Psychological Strokes

For everything you wanted to know on building leadership and management, refer Shyam Bhatawdekar’s website: http://shyam.bhatawdekar.com/

(Refer our High Quality Management Encyclopedia “Management Universe” at: http://management-universe.blogspot.com/)
For you to come out as a brilliant faculty or workshop leader of this topic on “Psychological Strokes” using the management exercise given here, it will be advisable to get a good grasp on this subject before trying out this management exercise. You will get benefited by reading a comprehensive write-up on psychological strokes titled “Positive Strokes” on the website: (Positive Strokes) http://positive-strokes.blogspot.com/

While on this subject, you may also like to refresh your fundamentals on its other related topics on transaction analysis and life positions by referring articles on: (Transaction Analysis- TA) http://transaction-analysis.blogspot.com/ and (Life Positions and OKness) http://life-positions.blogspot.com/

OK, now coming back to this management exercise on psychological strokes; use this exercise to elaborate on the following various types of strokes and to disguising between them:

1. Positive conditional stroke.
2. Positive unconditional stroke.
3. Negative conditional stroke.
4. Negative unconditional stroke.
5. Neutral or indifferent stroke.

This management exercise is in the form of a role play and is capable of arousing a lot of interest and fun amongst your audience in your workshop or seminar on the topics like “Psychological Strokes”, “Positive Strokes”, “Transaction Analysis”, “Motivation”, “Leadership” etc. So, it may work as an energizer too.

You will need five volunteers from your participants’ batch. These five volunteers will act like five employees of a department of an organization. You will also need a sixth participant to enact as their boss or manager.

Ask the rest of the audience to observe the role play attentively and also ask them to take notes on the kind of exchange of communication that will take place between the boss and each of the subordinates one by one.

Each volunteer who is acting like an employee will go to the sixth volunteer who is acting like the boss, turn by turn to show the work that each one has accomplished. The boss will enact one of the five psychological strokes from the ones listed above, preferably in that serial order by speaking out certain dialogues using an appropriate tone befitting that particular stroke which will construe that particular stroke.

After the five enactments are over, ask the participants to identify the strokes that were meted out by the boss to each subordinate. Let them also evaluate the impact of each stroke on its receiver. Ask them to tell you which of the strokes they found to be more effective and why?

You may also initiate a discussion on how well or effectively the strokes were given by the boss?

Supplement the discussion by your own observations as the faculty of the program and provide some additional inputs on the subject to finally wrap up the session.

Get Hold of the Related Books

You can order the following books on "management games and icebreakers" as printed books and eBooks from Amazon online:

1. Classic Management Games, Exercises, Energizers and Icebreakers
2. Classic Management Games, Exercises, Energizers and Icebreakers (Volume 2)
3. Classic Team Building Games, Exercises, Energizers and Icebreakers
4. 101 Classic Management Games, Exercises, Energizers and Icebreakers

Related Reading: (Repository of a large number of articles in management and leadership): http://shyam.bhatawdekar.com and http://management-universe.blogspot.com

Clutter Clutter Everywhere

For everything you wanted to know on building leadership and management, refer Shyam Bhatawdekar’s website: http://shyam.bhatawdekar.com/

(Refer our High Quality Management Encyclopedia “Management Universe” at: http://management-universe.blogspot.com/)It is a very simple yet very effective exercise to show that bad housekeeping can literally make you illiterate, ineffective and inefficient. The clutter can simply overwhelm anyone to the extent that one can go wrong every time he wishes to work in that cluttered workplace to find a correct solution. It is difficult to find an optimal process in a cluttered environment that can give 100% correct results with 100% confidence of saying that what I did was correct.

This exercise is a fun exercise and will also work as an icebreaker and energizer.

Here is how you as a workshop or seminar leader should proceed towards designing and administering this exercise to your workshop participants.

Well before the conduct of the seminar or workshop, you will have to do some preparation. Take a blank A4 size paper and with a black ink pen, mark on it lots and lots of cross marks (X, X, X ………). Put them randomly and haphazardly on the paper. The whole page should like a messy clutter of X, X, X, X ………… (cross marks). You may like to put some 200 such cross marks on the paper. Now photocopy the paper with cross marks- make the number of copies that are required in your workshop such that you will be in a position to give one photocopied paper with cross marks to each of your participants.

On the workshop day, when you wish to administer this exercise to the participants, distribute one photocopied paper to each participant.

Now ask them to count the cross marks made on the paper. Also ask them to count the time taken by them to complete the counting. After everyone has completed counting the cross marks, ask them to shout out their count (numbers) of cross marks as well as the time taken by them.

Everyone will be surprised and also shocked to see that literally everyone has a different and definitely incorrect count of the cross marks as if each of them had turned into an illiterate and even forgot the rudimentary math of counting the numbers. Also the time taken by each person to count will be different and will have no correlation with the correctness or otherwise of the count. The fact is that they were not able to find out a correct process of counting (will its full process capability) in all that clutter.

Even if someone counted the cross marks correctly as 200, he will not be in a position to prove with full confidence that what he did was 100% correct since he will not know what process to follow to re-count and how (what process to use) to convince others that his process of counting was fully capable of counting the numbers correctly.

Because of the messy clutter (horrible housekeeping), there is loss of correct process having full process capability and so, it will not be possible for anyone to complete any task correctly with 100% confidence level in such a work environment. Discuss this aspect with your participants by asking them to share the experiences they had in carrying out this exercise.

Get Hold of the Related Books

You can order the following books on "management games and icebreakers" as printed books and eBooks from Amazon online:

1. Classic Management Games, Exercises, Energizers and Icebreakers
2. Classic Management Games, Exercises, Energizers and Icebreakers (Volume 2)
3. Classic Team Building Games, Exercises, Energizers and Icebreakers
4. 101 Classic Management Games, Exercises, Energizers and Icebreakers

Related Reading: (Repository of a large number of articles in management and leadership): http://shyam.bhatawdekar.com and http://management-universe.blogspot.com

Ego States in Action

For everything you wanted to know on building leadership and management, refer Shyam Bhatawdekar’s website: http://shyam.bhatawdekar.com/

(Refer our High Quality Management Encyclopedia “Management Universe” at: http://management-universe.blogspot.com/)

(It will be advisable to read some literature on “transaction analysis” and “ego states” in order to appreciate the management exercise given below. For this, you can refer our literature on the subjects published at: (Transaction Analysis- TA) http://transaction-analysis.blogspot.com/, (Life Positions and OKness) http://life-positions.blogspot.com/ and (Positive Strokes) http://positive-strokes.blogspot.com/)
If you are a trainer or a workshop coordinator of programs or seminars on “transaction analysis (TA)” and more specifically on “ego states”, this is the management exercise or role play you can use very effectively in your workshops or seminars. This management exercise also works as an icebreaker in many situations. This can invoke a tremendous participation from the audience if carried out effectively.

You should use this role play subsequent to giving the participants of your program some ideas about what the ego states are; the way they are defined under the discipline of transaction analysis- what kind of words, facial expressions, body postures, tones etc are used by the persons in various ego states.

Then select out some seven volunteers from your audience who feel confident to enact each ego state or at least wish to give it a try.

Give them one sample sentence. It could be any sentence. For example, the sentence could be, “You are good in your job and I appreciate you.” Or it could be any other sentence (you may as well like to involve the participants in the deciding the choice of a sentence). Instruct the volunteers that each of them will enact one ego state by speaking this particular sentence by using the tone and body language appropriate to that particular ego state, Tell them that they can add some additional words or phrases from their side to this sentence as prefix or suffix or in between the sentence to bring out the correct sense of the particular ego states they will be enacting.

Assign one volunteer to enact each of the following seven ego states:

• Critical parent ego state
• Nurturing parent ego state
• Adult ego state
• Free child ego state
• Adapted child ego state
• Rebellious child ego state
• Little professor ego state

Now each volunteer will start enacting the ego state assigned to him. After each act, let the rest of the participants comment on it. You can even ask the enthusiastic participant(s) to enact that ego state any other way or by using some other sentence in some other situation.

Repeat this after every enactment of every ego state by each volunteer. By now there is likely to be lots of involvement from the audience and an increased understanding of the ego states among them.
Wrap up the session by giving additional inputs on the topic you may have to share with the participants of the program.

Get Hold of the Related Books

You can order the following books on "management games and icebreakers" as printed books and eBooks from Amazon online:

1. Classic Management Games, Exercises, Energizers and Icebreakers
2. Classic Management Games, Exercises, Energizers and Icebreakers (Volume 2)
3. Classic Team Building Games, Exercises, Energizers and Icebreakers
4. 101 Classic Management Games, Exercises, Energizers and Icebreakers

Related Reading: (Repository of a large number of articles in management and leadership): http://shyam.bhatawdekar.com and http://management-universe.blogspot.com

How Well Do You Communicate?

For everything you wanted to know on building leadership and management, refer Shyam Bhatawdekar’s website: http://shyam.bhatawdekar.com/

(Refer our High Quality Management Encyclopedia “Management Universe” at: http://management-universe.blogspot.com/)This management exercise tests the communication abilities of the participants in the training programs on “communication”, “effective speaking”, “effective listening” and “team work”. The exercise tests the speaking, explaining, discussing, feedback and listening capabilities of the people. You are the workshop or seminar leader or coordinator and you will administer this exercise.

Divide the entire participants into pairs of two participants per pair. The two members of each such pair will be selected randomly. If there are 20 participants in the group, ask first 10 participants to count out their serial numbers from 1 to 10. Then ask the rest of the 10 participants of the group once again to count from 1 to 10. Then serial number 1 from the first half of the group will pair with serial number 1 of the second half of the group. Same way, serial number 2 of the first half of the group will make pair with serial number 2 of the second half of the group and so on. Thus, there will be total of 10 such pairs in a group size of 20 participants.

Now ask the members of each pair to sit back to back, meaning that the back of the first member of the pair will be towards the back of second member of the group. All the pairs will take such positions in the seminar hall.

Instruct the participants that the first member of each pair will communicate to the other member of the pair to duplicate the sketch and the labels on the sketch which he is drawing on his paper with his pen/pencil. He will describe the sketch and the labels step by step so that the second member will be able to duplicate it ditto on his own paper by his own pen/pencil. Both can discuss without looking at each other’s papers. At the end of 15 minutes, ask them to stop.

Now tell the first member of each pair to check the sketch and labels drawn by the second member of the pair and let him find by what percentage the second member could duplicate the instructions of the first member.

Now repeat the exercise by asking the second member of each pair to describe to the first member another sketch and labels which second member will draw and have his first member to duplicate it. At the end of 15 minutes let the second member check how well his first partner has duplicated his instructions. Let him work out the percentage.

Show all the percentages achieved by each person of the entire group for each pair. The percentages indicate the quality and level of communication in each pair.

Start up a sharing of experience session by allowing each pair to share its communication experiences with the rest of the pairs.

Fill them in with your observations and tips for better communication- speaking, explaining, discussions, feedback, listening and team work.

Get Hold of the Related Books

You can order the following books on "management games and icebreakers" as printed books and eBooks from Amazon online:

1. Classic Management Games, Exercises, Energizers and Icebreakers
2. Classic Management Games, Exercises, Energizers and Icebreakers (Volume 2)
3. Classic Team Building Games, Exercises, Energizers and Icebreakers
4. 101 Classic Management Games, Exercises, Energizers and Icebreakers

Related Reading: (Repository of a large number of articles in management and leadership): http://shyam.bhatawdekar.com and http://management-universe.blogspot.com