Award winning Chinese animation on 'Three monks'.

Background:

It is a Chinese animated short film produced by the Shanghai Animation Film Studio.  It is also known as The Three Buddhist Priests.  Dr Mandi told us to watch this movie and come prepared to the class with all the management fundas we learnt from it. The most important funda was “How Teamwork and Productivity go hand in hand”.

The Story:

There was a small temple on a mountain and a little monk in the temple. His daily routine was shouldering water, chanting sutras, knocking the wooden fish, adding water to the holy water bottle on the table honoring the Goddess of Mercy, and watching over the mice from stealing food at night. His life was smooth and comfortable.
Soon after, a tall monk came. He drank half of the jar’s water as soon as he arrived at the temple, so the little monk asked him to fetch water. The tall one thought it was unfair for him to fetch water alone, so he asked the young one to do it together. They could only carry one bucket a time, and they would only feel content when the bucket was placed in the middle of the shoulder pole. Anyway, they still had water to drink in this way. Then, a fat monk came. He wanted to drink, but there was no water in the jar. The short monk and the tall one asked him to fetch water by himself. He carried a bucket of water, and drank it up immediately. From then on, nobody would fetch water, so they had no water.
Everyone chanted his own sutras and knocked his own wooden fish. As nobody would add water to the holy water bottle, the plant in the bottle withered soon. At night, a mouse came out stealing, but everyone pretended not to see it. As a result, the mouse was so rampant that it knocked over the candleholder and caused a fire.
Only thus did the three monks make a concerted effort to put out the fire, and finally awaken. After that, they started hanging together and the temple never lacked water again.

Learnings:

The movie teaches us a lot of managerial lessons. I have listed down few of them:

1.Productivity - It is an economic term defined as output per unit of input. Workplace productivity is about how firms can utilize labour and skills, innovation, technology and organizational structure to improve the quantity and quality of their output. For e.g. in the above example, if two monks would have carried one bucket instead of single monk carrying two buckets, would have increased the productivity.

2. Team work - The work which could have been done very easily had they worked as team took a toll on them. As we have seen in case of emergency (monastery catching fire), they worked as a team and got the desired results very easily. The manager has to ensure that the employees are working in a team, individuality hinders the progress of a firm.

3. Job distribution - The situation can be compared to an organisation which has all the resources in the world but is not able to utilise them properly. In the movie even with three monks (resources), water (end result)  was scarce in the monastery. It is responsibility of the manager to utilise the resources provided to him optimally. As we can see in the end the monks divides the job and get the desired result very effectively and easily. 

4. Crisis management - In the movie when the temple catches fire all the three monks work together as a team and gets out of the crisis situation. There are times when people lose their cool during emergencies. A manager must always keep a clam composure no matter what the situation is. In case of emergency, the manager should adopt a rationale thinking in getting the team out of the emergency situation. He should be in a position to assign different employees in different roles so as to better the situation.

   

How to set your goals properly and the 'Pygmalion Effect'.

 GOAL SETTING:

  

Goal Setting Parameters

Humans are curious and restless creatures. They are always found incubating some desire, running towards some destination or chasing a dream. That desire, destination or dream is their 'goal'.

Importance of Goal Setting Parameters

Goal setting parameters involve establishing specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time bound (SMART) goals.

On a personal level, setting goals helps people work towards their own objectives - most commonly with financial or career-based goals.

Setting goals affects outcomes in four ways:

1.                  Choice: Goals narrow attention and direct efforts to goal-relevant activities, and away from perceived undesirable and goal-irrelevant actions.

2.                  Effort: Goals can lead to more effort; for example, if one typically produces 4 widgets an hour, and has the goal of producing 6, one may work more intensely towards the goal than one would otherwise.

3.                  Persistence: Someone becomes more prone to work through setbacks if pursuing a goal.

4.                  Cognition: Goals can lead individuals to develop and change their behavior.

Tower Building Exercise

We assembled in our classes one day to attend the usual POM lecture by Dr. Mandi and we were soon told that we would be doing a ‘tower building exercise’. The goal of the exercise was to build a tower of 50 cubes with eyes blindfolded. Histoirical achievement was given as 27 cubes.

Step 1: The height of tower was arrived at after deliberations and agreement by the whole class.

Step 2: The goal was evaluated to determine its SMART characteristics and the following observations were made: 

Specific: A tower of cubes was to be built with eyes blindfolded. 
Measurable: Height of tower could be measured in terms of number of cubes.
Achievable: A similar tower of 27 cubes was built earlier.
Realistic: The blindfolded person would be verbally instructed by another person during the course of whole exercise.
Time bound: The tower was to be built by during the class itself.

Step 3: Tthree volunteers from the class was invited to perform the task and each team member assumed a different role, namely:

The Worker: One who would be blindfolded and would undertake the task of placing cubes one upon the other. He would simply be a follower with no authority of decision making.
The Supervisor: He would give verbal instructions to the worker and would be responsible for each right and wrong move the worker makes.

The Manager: He would plan, organize, lead and control the whole exercise. He would have the final authority in decision making

Step 4: Although the team tried its level best, but they were not able to build a tower with 50 cubes although they still managed 28 and beat the historical record. The task was however, properly managed with the supervisor running the whole show and direting his team members to keep patience even though things were not going their way.

My Learnings
Through tower building exercise, we saw that how a seemingly difficult task was undertaken in a managed and structured manner and the . The goal setting parameters help us in accessing the nature of goal and the course of action to be taken.
We also learnt about how to establish a relationship between Goal set, Potential, Goal achieved and Goal (History). i.e. Goal set > Potential > Goal achieved > Goal History.


PYGMALION EFFECT:

The Pygmalion effect was described by J. Sterling Livingston in the September/October, 1988 ‘Harvard Business Review’. "The way managers treat their subordinates is subtly influenced by what they expect of them," Livingston said in his article,’Pygmalion in Management’.

The Pygmalion effect enables staff to excel in response to the manager’s message that they are capable of success and expected to succeed. The Pygmalion effect can also undermine staff performance when the subtle communication from the manager tells them the opposite. These cues are often subtle. As an example, the supervisor fails to praise a staff person's performance as frequently as he praises others. The supervisor talks less to a particular employee.

Livingston went on to say about the supervisor, "If he is unskilled, he leaves scars on the careers of the young men (and women), cuts deeply into their self-esteem and distorts their image of themselves as human beings. But if he is skillful and has high expectations of his subordinates, their self-confidence will grow, their capabilities will develop and their productivity will be high. More often than he realizes, the manager is Pygmalion."

Can you imagine how performance will improve if your supervisors communicate positive thoughts about people to people? If the supervisor actually believes that every employee has the ability to make a positive contribution at work, the telegraphing of that message, either consciously or unconsciously, will positively affect employee performance.

And, the effect of the supervisor gets even better than this. When the supervisor holds positive expectations about people, she helps individuals improve their self-concept and thus, self-esteem. People believe they can succeed and contribute and their performance rises to the level of their own expectations.