The Half-lemon Creative Metaphor Know your employees Ali Anani, PhD
Sep 13, 2014
The Half-lemon Creative MetaphorKnow your employees
Ali
An
an
i, P
hD
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