Robert Watkins comments about insincere appreciation in response to my post on the recognition gap:A good example is the concept of the “Praise Sandwich”: take one piece of praise, one piece of criticism, and another piece of praise….and how he...
My recent posts on appreciation prompted Dale Emery to write about his experiences with appreciation.I offered people an opportunity to express appreciation to their colleagues for things they had done.The people in the room—hardcore geeks all—had no trouble offering...
This email from the Gallup organization landed in my mailbox this morning:Sixty-five percent of Americans received NO praise or recognition in the workplace in the last year, reports a Gallup Poll.And the number-one reason people leave organizations is that they...
Johanna reports on our continuing adventure in pair writing here, Her lessons learned for the week (high overlap with my lessons learned) are:We don’t have the same default ways to write — and that’s ok. The manuscript is richer for us talking...
Johanna and I have been writing again this week. Last time, as my faithful readers may recall, I owned the keyboard, and Johanna watched over my shoulder. She noticed all my little typing quirks, like backing up to fix typos. She really hated that one. This week,...
Here’s a little snippet from a Fast Company article on John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market: Before the adjournment of every business meeting at Whole Foods, including the ones that Mackey conducts, participants do a round of “appreciations,”...
Johanna pointed out on her blog how pair-writing is different from pair-programming. But I suspect the two are similar in many ways, too. Here’s what stood out for me in my pair-writing with Johanna: Conflict comes with collaboration. Conflict is part and parcel...
I was talking to a friend last week who works for an expert… in how to stifle teamwork. It’s simple, really: Establish two classes of membership on the team, then follow these steps to ensure that all are aware of the distinction. 1) Bring in donuts for the team every...
A while back I posted a little piece on Lewin’s succinct statement B=f(P,E). That little post grew up to be an article, posted on stickyminds. (It’s on the front page this week, after this week you might have to do a search to find it.)
A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about an article in HBR that talked about the magic that “people people” do. Now the article is excerpted here.And to go with it, here’s a snippet from a post by Dave Hoover, who, I suspect, is a very much a people...
I’ve been thinking a lot about the style of leadership that’s needed with self-organizing teams, and how it’s different from traditional top-down models. I think this captures the contrast: Hierarchical LeadershipFacilitative Leadership AssumesTop...
I came across Robert Sutton’s article, Nasty People via Johanna’s Hiring Technical People blog. Sutton reiterates the costs of tolerating abusive behavior in the workplace and poses three strategies to keep the workplace a jerk-free zone: Avoid hiring...
One of the promises of all the agile methods is frequent feedback about the state of the project and the product. With frequent feedback, we can adjust our actions and goals based on the current reality and manage empirically. Sounds good, but the practice isn’t...
Last year, a friend of mine was caught up in a corporate re-organization. The company president brought in a new guy to get costs under control and improve profits. Let’s call my friend Lori and the new guy Len.Len was a very bottom line kind of guy and he took...
Michael Harmer (via Clarke Ching) has two posts that illustrate Jerry Weinberg’s idea that “quality is value to some person.” When customer priorities aren’t explicit, developers will (naturally enough) fill in the blanks based on their own...
[rant]Last week I heard someone espousing a new form of project review called a Retrospective. Here’s what she advised:Anonymous feedback via survey or questionnaireRanking of questionnaire resultsFunctional groups discussing questionnaire results in...
I’ve been thinking a lot about two conversations I had about bosses. Both of women I talked to were experienced managers in a software organization. The first woman, Susan, has a reputation as a solid manager who produces results. She’s spent the last 10...
Once upon a time I worked for a large corporation. One of the managers there prided herself on being on the go. She was a constant whirlwind and ran between meetings (literally). She felt busy and important.If effective management were measured by busy-ness, she would...
In response to my post on shared commitment, Effern posted this comment: …”leaving early when everyone was made to work OT is a fantastic way to bring down team morale.” Effern’s comment got me thinking. I suspect that the low morale...
I’m back from Austria (with a side trip to Budapest — many thanks to Istvan Fay for showing us the highlights of Buda). It was a fabulous trip! I’ll be posting bits as I sort through and integrate.I was stuck by something Diana Larsen said in her...
