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by Laurent Bossavit.
Original Post: Motivational disasters
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Feed Description: You're in a maze of twisty little decisions, all alike. You're in a maze of twisty little decisions, all different.
The workshop is organized, for good reasons, around a series of exercises that have their origins in the theatre; they are adaptation of a director's training material. When the rehearsal ended and we sat around discussing the experience, someone's chance remark about "motivation" triggered a memory long buried, and I told the following story.
Back in the heady dot-com days, I was employed by "the leading portal site in France". A couple months before the IPO, a rumor started circulating, soon followed by an official confirmation: all company personnel - around 80 at that time, if I remember correctly - would be invited to an off-site event, to last an entire day. No other substantial information was leaked. We knew that the offsite would take place close by, in Paris. In the corridors we passed the head of HR, grinning like a cat who has swallowed a small defenceless creature, but she wouldn't say anything more.
Some among us were grumbling that our workload left us little time to spend one whole day in some sort of corporate boondoggle, some (I was among them) were mildly interested and excited at the prospect; we were sure to enjoy at least a somewhat luxurious free lunch, and quite possibly some form of entertainment.
When the day came, we all dutifully showed up at an office building which looked a close cousin of our office building. Whatever the Big Surprise was, the setting wasn't it. In the lobby, we were told that we had been "assigned" to groups. I followed instructions to the room where "my group" was already mostly convened, about 8 in all. The assignments were obviously intended to associate people from different departments - there was one girl from HR (who seemed to have a slightly better idea what to expect), two guys in Sales, and so on.
I was greeted by a pair of people - one guy, one girl - who looked slightly out of place, and who introduced themselves as "HR consultants", and told us that they would lead us through various fun activities. We were made to stand up in front of the group, and recite answers to corny questions such as "What do you do", "what do you like", "what do you dislike". For the most part we played the thing straight, though I remember one guy's answer to that last was "What I dislike - um, the practice of sodomy". My own line was "I dislike having my arm twisted". (Looking back, perhaps we were both attempting to make veiled allusions to the proceedings. I certainly was, but I never found out what my colleague had meant.)
We may or may not have gone through other such "exercises" before lunch; my memory of the whole morning is fuzzy after the first twenty minutes or so.
In the afternoon, we were told that we would plan, script, rehearse and finally enact a "playlet" - a skit or short scene - we were to take turns at doing this with the audience being the rest of the company. We were allowed to choose from a short list of "interesting" topics, which were all in some way related to the firm's mission statement or IPO-related issues; I'm making these up (except the last one), but the following list probably gives a fair idea:
Leading the industry in Community building
The best and brightest Internet brand
Stock Options & easy money
...etc...
My group picked "easy money". We were heavily prompted by the "HR consultants"; upon questioning these had turned out to be theatre students recruited as "extras" by the actual HR consulting firm retained for the event (I never knew who they were, probably Andersen or someone like that). They told us stuff like "you should portray an emotion; how do you feel about making easy money from your stock options ?", and "what would be a good metaphor for the greed you are feeling ?" I'm hazy on the details, but I remember we did something involving farm animals. I was a pig, symbolizing Greed.
You're probably nauseated enough by now; I shan't go on. I know from ulterior conversations that a number of us "resigned" then and there; they may not have left the company immediately after, but their mind was made up that this was a ship bound to sink.
In terms of motivation, the whole thing was a disaster. Actually, we were never told that the point of the entire mess had been motivation; we could only guess. The purpose was never explained, before, during, or after. My best guess is that this was just something foisted off upon us by the "consultants" as a standard feature of the pre-IPO grooming of an IPO-worthy company, and never questioned by the powers that were.
The contrast with the aforementioned "theatrical" workshop (which I perhaps might not have attempted if I had explicitly recalled this episode) is striking. In the workshop rehearsal, we provided a context of safety; in the beginning, we made clear that no one was under any obligation to perform the exercises. We intend to do this in the actual workshop, and I do this in every single one of my training or consulting activities. Such a simple "ground rule" was never offered in the corporate event. In the workshop, we make our purpose clear, and we make clear what we expect to get from the event and what we hope the participants will get out of it.
Most importantly, we make no attempt whatsoever to "motivate" people. Motivation is something intrinsic: an activity, a project interests you, or it does not. I suspect that all attempts to inject motivation from the outside, as it were, are bound to fail; at any rate, attempts to instill motivation by a stock "activity" chosen from an HR consultancy's catalogue certainly are.
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