How to Coach Yourself and Others Better Coaching Through Visualisation | Page 256

Imagination in Handling Employees
In commercial affairs men are the great means to money-making,
and efficient personal service the great key to prosperity. In your
dealings with employees do not be guided by the necessities of the
moment. Expediency is the poorest of all excuses for action. Have
regard not only for your own immediate needs, but also for the
welfare and future conduct of your employees. It is part of the
burden of the executive head that he must do the fore thinking not
only for himself but for those under him.
Perhaps the man you have under observation for advancement to
some executive position has all the basic qualifications of judicial
sense, discrimination and attentiveness to details, but you are
uncertain whether he has enough imagination to devise new ways
and means of doing things and developing business in new fields. If
you wish to try a simple but very effective test along this line, you
can adopt the following standard psychological experiment, which
has been used at Harvard, Cornell and many other colleges and
schools.
How to Test an Employee’s Imagination
Let fall a drop of ink on each of several pieces of white paper,
letterhead size. This will make irregular blotches of varying forms.
Let the subject be seated at a desk and ask him to write briefly about
what he sees in each blotched sheet, whether it be an animal form
suggested by the outline of the blot, or anything else that comes into
his mind while looking at the black spot. The principle involved here
is the same as that involved in seeing pictures in a flickering log fire
or having a vision of past or future events by gazing into a crystal. In
any of these cases, it is not the blot, the fire or the crystal that
produces the vision, but the creative imagination that recombines old
elements into new forms. The number of images suggested to one by
certain standard forms of ink-blot when compared with established
results is a measure of his imaginative ability.
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