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It’s Easy: Just Put Up Posters
By Ron | August 12, 2008
I used to have this boss that traveled a lot. He would read those catalogs they have on the airplanes; you know, the ones that advertise the motivational posters. Upon his return from some business trip, he would darken my door and ask me why we don’t have these great pictures posted around the plant.
It was always hard trying to explain to him why I actually hated those things. “Motivation just is,” I would tell him, “You can’t get it by just hanging some dippy posters on the wall.”
It always seemed to me that the places which had these so-called inspirational pictures were the last companies to have teamwork, leadership, or motivation. I believe that these pictures accentuate the difference between the fantasy and reality and have an adverse impact on the employees.
Awhile back, I worked for such an organization and I always wanted to replace their posters with my own that showed what was really happening in the company, like…
LEADERSHIP (picture of the actual boss spying on his employees) Caption: “Leadership is knowing what motivates our employees.”
MOTIVATION (picture of a supervisor handing out a warning to an employee) Caption: “Motivation happens by instilling fear in the organization”
Obviously, I never put up my mythical posters. What reality posters would you create for your organization?
Topics: HR, Leadership, Management |
August 13th, 2008 at 4:49 am
Despair.com is the antidote to those inspirational posters (Demotivators), and nothing I could come up with could better reflect how I feel about the HR processes at a certain company than…
Tradition (photo of the Pamplona running of the bulls): Just because you’ve always done it that way doesn’t mean it’s not incredibly stupid.
August 13th, 2008 at 9:47 am
You hit it right on the head, Ron. Just for snicks, I read that Despair, Inc. site from time to time. Some of them really crack me up.
http://www.despair.com/