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Motivating Employees and Strategies of Influence

November 29, 2015 By Andrew Ludwar Leave a Comment

I know, I know. Another management topic. Haven’t we heard enough leadership buzzwords? Seen enough trendy motivational topics? Like probably most of you, I dread the elevator pitch of anyone about to give me a spiel on the latest and greatest industry buzzword topic. Especially if all they did was read an article on LinkedIn. And especially if it’s about DevOps. But! Hear me out. This one resonated deeply for me, so I think (and hope!) you’ll relate to this one. This information is taken from a book on the subject, “Developing Management Skills”, by David A. Whetten, and Kim S. Cameron.

In a project management class I’m taking, the professor refers to Principles of Influence and describes them as the guiding fundamentals in which people consider when deciding whether or not to be influenced by another person. Further to that are the Strategies of Influence, based on these principles, that one can take when looking to influence others around them. For most of us, this occurs in our working lives. Let me list them here, I think they’ll make more sense once you read them. The Strategies of Influence are:

  • Retribution (based on fear or threats of what the influencer can withhold from you or punish you with. Intimidation, coercion, etc.)
  • Rationality (based on persuasion and logical thought formed from facts or appeals to personal values)
  • Reciprocity (based on mutual exchange or offerings between you and the influencer)

Where do these apply? Well, when one enters a situation where they need to influence somebody to act, one must decide which of the three influence strategies they will use. Now, why should you care? You should care because these strategies are being used in your business today, and there are situations where each of them are most effective, and also exceptionally ineffective. Depending on your business environment and your task at hand, one strategy may offer far more than the other two. As employees and managers who are constantly pressured to do more with less, I believe it is our duty to understand the strategies in order to identify which one is most appropriate for the situation at hand or possibly for the particular business environment that you’re in. Taken from a PDF of the book, these tables provide examples and summarize the pros and cons to each strategy:

Example strategies:

"Developing Management Strategies", David A. Whetten, and Kim S. Cameron. pg 325
“Developing Management Strategies”, David A. Whetten, and Kim S. Cameron. pg 325

Pros/Cons:

"Developing Management Strategies", David A. Whetten, and Kim S. Cameron. pg 323
“Developing Management Strategies”, David A. Whetten, and Kim S. Cameron. pg 323

These influence strategies manifest from managerial preferences, and are shaped and influenced by corporate culture.  Personally, I do my best work and am most effective when the rationality strategy is used. Occasionally, reciprocity and retribution are effective, but aren’t sustainable long-term due to the need to maintain respectful relationships with colleagues and co-workers. If I were to quantify the most effective balance of the strategies for my business environment, I’d say it would be 80% rationality, 5% retribution, and 15% reciprocity.

The reason I think this is so interesting is that the rationality strategy is relied upon heavily in open source, and is fundamental to effective mass collaboration. Decision making may take a little longer, however the quality of decisions are often much higher compared to the other strategies. That being said, the retribution strategy is relied upon heavily in the military, and is very effective in that quick, direct action environment. Additionally, reciprocity is vital in a political environment where parties are heavily mutually dependent and compromises need to be made.

Consider the situation or environment you are in today:

  • Are any of these strategies present in your organization or reporting structure?
  • Can you think of examples where they have been effective or ineffective?
  • Which one inspires you to do your best work?

Filed Under: enterprise, open source Tagged With: social motivation, workplace culture

Theft/Intruder detection on Android w/ Tasker

September 27, 2015 By Andrew Ludwar 1 Comment

If you have a smartphone, surely you covet it’s presence and usage. It probably doesn’t leave your sight very often, and losing it would be a huge inconvenience to you, perhaps almost disastrous. Thankfully, there’s a slew of services out there that help you locate your lost or stolen device, remote wipe it, etc. in case this happens. I’m going to highlight one more tool available to you in your smartphone arsenal that can help you keep tabs on your device. Also, this tool can be used for quite a bit more than security. Since this is a linux blog, of course I’m going to be talking about the android platform 🙂 .

Tasker is an automation application that’s available for Android. Think of it as an automation language for your smartphone. From settings to states and events, Tasker allows you to setup rules and logic to handle common tasks that you may want to automate, or integrate together. If you’re familiar with IFTTT think of it as IFTTT for your phone. One of the recipes I’ve been meaning to setup for a while (a recipe or profile is the term used to group rules and logic together) is to detect when someone enters my PIN or PATTERN code incorrectly, have a photo of them taken discreetly, and then email it to me with the phone’s GPS location. This gives me a picture of the potential thief, as well as the location of my phone should I ever lose it. This is something I could provide to authorities to help recover the device, or at least see which friend/child has “borrowed” my phone for mischief. 🙂

I have a Samsung Galaxy S4 running CyanogenMod11, which is Android KitKat v 4.4.4. You’ll need to install Tasker, add the Secure Settings plugin to Android, install SL4A (Scripting Layer for Android), install Python, and have this script in your /sdcard/sl4a/scripts/ directory. Tasker has a wiki and further details on how to do this if you have questions. I had some troubles locating these .apk files as the SL4A project has recently moved from Google Code. I’ve linked them here for your convenience, but you could download from a more *trusted* source if you’d rather 🙂 . Once those items are installed from Google Play, you’ll want to open Python and follow the prompts to complete installing the modules. You should end up being able to run SL4A and see a few scripts in it’s list, one of them being sendemailA.py:

SL4A and Python
SL4A and Python

From here, you’re ready to open Tasker, and create the profile. The Tasker wiki has pre-built profiles you can either use directly, or slightly modify for your own use. I used both of these profiles to create mine. The first, failed login photo, and the second, automatically take and email your photo. At this point, you’ll be creating your first Tasker profile, associating Actions with it, and creating/setting a few variables. Don’t worry, this is pretty easy to do, you don’t need any programming experience. Here is what my Tasker profile looks like. I’ve removed my personal values in the variables, these will be substituted for your own:

Tasker Profile
Tasker Profile

You can hit the play button at the bottom left to test your recipe. This is what my final product looks like… After 3 failed login attempts, I’m emailed a photo of the intruder (me in this case!), with a link to my phone’s GPS location transposed onto Google Maps:

Tasker Email
Tasker Email

Filed Under: open source Tagged With: Android, Security, Tasker

Motivation – Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose; & The Open Organization

August 9, 2015 By Andrew Ludwar 1 Comment

If you’ve been paying attention to the open source community lately, or are keen to keeping abreast of the latest trends in corporate leadership or management, you may have heard of Jim Whitehurst’s new book titled The Open Organization. The book compares and contrasts leadership styles and engagement strategies in the modern corporate world. It argues for distributed decision making, employee involvement, and a meritocracy over the traditional top-down, follow orders, military style of management. This book is a must-read for all management types, and employees. While your organization may not be as “open” as RedHat, there’s certainly insight (and employee engagement!) to be had by heeding some of the management tips from Jim.

This book reminds me of Dan Pink’s talk at the RSA about motivation. Once basic monetary needs are established, people are no longer motivated by compensation. Instead, people become motivated by autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Jim’s book (and subsequently RedHat’s corporate culture) further enforce that merit is becoming more of a factor in igniting passion and performance in your employees. If you have a few hours, have a read of Jim’s book. If you have only 10 minutes, watch Dan’s talk. Both will open your eyes and help you understand how to best manage engagement and performance in the 21st century organization.

Filed Under: open source Tagged With: social motivation

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