Posts Tagged ‘lack of collaboration’

01
Apr
2018

collaboration creates mediocrity

categories: announcement

‘Collaboration’ Creates Mediocrity, Not Excellence, According to Science

Far from being a productivity panacea, a collaborative culture will drive your top performers away.

A recent study published in Applied Psychology has now confirmed that a collaborative work environment can make top performers–the innovators and hard-workers–feel miserable and socially isolated.

The problem is that rather than seeing a top performer as a role models, mediocre employees tend to see them as threats, either to their own position in the company or to their own feelings of self-worth.

Rather than improving their own performance, mediocre employees socially isolate top performers, spread nasty rumors about them, and either sabotage, or attempt to steal credit for, the top performers’ work. As the study put it: “Cooperative contexts proved socially disadvantageous for high performers.”

open-plan offices, with all their interruptions, distractions, and noise pollution, are productivity sinkholes. My note: and if these sinkholes are avoided, the PSEUDO-democracy of faculty meetings can assure the ostracizing of those who think differently and assert the rule of meritocracy in a “democratic” way.

This is not to say that teamwork is a bad thing, per se. Indeed, most complex projects require a team to successfully complete. For teams to be effective, though, they need leaders who can swiftly squelch any attempt to isolate or denigrate a top performer.

22
Jul
2015

consensus of mediocrity versus disruptive innovation

categories: collaboration and creativity

Attached below is the entire correspondence:

  1. a committee is formed.
  2. the committee decides “democratically” what needs to be done.
  3. the emphasis, as per administration is on “consensus” not on expertise and per LRS staff on “democratic” (meaning who has more votes), not on expertise.

Who is John Galt?

From:
Sent: Wednesday, July 22, 2015 9:19 AM
To: Miltenoff, Plamen <pmiltenoff@stcloudstate.edu>
Subject: FW: Green Screen for Library Lawn Party?

Hi Plamen.  Honestly and respectfully, the idea didn’t move forward because the planning group wasn’t excited about it and the scavenger hunt group had other ideas for ways they wanted to administer the scavenger hunt.

I apologize for not reaching out proactively to tell you that.

From: Miltenoff, Plamen
Sent: Tuesday, July 21, 2015 5:00 PM
To:
Cc:
Subject: RE: Green Screen for Library Lawn Party?

I am mighty curious why ideas, which had been repeatedly offered by IMS faculty to the lawn party committee were not considered and responded to, but ideas, which the lawn party committee thinks that fit the ideas of the IMS faculty are proposed.

Just curious. Don’t expecting answers. Not that they are coming anyhow…

—————-

Plamen Miltenoff, Ph.D., MLIS

Professor

320-308-3072

pmiltenoff@stcloudstate.edu

http://web.stcloudstate.edu/pmiltenoff/faculty/

worse then no hope is false hope: based on my experience working with administration

 

From:
Sent: Tuesday, July 21, 2015 3:47 PM
To:
Cc:
Subject: Re: Green Screen for Library Lawn Party?

Our green screen has never been set up for these types of activities. It would be really complex to set it up. I’m quite leery of promoting something with no support and no prospect of support. There are no funds for student help and no one available to manage it. Before our days were cut, I offered to continue with some management, using my normal set of extra duty days. Now there are really no resources to operate the studio.

I think this would be logistically difficult to do and not useful for campus communication.

From:
Date: Monday, July 20, 2015 at 12:42 PM
To:
Subject: Green Screen for Library Lawn Party?

Hi    .  We continue to brainstorm ideas for promotion of library services for the Library Lawn Party.  Wanting to learn a little more about the green screen…thinking it would be a nice promotion for the studio.  Would you have ideas for how we could incorporate the green screen into the event?  We could get students down to the studio and in front of the screen.

Perhaps we could have them read something on cue cards and then edit it together…you’ve probably seen things like that…where each word in a string is spoken by a different person.

Or could we somehow put students in front of it and put something crazy in the background and have the image stream to a monitor somewhere?

Would either of these ideas be feasible?  Would it be difficult??