Employee Productivity

Why did you miss seeing the 3 "Fs"? Say the word "OF" out loud-it sounds like "OV", doesn't it?
Your eyes see "OF", but your mind tells you it is "OV". Blind spots are interesting, aren't they?

Back to the other "blind spots exercise". The next time you have a managers' meeting, ask everyone to look for red cars on the way home that day. When you get together again,ask them for the results and then teach them about blind spots.

It will help your managers realize, among other facts, that they have blind spots about the potential of their own employees.

Maybe the most important thing about blind spots is knowing that we have them. Most people think they are seeing the truth-the truth is that they are only seeing part of the truth...and how much $$$$ is that fact costing your company, day after day?!

Employee Productivity

Most people only see 2 or 3 "Fs" in the sentence-they are actually 6 "Fs". A lot of folks miss the "F" in the word OF-there are 3 of them. This is called a "blind spot"-just like missing the red cars. A blind spot is something right in front of you that you don't see. So.....if you miss seeing unimportant things like the red cars and 3 of the "Fs", what important information are you and your managers missing that is staring you right in the face?! Information that could make your employees more productive and your company more $!

Employee Productivity

When I conduct seminars and use the "red cars exercise", I always get positive reactions from my students. One of my blog readers liked it enough to forward it to some of the employees at that reader's organization.

Time for one more exercise-read the following sentence QUICKLY, then pause-then read it one more time and QUICKLY count how many times you see the letter "F" in the sentence:

"FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF MANY YEARS."

How many letter "F"s did you see?

Employee Productivity

Are your managers being as productive as they could be? Probably not. That is the bad news-the good news is that you can easily teach them to be more productive, to use more of their potential. Here is a fun exercise for you to try on the way home from work tonight that will help you understand my point: as you drive home, count the number of red cars you see, then write that number down on a piece of paper. Now, if I had NOT told you to look for red cars on the way home, would you have seen them? The answer is-No. However, would the red cars have been there? Yes! You didn't see them because you had not set a goal to look for them-you were "blind" to the existence of the red cars. So..... if you did not see the red cars, what really important pieces of information are you not seeing? More next time...

Quotes

Continued from Monday's post:"Everybody thought anybody could do it, but nobody realized that everybody wouldn't do it. It ended up that everybody blamed somebody when nobody did what anybody could have done!"