One of the biggest mistakes people make is attributing system problems to individuals (and individual problems to the system). If you try to solve the problem on the wrong level, you are doomed to fail. Here’s a simple yet classic example of trying to solve a...
A while back I was talking to a manager who complained that “no one” in his organization was “accountable.” Of course, he exempted himself form that category. This manager, (I’ll call him Tom) feels like he’s accountable— he knows that if they people creating...
The answer is (of course): “It depends.” Self-management is a spectrum, not a point. How much self-management is right for a team depends on that team. I see many teams in small companies and start-ups who self-manage. They set product goals, make...
I’ve been writing about seeing systems, and got to thinking about a company I did some work for a few years ago–because they were a great example of how focusing on events leads to blame and prevents people from seeing patterns. Here’s the story....
A couple of weeks ago, I listened to a very funny story about economic incentives on NPR. (Something funny on economic incentives?!) The story was about an economics professor who decided to use incentives to shape the behavior of his children. He devised an incentive...
When managers want to improve financial results, they turn first to trimming costs. This is the logical first place to look if balance sheets are your primary view into how the organization functions. Many cost cutting measures do have an immediate effect on the...
Questions matter. The questions we ask open one avenue of inquiry, but close others. If we want to change the way we manage, we need to change our questions. And so, here are my slides from my talk at Agile 2010: 14 Essential Questions aimed at refocusing...
I’m a big believer in one-on-one meetings on manager-led teams. It’s a way to connect with people, stay in touch with progress, learn about problems early, coach, work on career goals, offer feedback, and more. But if you are the manager for a self-organizing team,...
No one likes to be blamed, so why do we blame each other in the first place? What place does it have in our relationships, and how does it affect our problem-solving abilities? A personal experience with customer disservice to highlight our attraction to assigning...
We’ve long lived with the assumption that the people at the top of the organizations are the ones who understand the business. They understand the market, the product, the customers. They hold the financial information about how the company makes money and the...
(c) 2010 Esther Derby I recently spoke to a senior manager who wanted to know how “agile” his company was compared to other companies. When I asked what he’d gain from that information, he responded that then he’d know what practices the...
Last summer I participated in a seminar. The format included group discussion, and discuss we did. But one member of the group, Bernard, didn’t discuss so much as pontificate…at length, and often on topics that were tenuously connected to the subject matter of the...
Systems drive behavior. Therefore, if you want to change behavior in an organization you need to understand the factors that influence the current pattern. An Example The managers in an organization have decided that they want the productivity and morale benefits of...
A while back, I sat in on a birds-of-a-feather session on organizational change. The main theme was bemoaning the difficulty changing even mid-sized organizations. When people talk about how hard it is to bring change there’s a tendency to blame: people who...
At the start of my series on Performance without Appraisal, I listed the goals that organizations hope to achieve with annual performance appraisals and so-called performance management systems: improve individual performance improve organizational results determine...
One of the big problems I see in organizations is that managers who want to improve productivity pull the wrong levers. For example, one company I know of decided to improve performance by ranking everyone in the company from 1…n, and firing the bottom 10%. Not...
What problem are organizations trying to solve with incentive pay? Is an incentive plan the simplest, most effective way to address the problem? Most managers believe that incentive pay plans encourage the desired behavior, drive performance improvement, and reward...
I attended an Organizational Change BoF last evening at the AYE conference. Among other things, we talked about why it is that some managers fail to act when there are many signs of big problems. I see three conditions that are prequisites for change (at any level):...
I’ve been watching a discussion on the Agile Project Management yahoo group, which poses the question, “Does everyone in agile need to be above average?”The question behind the question is, “Does agile need extremely competent people in order...
