Tower Building Exercise in IM21 Section B by Dr. Mandi
Organizational behavior is all about understanding the employees in an organization.PUC-productivity , understanding and control of an employee is essentially what OB is all about.
In the tower building exercise we learnt two very important concepts of OB
- Effective organizational management is possible only when the doers and thinkers are separate entities.
- Closed eyed performance should be better than open eyed performance in an organization.
The basic organisational structure with a worker at the lower level of the pyramid , followed by a manager and in the end, the General Manager of the company , with the worker wearing a blind fold, which is very synonymous to the actual situation in an industry wherein a worker is just asked to follow instructions without questioning or suggesting ,and it is the manager who takes the decisions .
In this exercise the blindfolded guy represented a worker who was just following the instruction of his manager to place blocks one over the other.The blindfolded person could not "see"what he is doing which is the actual situation in an organization where a worker does not know why is he doing a job .He just does what he is told to do by the manager.In the end he managed to place 16 blocks together just by listening to his superior.
This exercise also put the communication skills of a manager to test.
Learnings:
The manager later on agreed that if he had communicated in a better way,more than 16 blocks was possible.
This should be the mentality of a manager who always believes that:
- "POSSIBILITY > REALITY"
The best is yet to come.
- Also, Where the gap exists or areas of improvement should be identified.
- Then Why the gap exists question should be answered.
- Lastly,What should be done to fill the gap between possibility and reality must be answered.
