eventually develop scratches, people will eventually develop stress and demotivation. Can people achieve when they are treated like robots? The answer is YES. Of course highly-trained people can achieve their goals. For example, a woman with countless hours of experience in sewing and spent many sessions on sewing methods training, will undoubtedly reach the pieces per day targets assigned to her. Or, a supervisor who just came back from his 3 months ISO training in the US would flawlessly know how to learn and implement the local company's standard operation procedures and management control systems. But it's people we are talking about, here. People may be able to keep their ideals high and do their work flawlessly after they walk out of the training room. But people will eventually face problems and obstacles in their everyday activities. Even an easily predictable problems can bring down people's courage.
And at time like this we need to help people back on their feet. Some problems are work-related, and some others are non-work-related. Even a brief argument with the spouse in the morning can cause a whole day of bad mood and unnecessary mistakes. Thus, it needs a good leader to come up with ways to tackle this kind of problems and bring him back to work.
So this is what duct-taping the bowls means : While we keep our employees technically updated, we also need to keep their spirit and morale up. Keep doing this, we will find ourselves see productivity improves with relatively smaller effort. We would start to see them exceed their targets because they want to give more. Remember the story about the two employees in the Toyota factory? Both guys have the same, simple job description : Pulling levers to mechanically and manually continue a small part of the assembly process. When asked about what they are doing in the booth, one guy said plainly, "I'm here only to pull these levers", while the other guy answers "I'm making Toyota!". I'm sure that the first guy never get encouragement and positive feedbacks from his supervisor, while the other guy keep getting positive inputs and encouragement from his superior.
So you see, it's all a matter of treating people as a complete human being. Hard? Yes. But it's learnable.
I don't want my people to do their best. I want my people to WANT to do their best.
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