At the start of the great wave of WFH, a comment about using PTO for child care during the day scrolled by. No one can seriously be expecting people to switch to PTO each time their kid needed some attention, can they? How could that possibly work? 7 minutes here, 22...
I visited an organization making an Agile transformation. It looked like the teams were making great progress. But the managers asked, “How can we tell they are working hard?” Team members seemed happy with their cross-functional teams. They solved...
I’ve been hearing various people speculate about how work will look after things get back to normal. (First, they aren’t going to go “back” to normal. There will be a normal, but I doubt it will be what existed pre-pandemic.) It does seem likely that remote work will...
On the first day of widespread work from home brought about by the pandemic, I heard a workplace “expert” talking about the new reality of remote work. “Performance expectations and standards must remain the same as in the office,” he declared. There is so much wrong...
Many people who are accustomed to going to the office are now working from home, including me. That means more remote meetings, working sessions, and social catch ups. What can we do to make the best of remote meetings? I advocate having a lightweight structure for...
Problems can’t hide when information is public. Trouble is, some organizations make it difficult for people to bring up unwelcome news. But problems can only hide for so long. The questions is, when would you rather know–late or early? Most issues are...
Middle management gets a bad rap. The comic strip, Dilbert, depicts middle managers as clueless micro-managers. Obviously, Dilbert is a caricature. But something in it rings true enough that those cartoons show up in offices all over the world. It is not just...
Recently, while discussing how job descriptions and evaluation criteria impact collaboration, a director commented, “Behavior. That’s what we’re after. Behavior!” Her comment struck me as both familiar and very odd. However, the director’s comment did...
This time of year is associated with giving gifts to others. But I think it is also a good time to think about the gifts we can give ourselves. One that we can all afford is the gift of reflection time. Let me tell you a story. I have a friend, Jen, who is a pure...
I had the privilege to study with a renowned artist, Nancy Crow. It was a wonderful experience. Of course I learned about art —design principles, use of color, figure ground tension. I also came smack up against an issue that I see in so many organizations: the desire...
Trust may seem mysterious—something that just happens or grows through some unknowable process. The good news is there are concrete actions that tend to build trust (and concrete actions that are almost guaranteed to break down trust). First, let’s agree on a...
I recently sat down for an interview with Marcus Blankenship of Programming Leadership. We talked about my book, 7 Rules for Positive Productive Change, and how change plays out for people and organizations. You can listen to the full interview on Marcus...
At the end of one of my Team Coaching workshops, a participant–an agile coach with years of experience– remarked, “I had no idea there was more to coaching than asking questions.” Another coach commented, “I see now why me teaching how to write stories...
Well, it’s that time again — time for the yearly performance review. The ritual starts with gathering feedback, proceeds to assigning rating/ranking, and drags on through doling out a raise. Do you enjoy annual review ritual? Thought not. This year I think...
John was out of patience. “It shouldn’t take this long!” John, the VP of Development, snapped. “This is a simple change. It is just not that hard!” The “it” John referred to was a set of measures and metrics. He believed that if all the teams reported these, everyone...
In an online forum, someone declared that feedback between peers must be anonymous. He asserted people won’t be honest without anonymity. However, I have found it is possible to be honest and not anonymous. Further, anonymous feedback backfires in number of...
Some people seem to think that empathy has no place at work…that work requires a hard-nose, logic, and checking your emotions at the door. But, in periods of change, emotions—which are always present, whether we choose to acknowledge them or not—surge to the surface....
Most job descriptions break work down into discrete chunks. They define activities a person must do, list required behaviors and desired qualities. Job descriptions aim for standardization. I understand HR departments desire consistency. Yet, it seems to me, job...
In previous Super Power posts, I wrote about the importance of curiosity and observation in change. Both of those play into the Super Power I’ll discuss in this post: experimentation. Tiny changes, done as experiments, may feel like you’re dancing around...
Why does observation matter? Let me tell you a story.When I was a kid, we played a birthday party game called Pin the Tail on the Donkey. The game involved a large wall poster of a sad-looking, tailless donkey. The parent-in-charge handed out replacement tails and...
