I came across a spate of articles lately proposing different reasons why it’s rare to find a good manager. The reasons ranged from rising to their level of incompetence, becoming corrupted by power, promotion by favoritism, and not being a “born leader.” I suspect the...
Every so often, the Prime Directive comes up on one of the lists I follow. And inevitably someone says something like “I don’t believe everyone is doing the best s/he could. I know I don’t always do the best job I could.”There are a couple of...
People come up with all sorts of ideas and potential changes in retrospectives–usually more than the team can digest in one retrospective or, for changes, more than they can do in the next iteration. I often use dot voting to help the team prioritize and choose...
Earlier this week, I posted a bit about barriers to effective listening. Two days later (conincidentally) I received an email from my friend Janis Aaron Moore. Janis was a programmer for years, and has recently gone back to college, where she’s doing the college...
My teachers in school and at university spent lots of time and effort teaching me how to speak and write effectively. I didn’t get much instruction during my school years on how to listen effectively–mostly my teachers told me to “sit still and...
Ken Flowers suggests answering these three questions to clarifiy your leadership philosophy (which he came across on George Ambler’s blog):What you believe about people …What you believe about life …What you believe makes groups and organizations...
Bob Sutton points to more research about prima donnas, prima dons, and jerks-at-work:Boris [Groysberg ] wrote me a pair of detailed notes about a series of case studies that he has done that track Lehman Brothers’ research department over a 20 year period. Boris...
My new article on Incorporating Part-Time Team Members is on Stickyminds.com.In one of my workshops I run a simulation on distibuted and part-time teams. The dynamics for the part-timers are almost always the same. People who work part time may want to fit into the...
The other morning had an early flight from the west coast to Minneapolis. There wasn’t a line at the check in counter, so I walked right up to the self-checkin kiosk. As I approached, a woman wearing an airline uniform approached me. “Let me help...
Interesting post from Bob Sutton on the obsession with individual talent, and the evidence that people are more productive when they build relationships and work togeher over time.
Someone recently described this situation on the Scrum Development list: “…we’ve found some members of the Scrum team working extra intensely to cover for poor performing people. For example, if the strongest developer pairs frequently with the...
Someone recently asked, “How would you go about inculcating the results from retrospectives [sic] back into the culture for the benefit of future projects?”There are two different approaches depending on whether the team holds retrospectives as they go, at...
A friend and I were talking about getting fired the other day. In my experience, most people who are fired are not unskilled or incompetent. They may be in the wrong job, which means there’s a poor fit between the skills, domain knowledge, preferences, and...
I’ve pointed out in a few posts that the environment (system, processes, structures, culture) and management are a huge factor in performance in organizaitons. And they are. But sometimes, it is an individual problem.Like this woman who works in a health care...
Mike Kelly has a nice post on diluting the power of appreciation. My experience is that genuine appreciations can transform many situations. A couple of years ago I led a year-long project with a distributed team–no two members were in the same timezone....
Johanna has been blogging about finding candidates who have experience with agile methods. So I’ve been thinking about the “typical” resume sifting process and how that might work/not work when you’re looking for candidates who have worked on...
