Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
How to Say, “I Don’t Know” and Keep Your Job (If you don’t realize why you’re receiving this email, I discovered a problem with my newsletter settings. Feel free to unsubscribe. The link is at the bottom of the email.) How easy is it for you to say, “I don’t know,” or “I need help?” …
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Secrets to Catch Yourself Mind-Reading The more remote we are, the easier it is for us to assume we know what other people think. I call that mind-reading. I am not clairvoyant—not even with my husband. (We both would like a little clairvoyance, at times!) The more mind-reading we do, the more likely we will …
How to Manage by “Walking Around” When You’re Remote If you’re like me, you learned a lot by walking around and listening when you were in the office. I saw and heard the state of the various teams. I could see in-progress work. I could see and hear how the team members treated each other. …
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Three Ways to Rethink Your Business I received several thank you’s for the previous newsletter, Three Tips for Coping When You’re Supposed to Lead. I’m delighted that the issue resonated with so many of you. I’ve worked with several clients over the past weeks to help them rethink their projects, portfolios, and their business. Here are …
Three Secrets to Building Your Influence, Part 3, Shared Interests If you want to change anything in your organization, you need to influence at least one other person to succeed. I wrote about showing your competence in Part 1. Part 2 was about building trust. Now, let’s talk about creating win-wins with shared interests. I bet you’ve met people who …
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Build Your Agile Tribe One of the reasons I use agile approaches is because they work. Not all of them, all the time. I find that I have to adapt my agile approach to the current context: the organization and its culture, the people, and the product(s) in development. Some people prefer to use a …
Define Your Agile Success I bet many of you are working to use agile in your organization. Is your agile approach working for you? If you think you could use agile better, maybe it’s time to define what agile success means to you. Consider these three questions: What is valuable to us? How will we …
Do You Have Too Much to Do? If you are like most of the people I work with and meet, you have too much to do. You’d like to say, “No!” to more work, but maybe you’re not sure how. The first step is to gather all the work, so you and everyone else knows …
Creating an Environment of Leadership I bet you have some problems that have been problems for a while. Or, you want to influence other people to change. You need an environment of leadership, because you can’t do it alone. Here are three tips to creating an environment where everyone can lead: Tip #1: Share the …
Discovering Your Leadership Do you think managers are the only leaders in your organization? Nope. We have always needed leaders at all levels of the organization. You might not feel like a leader. How do you discover your leadership? Ellie, a tester working on a supposedly agile team, was worried. The team worked in timeboxes, …