When Diana Larsen and I teach a two-day Leading Agile Retrospectives workshop, the second day is stand up facilitation practice. We create the bare bones story of an iteration, then the class works together to design a retrospective. Each participant has a chance to...
In my previous post, I described a framework for offering feedback on work results and work relationships.Step 2 is Describe behavior or results. Use neutral language and examples. If the person doesn’t recognize himself in the description or agree with the...
Art Petty posted Why I Hate the Praise Sandwich.Praise sandwich, as you recall, involves buttering someone up with a compliment or praise, stating a criticism, and then fluffing them back up with another bit of praise.Sounds icky, too, doesn’t it?Art offers:5...
I just heard that a group of people is working on a CMMi-like framework for Agile Product Management. And of course there’s the Agile Maturity Model. And various surveys to assess Agility.”Maturity” and “agility” are the wrong things to...
Esther Schindler recently put forward a scenario about a struggling employee named Frank, and solicited advice from her network.Briefly, the scenario is this: Frank was a great maintenance programmer, but the company is retiring the system he worked on. Frank has...
Peer feedback is a core skill for collaboration. It’s impossible to work closely with out running into some bumps: differences, disappointments, and disagreements. Peer to peer feedback can help keep working relationships on track and improve results (and it...
Building trust may seem mysterious… something that just happens, or grows through some unknowable process. Like many things, there are concrete actions that tend to build trust (and concrete actions that are almost guaranteed to break trust down).First, a...
In these unsettled times, you can spend time worrying about things you can’t control, or you can take action on things that are within your control. Here are 10 things you can do as a developer to make yourself more visibly valuable, which may keep you off the...
Teams have gone in and out of fashion as a way to improve productivity for years. In my field, teams are essential. The work requires a broad mix of skills and collaboration. But, myths about how to establish and support productive teams abound. These three are...
I hear people talk about getting executive support for Agile adoptions (or other organizational changes). But I seldom hear people talk about what that support looks like. It’s more than money and speeches. Want to know how to really help your organization...
One of the big problems I see in organizations is that managers who want to improve productivity pull the wrong levers. For example, one company I know of decided to improve performance by ranking everyone in the company from 1…n, and firing the bottom 10%. Not...
Seth Godin blogs about Three Kinds of Meetings:There are only three kinds of classic meetings:Information. This is a meeting where attendees are informed about what is happening (with or without their blessing). While there may be a facade of conversation, it’s...
What problem are organizations trying to solve with incentive pay? Is an incentive plan the simplest, most effective way to address the problem? Most managers believe that incentive pay plans encourage the desired behavior, drive performance improvement, and reward...
From Bob Sutton’s Work Matters blog:15 THINGS I (Bob Sutton) BELIEVE1. Sometimes the best management is no management at all — first do no harm!2. Indifference is as important as passion.3. In organizational life, you can have influence over others or you...
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know how I feel about compensation systems that claim to motivate better performance with differential pay. For example, A Compensation Story in 2006, It’s What We Know That Ain’t So and Pay for...
Mike Cottmeyer writes about Feelings, Thoughts, and Actions. When people have a strong response, Mike describes thoughts as the point of leverage to change behavior. How we think can be influenced more directly… it is somehow less personal. We can learn about...
Johanna’s post, projects don’t need specialists (and the 19 the comments that went with it), got me thinking.People tend to coalesce around shared interests–both in terms of what they find interesting, and what concerns them. Take the category of...
Mark Levison has an interesting post in response to a Scrum Development discussion about “bad apples” on a team.Before applying the label, look for reasons the person might not be performing. There are lots of reasons for a temporary dip in performance....
From a CNN article:We’ve all heard the conventional wisdom about good work habits. Many of us have attended time management classes, participated in workshops and have been advised to “work smarter, not harder.”Work habits that might seem less...
George Dinwiddie is considering a discussion about velocity as a performance measure and how to tell whether people are working hard that started on the scrumdevelopment yahoo list.Here’s the original question, posted by Graeme Matthew. The unknown in all of...
