In my previous post, I described a framework for offering feedback on work results and work relationships.Step 2 is Describe behavior or results. Use neutral language and examples. If the person doesn’t recognize himself in the description or agree with the...
Art Petty posted Why I Hate the Praise Sandwich.Praise sandwich, as you recall, involves buttering someone up with a compliment or praise, stating a criticism, and then fluffing them back up with another bit of praise.Sounds icky, too, doesn’t it?Art offers:5...
Esther Schindler recently put forward a scenario about a struggling employee named Frank, and solicited advice from her network.Briefly, the scenario is this: Frank was a great maintenance programmer, but the company is retiring the system he worked on. Frank has...
Teams have gone in and out of fashion as a way to improve productivity for years. In my field, teams are essential. The work requires a broad mix of skills and collaboration. But, myths about how to establish and support productive teams abound. These three are...
I hear people talk about getting executive support for Agile adoptions (or other organizational changes). But I seldom hear people talk about what that support looks like. It’s more than money and speeches. Want to know how to really help your organization...
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...
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know how I feel about compensation systems that claim to motivate better performance with differential pay. For example, A Compensation Story in 2006, It’s What We Know That Ain’t So and Pay for...
Mike Cottmeyer writes about Feelings, Thoughts, and Actions. When people have a strong response, Mike describes thoughts as the point of leverage to change behavior. How we think can be influenced more directly… it is somehow less personal. We can learn about...
Johanna’s post, projects don’t need specialists (and the 19 the comments that went with it), got me thinking.People tend to coalesce around shared interests–both in terms of what they find interesting, and what concerns them. Take the category of...
Mark Levison has an interesting post in response to a Scrum Development discussion about “bad apples” on a team.Before applying the label, look for reasons the person might not be performing. There are lots of reasons for a temporary dip in performance....
From a CNN article:We’ve all heard the conventional wisdom about good work habits. Many of us have attended time management classes, participated in workshops and have been advised to “work smarter, not harder.”Work habits that might seem less...
George Dinwiddie is considering a discussion about velocity as a performance measure and how to tell whether people are working hard that started on the scrumdevelopment yahoo list.Here’s the original question, posted by Graeme Matthew. The unknown in all of...
When the team self-organizes, the manager needs to step back, but not too far back; she needs to step in, but not to quickly.My article on the manager’s role in self-organizing teams is on the cover of Better Software Magazine and available on-line here. (link...
George Dinwiddie has posted his notes from one of my AYE 2008 sessions, Magic Chemistry of Teams.During the session, I asked people to draw a time line that represented their experiences working on teams, then, working in small groups, identify the factors that were...
Many organizations have a model that feedback rolls down hill. The VPs give feedback to the Directors that report to them. Directors give feedback to the Managers. Managers give feedback to developers. It all cascades downward.A manager’s job is to create an...
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):...
Most of the time I hear people talking about trust, they are talking about trust between team members. It’s equally important to have trust between managers and team members. In fact, the relationship between an employee and his/her manager consistently shows up...
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...
When I talk to teams about self-organizing, people worry about what to do when some one on the team isn’t working out. If we’re a team, they posit, we have to work things out so we can work together. Not necessarily so. Teams need to manage team membership...
