On her Hiring Technical People blog, Johanna Rothman writes about firing people who don’t work.This matches my experience. Holding on to employees who aren’t pulling their weight drags down morale for the entire team. Firing someone isn’t easy, and...
I often work with groups who know where they want to go, have some good ideas on how to get there, but they are blocked. When I ask why they can’t achieve the results they envision, they tell me things like: –We lack resources.–We lack...
fa-cil-i-tate. verb. (1) to make easier or less difficult; to help forward (an action, a process, etc.). (2) to assist the progress of (a person).–Random House College Dictionary Revised EditionI spent Friday, Saturday and Sunday in Ottawa at the annual IAF...
Laurent Bossavit posts a discussion of the reasons to deep six the status meeting. The problem ? A status meeting’s traditional format has the person who convened the meeting, a manager usually, work through a list of items. They are items of importance to the...
All retrospectives, all the time. At least in this post.Keith Ray posts this snippet about self-directed improvement paths on his blog. (See previous post on Keith’s Project Management tip on Reforming Project Management.)Retrospectives are an excellent vehicle...
My pal Keith Ray sent this Project Management tip into Hal Macomber: 007: Create A Habit of Self-Directed Improvement Keith Ray reminds us that an intention and routine of improvement matters more than any specific improvement methods. Too often a bureaucratic intent...
From an article by Tom Krattenmaker in HBS Working Knowledge: Career Effectiveness: In Search of the Perfect Meeting: “The biggest complaints I hear about meetings are that they’re unproductive, that they last too long, that they’re...
One-on-one meetings are a vastly underrated management technique… well done one-on-one meetings, that is. I find them useful particularly when the group I’m managing is a group, not a tight-knit team, but I’ve used them when I was managing project...
This from Keith Ray, after reading Selling the Invisible by Harry Beckwith: “Management” is mostly invisible – the worse management is, the more visible it is. The best managers (I’m told) often seem like they are neither busy nor doing...
Laurent Bossavit tells a story about following “the process” to fix a customer problem. The only problem is, at the end of it all, the customer still has a problem.Laurent writes:My version of the Zeroth Law of Quality: if you’re not solving the...
