The half lemon creative metaphor

The Half-lemon Creative MetaphorKnow your employees

Ali

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I dedicate this presentation to Luc Stenger

I made a comment on using the ½ lemon metaphor on LinkedIn Social Capital Group and Luc Stenger responded by saying “Luc STENGER consultant “situation analyst” - free lance@ Ali : People need pressure to squeeze their juice as I said before: • please define "pressure": * freely accepted or self inflicted (motivation in this case) ?

* accepted by necessity?

* forced upon?

• every lemon kind is best for somethingdifferent (salad, cake, drink, ...) • some lemon kind are corresponding to expectations and others can be surprising • asymmetric thinking can bring a very good lemon for something to be far better for something totally unexpected

Employees are like lemon trees

A lemon tree needs good soil, environment and fertilizers to grow healthily

These factors determine what type of lemon the tree yields. Sour lemon, sweet

lemon, rough skinned lemon and soft-skinned lemon are examples.

Now, you want to get the juice out of the lemon or use its skin… how to do that?

Akin is :How to get the juice out of your employees?

How to increase the juicy outputof your employees?

or, what a lemon may teach us?

You don’t get the juice out of a whole lemon

You need to cut it into two halves

If you squeeze a cold lemon you getmuch less juice

So, are cold workers who have nowarmth for what they do

It is not only cold bodies;it is more cold feelings

Apply some pressure on the lemon toget the juice out

Sweet pressure is required to get the juice out of your employees

Heat and pressure help in weakening the membranes that trap the juice inside the

lemon’s flesh

Get the trapped juice of your employees the same way

Keep the hearts warmHeating lemon in a microwave for a short time may increase the juice output by 40%

A great incentive is warming up the hearts of your employees to lessen their resistance

to flow

The reverse thinkingKeep the lemon in salted ice--- this freezes

the water in the lemon.

Ice has bigger volume than water and so the membrane loosens and the juice flows

out after warming

Similarly, if your employees go through a “cold phase”, make them freeze more and

then warm them up.Great improvements may result

A Butterfly Effect

Cut the lemon lengthwise insteadof crosswise

You shall be surprised to get threetimes more juice.

So, change the direction of your employees occasionally. Move them from engineering

to management or from sales to marketing. Their juicy output may increase drastically

A Butterfly Effect

How then to make employees produce much more using very simple and

creative ideas?

A challenge for leaders and managers

You may use a fork to get the juice out of lemon by rotating and squeezing it

You may use a fork to get the juice out of employees by rotating and squeezing

them.

Rotate them so as not to get them bored and to keep their productivity high

Some lemons are self-seeding

Look for employees who are self-motivated to grow or grow others voluntarily

Some varieties of lemon trees have branches have large thorns; yet their juice

is of very high quality

Even some workers may seem thorny; yet their juicy output is of very high quality

Get the juice out instead of the employees out. Sometimes, thorny employees are

great performers.

The peels of lemon have many uses.

Look for quality employees who are multi-tasked.

Because lemon trees in containers are sometimes used as indoor plants, they do not have the benefit of bees or wind to pollinate the flowers. Without pollination,

you will not get a fruit crop

So are employees who are kept indoors and restricted from interacting with other

departments.

Encourage employee pollination

If a lemon tree is slightly stressed for water bud induction, it will produce more flowers

Time the sweet stress of your employees and their output shall increase

I end the presentation hopefully with little sweet stress on the reader