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...
