Johanna’s on a (very excellent) rant about forced ranking. I concur. Some people are convinced that forced ranking is a Good Thing. Usually they have arguments such as “everyone needs to know where they stand,” or “we need some way to weed out...
I wrote a little article (posted on stickyminds) about how our interpretation of an interaction can get us in a tangle.Sometimes we hear someone say something, and conclude that we’re being treated unfairly or we’re under attack. A friend of mine wrote to...
Via Dave Smith: Why Crunch Mode Doesn’t Work: 6 lessons by Evan Robinson.Evan’s 6 Lessons.Lesson One, then, is this: Productivity varies over the course of the workday, with the greatest productivity occurring in the first four to six hours. After enough...
It seems that Agile is out of the early adopter phase and people are starting to ask about how to do Agile organization wide.So I’ve been pondering change for an Agile organization.One thing I’m quite certain about is that traditional...
Brad Appleton starts his new blog with a post The first thing to build is TRUST.Agreed! If we want to deliver great software, we have to attend to building trust and relationship. The quality of interactions determines the quality of results. Here are five pragmatic...
Susan Annunzio posts on the Fast Company blog:One of the most interesting findings of the Contagious Success research is that in high-performing groups, the leader “protects” the group from the larger company, whether lobbying for more resources or...
A couple of weeks ago, I attended a fund raiser and was seated next to a person I didn’t know. I struck up a conversation, asked a few questions, and learned that the person next to me was a manager in a IT department.This week, I had lunch with another manager...
A couple of weeks ago, at the Better Software Conference in San Jose, I lead an informal session on Retrospectives. I agreed to put the notes from our session up on my blog. This is a combination of the notes and my editorial comments :-)I use a framework for...
I’ve been spending time on planes lately, and have had plenty of time to catch up on my reading. (Well, I made some progress, but I’m really not caught up.) Some of the books have been better than others and some have been quite astonishing.I was struck by...
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...
