I noticed at the recent agile conference that there were lots of people who billed themselves as agile coaches, and several sessions on coaching. Seemed like more of both than in past years. I consider myself a coach, too, though not with a capital C. I usually coach managers or teams, and sometimes coaches. Mostly, [...]
Jurgen Appelo, the wildly popular Dutch blogger, makes lists, among other things. His latest is the Top 100 Agile Books. He’s worked out a formula that takes into account reviews, average ratings, and continued interest. Not perfect, but I’m not going to complain, because I made the list–twice! Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management [...]
I’m a big believer in 1:1 meetings on manager-led teams. It’s a way to connect with people, stay in touch with progress, learn about problems early, coach, work on career goals, offer feedback. But if you are the manager for a self-organizing team, you need to adjust the way you do 1:1 meetings. First, unless [...]
Samuel Culbert interviewed on NPR. Employee performance reviews should be eliminated, according to UCLA business professor Samuel Culbert. “First, they’re dishonest and fraudulent. And second, they’re just plain bad management,” There’s also an excerpt from Culbert’s book, Get Rid of the Performance Review! He doesn’t pull any punches. It’s time to finally put the performance review [...]
We’ve long lived with the assumption that the people at the top of the organizations are the ones who understand the business. They understand the market, the product, the customers. They hold the financial information about how the company makes money and the current financial status. Since they hold this info, they also know what [...]
Last summer I participated in a seminar. The format included group discussion, and discuss we did. But one member of the group, Bernard, didn’t discuss so much as pontificate…at length, and often on topics that were tenuously connected to the subject matter of the class. And, when Bernard got to a pithy phrase, he repeated [...]
This article first appeared on stickyminds.com. Not long ago, I received a call from someone who wanted to hold a retrospective. “Tell me about your goals for the retrospective,” I prompted. The requestor proceeded to describe what amounted to a mini-witch hunt. If you really want to wreak havoc with a team, try having a [...]
So, you’re on a cross-functional team. Great. You’ve got people will different skills and different points of view. That means conflict is not just likely, it’s inevitable. Conflict can lead to increased trust and creativity–if you know how to recognize the source, understand your default conflict mode and have strategies to handle the conflict without [...]
Too often, manager in organizations act as if changing behavior in an organization is a simple matter of “make it so.” Some changes are like that–but most significant changes are not. Systems drive behavior. Therefore, if you want to change behavior in an organization–increase accountability or teamwork for example– you need to understand the factors [...]
A while back, I sat in on a birds-of-a-feather session on organizational change. The main theme was bemoaning the difficulty changing even mid-sized organizations. When people talk about how hard it is to bring change there’s a tendency to blame: people who don’t turn on a dime are labeled resisters, NoNos, dinosaurs, laggards. There certainly [...]