A participant in one of my workshops of my workshops declared that in every team there is pecking order….and every one knows what the order is from one to n. Peck, peck, peck. Since this is the case, he reasoned, it follows that ranking people in organizations...
How can managers support teams to truly support team responsibility? In the early days of Agile, some pundits (and developers) declared, “We don’t need no stinking managers.” They asserted that if teams were self-managed, management work was waste....
Every team needs leadership, even self-organizing teams. When I make this statement, some people assume I mean that every team needs a designated leader. I can’t blame them, most people are accustomed to thinking of leadership residing in a role or a charismatic...
Slides from a talk I gave on Double Loop Learning in Retrospectives: Double Loop Learning in Retrospectives View more presentations from Esther Derby And take a look at PROMOTING DOUBLE LOOP LEARNING IN RETROSPECTIVES.
Many people are conditioned to say Yes to every request that comes their way. I met a CIO like that. He told me his policy was to never say No to the business. So he always said Yes, and the business was always angry because things he agreed to didn’t get done,...
“The thinking that got us here isn’t the thinking that’s going to get us where we need to be.” attributed to Albert Einstein I have this niggling concern about retrospectives. I have no doubt that retrospectives that are too short,...
I recently talked to a group that’s forming a new “change leadership” team. Part of the work of the team is improving the organization, and part is capacity building. Four of the people on the team are folks with technical backgrounds who are viewed as having...
I was talking to my friend Penny the other day about a team she coaches. She has a problem I’ve seen on many teams: a smart guy (or gal) who dominates the team. I’ll call Penny’s team member Bob. Most of the time Bob is an asset to the team. But when...
What’s the purpose of team values, norms, working agreements, and simple rules? Bob Sutton posted a piece on Team Guidelines that got me thinking how team values can be shaped and influenced. The guidelines–all Mom and Apple Pie–were handed down by a...
Conflict is inevitable at work. Sooner or later, people will disagree. Might be about what to test or how to implement a feature. Team members may disagree about what “done” means, or whether “always” means 100 per cent of the time or some thing else. If...
An old saw tell us, “You never have a second chance to make a first impression.” This applies to one-on-one introductions, but also to entering groups. When you join a new team–as a member or a coach–those first encounters shape future...
InfoQ picked up my post, Team Trap #1: Messing with the Membership, and contrasted it with Mike Cohn’s advice that a PO, manager or scrum master who observes that the team is too homogeneous might stick a couple of new team members to increase diversity on the...
Conflict often feels persona. However, the source of conflict is often not. Different goals and priorities create structural conflict– which can then spill over into acrimony and blame. People focus on personal differences rather than the real source of...
Do you really have a team when someone keeps messing with the membership? One summer, long ago and far away, I was on a softball team. It would be an exaggeration to say I played softball, but I did participate in practices, showed up for games and imbibed of...
A team is a social unit, a group of people who work collaboratively to accomplish some goal. Every team is a group of people, but not every group of people is a team. I hear the term applied loosely–describing anything from a collection of individual...
One of the traps people fall into on teams is withholding information –feedback– that’s critical for the team to function. Sometimes the information is about friction between team members. When team members don’t have a way to talk about small...
From time to time, I hear from people who aren’t realizing value from their retrospectives. When I probe to understand the situation, I understand why they aren’t getting results–the process they are using isn’t designed to actually help the...
Trust is a foundation for effective team work (and effective organizations). Some managers attempt building trust with ropes courses, sailing, or cooking events. Such activities like these may fun (for some). Indeed, people may develop a level of camaraderie through...
I’m not talking about withholding information related to the task and context. Without doubt, that will damage a team. I’m talking about information regarding your internal state . A Story Let me tell you a story about a team I coached. They’d asked me to observe them...
Many managers ask me, “How can I motivate my team?” I’ve certainly seen many efforts to motivate teams. Contests, prizes, pep talks, badges, points, canned thank you notes, and recognition events. Most of this comes down to using rewards to motivate people to...
